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Drawing on panarchy theory and adaptive cycles, this study aims to investigate the role of reorganisation capabilities on firms’ supply chain resilience. The conceptual model underpinned by panarchy theory is tested in the agrifood supply chains disrupted by a geopolitical crisis and faced with material shortage. The study considers circularity as a core reorganisational capability and measures its interplay with two other capabilities: new product development and resource reconfiguration capabilities to achieve supply chain resilience.

A quantitative research design is followed to test the relationships between circularity capabilities, resource reconfiguration capabilities, new product development capabilities and supply chain resilience. A cross-sectional survey is applied to a sample drawn from food manufacturers who are dependent on wheat and sunflower oil as raw material and who are faced with material shortages in the aftermath of a geopolitical crisis. Measurement models and hypotheses are tested with the partial least squared structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) based on 324 responses.

The results show that new product development and resource reconfiguration capabilities fully mediate the relationship between circularity capabilities and supply chain resilience. In other words, the food producers achieved supply chain resilience in response to agrifood supply chain disruption when they mobilised circularity capabilities in combination with new product development and resource reconfiguration capabilities.

The findings suggest that producers in the agrifood industry and even those in other industries need to develop circularity capabilities in combination with new product development and resource reconfiguration capabilities to tackle supply chain disruptions. In a world that is challenged by geopolitical and climate-related crises, this means leveraging 3R practices as well as resource substitution and reconfiguration in new product development processes.

The study explores the release and reorganisation phases of adaptive cycles in a panarchy by analysing the interplay between different capabilities for building supply chain resilience in response to disruptions challenging supply chains from higher levels of the panarchy. The results extend the theoretical debate between circularity and supply chain resilience to an empirical setting and suggest the introduction of new variables to this relationship.

A fundamental research question is what leads some organizations, but not others, to be sustainable in their procurement operations. Extant theoretical frameworks, while valuable, do not fully reflect the nuances of decision-making in procurement operations. We aim to illuminate the role of individual attitudes, capabilities, and behavioral intentions in actualizing sustainable procurement.

We develop a framework by adapting the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to the context of sustainable procurement. We test the framework with a sample of 465 procurement professionals based in the EU through partial least squares structural equation modeling.

We find that sustainable purchasing behavior is predominantly shaped by behavioral intention, that is, willingness to pay for sustainability. This behavioral intention is significantly influenced by individual attitudes and capabilities in addition to awareness of consequences and perceived corporate social responsibility engagement but, interestingly, not by individual subjective norms.

The TPB is one of the most influential models for predicting behavior. However, the application of the theory in operations management is hitherto limited. The present study contributes to understanding individual-level antecedents of operations management practices and offers suggestions to practitioners engaged in fostering sustainable procurement.

Although the literature on modern slavery (MS) is continually increasing, there remains a paucity of theory-driven research. Hence, this study aims to develop a multitheoretical framework and research agenda for MS.

This study comprised two steps. First, it reviews the literature on supply chain (SC) social sustainability to identify the typically used theories. Six of them were selected for this study: institutional, stakeholder, resource-based, resource dependence, principal agent and transaction cost economics theories. Second, it conducts a systematic literature review using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines to analyze relevant literature on social issues in SCs, and thematically synthesizes the findings. The six theoretical perspectives and key themes that emerged from the literature were used to develop future research directions (RDs) for MS.

This study develops a multitheoretical framework and research agenda comprising 20 theory-driven RDs for MS, focusing on the environmental, firm and transaction levels.

This study provides a reference for future MS research. Although the study used only six theories, future studies can develop further research agendas for MS based on diverse theories.

Practitioners can use this framework to understand MS from varied perspectives and identify and mitigate MS risks in SCs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study presents the first comprehensive and theoretically grounded research agenda that positions MS research onto a stronger theoretical foundation.

Environmental emissions are increasing in the urban areas. Much of the emissions arise from public procurement activities given that public sector firms are major customers to many supplying firms. Given the tremendous contribution, this study aims to examine the adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices among public sector firms through assessing the impact of urban environmental governance, government environmental communication and organizational environmental governance.

Data for the study were collected in a single time period from central procuring and disposing entities (public sector firms) in the urban areas. A sample of 105 public sector firms in were used. One procurement officer and one member of the contracts committee were the key informants in the study. AMOS SPSS version 26 was used to obtain the results for the structural model and measurement model, respectively.

The findings indicate that the adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices among public sector firms is significantly influenced by government environmental communication, organizational environmental governance and urban environmental governance. Urban environmental governance significantly influences organizational environmental governance. Urban environmental governance fully mediates the relationship between government environmental communication and public sector firms’ adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices. Also, urban environmental governance and organizational environmental governance mediate the relationship between government environmental communication and adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices.

This study examined the adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices among public sector firms. However, the study was conducted in a public procurement setting rather than a private sector procurement setting. Also, the study examined the impact of government environmental communication on public sector firms’ adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices ignoring the impact of internal communications made within the public sector firms on environmental issues.

This study examined the adoption of environmentally friendly urban freight logistics practices among public sector firms. Freight logistics in public sector procurement has not been given significant attention in earlier research. Emphasis is placed on sustainable public sector procurement ignoring other aspects that would help curb environmental emissions that may arise during and after the delivery of public procurement requirements.

This study aims to comprehensively map and prioritize risks in the pharmaceutical supply chain, focusing on European and North American countries through a multi-actor perspective.

Through a structured literature review on supply chain risk management in the pharmaceutical supply chain, we identified 84 risks. After shortlisting the 15 most critical ones, we applied the analytic hierarchy process to prioritize risks affecting the pharmaceutical supply chain, considering both the perspective of individual actors and the entire supply chain.

This study first analyzed the pharmaceutical supply chain risk management literature to identify the most critical risks. It then offered a novel perspective on risk prioritization through a multi-actor analytic hierarchy process, revealing how different actors assign varying levels of priority to these risks based on their unique roles and business contexts.

Recent disruptions, such as COVID-19 and the Ukraine conflict, reshaped pharmaceutical supply chain risk priorities, revealing a ranking that diverges significantly from the literature. Each supply chain actor prioritized risks differently based on their role, highlighting a fragmented approach and emphasizing the need for more collaborative, systemic risk management. This study introduces new research directions to address unmet, real-world needs within pharmaceutical supply chain risk management.

The study aims to explore how Indigenous peoples and their concerns become “entextualized” within the environmental disclosures of resource extraction firms.

A mixed-methods content analysis of 11,850 annual information forms filed by resource extraction firms with Canadian security regulators between 1997 and 2023 is conducted. FinBERT transformer encodings, agglomerative hierarchical clustering and computer-assisted techniques are combined with inductive analyses.

The findings show that, although Indigenous peoples and their concerns have become a more important element in environmental disclosures, dominant semantic meanings tend to view Indigenous people as impediments. At the same time, the entextualizations of Indigenous peoples and their concerns sometimes escape these dominant frames. Big firms appear to be no more likely to exhibit leadership or substantively take Indigenous peoples and their concerns into account than smaller firms.

The study offers a longitudinal perspective on how the environment and Indigenous peoples are portrayed in corporate disclosures. The study emphasizes the need to view environmental accountability as inextricably intertwined with accountability to Indigenous peoples and also illustrates the importance of identifying the semantic meanings that are being communicated. We propose that analyzing how and why specific semantic meanings about Indigenous peoples and their concerns become entextualized provides activists and policy-makers with a starting point for improved disclosure practices and, hopefully, better resource extraction practices.

Companies are increasingly appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) to anchor the need to highlight climate change at the senior management level. This study aims to examine how CSO power and sustainability-based compensation influence climate reporting and carbon performance.

Using one of the largest data sets to date, consisting of 18,834 company years through the author’s observations, spanning an 11-year period (2011–2021) in 33 countries. This paper used quantitative methods – specifically, ordinal logistic regression estimation. This paper measures the level of climate change disclosure based on the carbon disclosure leadership methodology. Carbon performance is based on the intensity of carbon emissions (Scope 1, Scope 2), which is a quantitative and relatively more objective measure.

The results suggest that climate change disclosure continued to increase and the carbon emissions intensity of the companies in this study gradually decreased over the sample period. This paper finds that the presence of the CSO within the top management team has a positive and significant influence on the level of information on climate change of the companies in the sample. This finding confirms the idea that the managerial capacity of CSOs motivates the disclosure of climate change. The empirical results confirm that there are differences in the role that the CSO and sustainability-based compensation play in influencing the quality of climate information disclosure in developed and developing countries.

The recourse on a mixed theoretical framework, which highlights upper echelons theory, argues the understanding of the role of CSOs in explaining the relationship between climate change disclosure–carbon performance relationship. The novelty of the study lies in the approaches adopted to describe the quality of climate change disclosure. To control for endogeneity, this paper uses a difference-in-difference analysis by adding a firm to the Morgan Stanley Capital International index as an exogenous shock.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate sustainability and economic factors into a framework for understanding the reshoring decision.

This paper integrates sustainability and economic factors into a reshoring framework through using the theoretical perspectives of the natural resource-based view (NRBV) and transaction cost economics (TCE), and carrying out case study research with a number of firms involved in reshoring in the German automotive industry.

Through adopting a multi-theory approach, the framework captures the complexities of the reshoring decision and illustrates that reshoring is not a location decision alone, but encompasses a range of sourcing options such as local production in-house, using a local supplier or addressing sustainability problems with the offshore operation. The importance of sustainability capability development as a basis of extending the range of reshoring sourcing options available is highlighted.

Using the NRBV has allowed to develop value creating drivers in the context of reshoring. Integrating the logic of TCE with this analysis provided an understanding of how cost reducing drivers were present alongside the value creating drivers for reshoring at the case companies. Beyond previous frameworks integrating the RBV and TCE, bringing in the NRBV allowed us to highlight the importance of sustainability capability development as a basis of extending the range of reshoring sourcing options available. While this study’s cases were in the automotive industry in Germany, future research could sample for further geographies and industries to cover varying regulatory pressures for sustainability as well as sustainability-related industry initiatives.

The framework can provide guidance to managers on the conditions that favour the selection of each sourcing option when making the reshoring decision.

Although there are frameworks in the literature that explain the reshoring decision, limited attention has been given to integrating sustainability issues into the analysis. The findings here contribute important insights into the complementary and contradictory prescriptions of the NRBV and TCE in reshoring decisions, and several propositions are offered outlining these relationships. The resulting framework provides an integrated approach for managerial decision-making beyond economic factors alone.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly implement digitalization in uncertain business environments. However, a dearth exists in the entrepreneurship literature for understanding the decision-making logic of digitalization as a management issue. Drawing on the effectuation theory, this study aims to explore the relationships between effectuation dimensions and SMEs’ digitalization.

Using quantitative data collected from 345 Chinese SMEs through questionnaires, the authors conducted the principal component analysis and hierarchical linear regression analysis.

The results highlight significant positive relationships between the four effectuation elements – experimentation, affordable loss, flexibility and precommitment – and SMEs’ digitalization. Moreover, this research considers the environmental conditions as moderators and reveals that environmental dynamism and complexity associated with high uncertainty negatively moderate the effects of effectuation on SMEs’ digitalization.

SMEs embarking on digitalization should constantly experiment to determine optimal strategies while contemplating their affordable losses. Flexibility should also be maintained to discard unproductive tactics and redirect to other viable options. Additionally, precommitments can reduce the risk that SMEs encounter in digitalization process. While the effectuation principles consolidate the likelihood of a successful digitalization, this research recommends that entrepreneurs should carefully consider their possible application in uncertain environments.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by theoretically clarifying the decision-making mechanism of digitalization and extends the application of effectuation to this context by illuminating the influences of effectuation principles on SMEs’ digital transformation. The identification of negative moderating effects of environmental uncertainty also augments an academic criticism about uncertainty creating the conditions for effectuation.

Through the theory of dynamic capability, this study aims to make theoretical hypotheses and empirical explorations on the relationship between supply chain quality management (SCQM) practices, dynamic supply chain capability (DSCC), supply chain resilience (SCR) and environmental dynamics.

In this study, DSCC is used as a mediating variable in the relationship between SCQM practices and SCR. To enhance the resilience of the supply chain, the moderating effect of environmental dynamics was tested. About 426 completed questionnaires were obtained from a cohort of Chinese manufacturing enterprises, and the proposed hypotheses were tested using the structural equation model method.

Empirical evidence shows that SCQM practices have a significantly positive impact on SCR at the overall level. Achieving better DSCC plays an important mediating role between SCQM practices and resilience. In addition, environmental dynamics have a moderating effect on the relationship between SCQM practices and DSCC.

This study constructs the influencing mechanism of SCQM practices on SCR through dynamic capability theory and enriches the relevant literature on SCR research. This study also provides management guidance for firms to enhance SCR through SCQM practices in an uncertain environment.