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The purpose of this paper is to discuss questionable research practices (QRPs) in business research, particularly in the logistics and supply chain management discipline, in light of antecedents influenced by the current academic environment and the consequences for academic rigour and relevance to stimulate thinking and debate among the academic community.

A literature review and autoethnographic approach were used to examine these issues based on over 60 years’ collective academic experience of the authors. Data were collected from discussions among the paper’s authors as well as recounting open discussions with other academics and journal editors to collate their observations.

Evidence is provided of issues the authors have seen first-hand where antecedents in the academic environment influences QRPs, which then detrimentally affect research rigour and relevance, integrity and proper contributions to ground-breaking research and knowledge advancement.

This paper is based on personal observations and experiences of the three authors as well as open-ended discussions with others in the academic community. Suggestions are provided for various academic stakeholders to address these issues.

Practical implications are only provided for academics in their roles as authors, journal editors and reviewers.

Encouraging the academic community to eliminate QRPs to improve the rigour, relevance and quality of research will provide more credibility and integrity resulting in better impact and outcomes for society at large.

The value of this paper is in stimulating thinking and debate among academics to return to core issues and values in academia opposed to focusing on narrow university goals focussed on other antecedents of QRPs.

Access to food through retail supply chain distribution can vary significantly among the urban poor and leads to household food insecurity. The paper explores this sustainable supply chain phenomenon through a field study among South Africa's urban poor.

Urban metabolic flows is the theoretical basis in the context of supply chain management (SCM). The field study comprised 59 semi-structured interviews in one South African township. Data were recorded, transcribed and translated, and coded using NVivo 12 to provide an inventory of eight themes categorized and patterned from the analysis.

Findings indicate societal factors play a significant role affecting food distribution, access and security from a spatial perspective of retail outlet locations and a nutritional standpoint regarding quality and quantity of food.

The study is exploratory in one township, and while rigorously conducted, the generalizability of findings is limited to this context.

The study practically contributes by providing guidance for food retailers and policymakers to include nutritional guidelines in their distribution planning, as well as the dynamics of diverse neighbourhoods that exist in modern urban contexts.

New forms of retail food distribution can provide better security and access to food for the urban poor, contributing to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2 Zero Hunger and 11 Liveable Cities.

The study is interdisciplinary and contributes by linking UN SDGs and SCM through urban metabolic flows from development studies as an overarching framework to enable analysis of relationships between physical, social and economic factors in the urban environment.

Mixed methods research is useful to enhance theoretical and practical research contributions. However, single methods have predominated much logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) research. This paper presents a review of mixed methods research across ten years in LSCM to determine their usage, identify benefits and inhibitors, and provide suggestions for LSCM researchers to realise the benefits from using mixed methods.

This paper adopts a mixed methods approach through a quantitative analysis of methods used in six leading LSCM journals, an e-mail survey of mixed methods article authors during the review period, and four published case studies that used mixed methods.

Only 144 (ten percent) of all empirical articles were published using mixed methods during the review period. A range of benefits and inhibitors regarding mixed methods adoption were found. Suggestions for LSCM authors include research training in mixed methods use and developing a project-specific research design due to the specificity and complexity associated with mixed methods research.

LSCM is at a critical juncture, shaped by new contexts, themes and challenges, and would benefit from different research approaches and methods. This paper contributes to the LSCM domain through analysing the current state, benefits and inhibitors of mixed methods research in LSCM journals to provide a renewed call to action and guidelines for mixed methods LSCM research, and suggesting research design adaptation to enable agile and resilient research when investigating rapidly changing and complex phenomena.

Fashion supply chain (FSC) research has identified two important issues of sustainability management and risk management. However, investigation of these issues is relatively sparse and has primarily been independent with little combinatory research, despite their important interrelationships. The purpose of this paper is to address that gap by critically reviewing extant literature to synthesise important sustainability risk issues in FSCs and proposing an empirical research agenda.

This paper uses a structured literature review approach and Denyer and Tranfield’s (2009) context, intervention, mechanisms and outcome (CIMO) criteria for critical analysis to enable the development of future empirical research areas.

While sustainability and risk are discussed independently in the supply chain literature, combinatory discussions are very limited, despite the interdependence of these concepts. There is little substantial research on sustainability risk in global FSCs and therefore, an empirical research agenda is proposed with the four research directions to address the gap and take forward the notion of supply chain sustainability risk management in FSCs: definition; organisation and management; influence on performance; and development of a conceptual framework.

This paper provides a critical literature review and thus lacks empirical study.

This paper highlights important issues in sustainability risk management for FSCs and presents an agenda for future empirical research.

This paper contributes by providing a combinatory synthesis of sustainability and risk management in FSC literature and an agenda for future empirical research.

The purpose of this paper is to present a literature review and conceptual consideration of servitization in humanitarian logistics (HL) and provide a research agenda for HL scholars and insight for practitioners and by doing so will fill a gap in existing research and practice.

The paper uses a literature-based approach that extends concepts usually applied in a commercial context to the area of HL.

The paper initiates a discourse on the importance of taking into account servitization in developing and managing effective emergency relief chains. This paper argues that a broader servitization paradigm needs to be integrated for international humanitarian organisations (IHOs) to maintain a competitive advantage.

The authors investigate servitization as a management innovation in IHOs and plot a research agenda for scholars.

There is a paucity of literature considering horizontal collaboration among grocery retailers, suppliers, and third‐party logistics (3PL) providers. This paper seeks to investigate benefits of and barriers to the use of fourth‐party logistics (4PL) management as a catalyst for horizontal collaboration.

Three suppliers, three logistics service providers (LSPs), and one grocery retailer participated in semi‐structured interviews for this exploratory qualitative study.

Large LSPs can establish 4PL management but the significant investment required to do so is a deterrent. Interviewees believed 4PL would negatively influence the grocery retailer‐supplier dynamic but simultaneously would provide key potential benefits. Retaining supply chain control means more to grocery retailers than cost efficiencies realised through horizontal collaboration.

Fierce competition among major grocery chains means that most are unwilling to participate in studies of their systems, which restricts the research scope.

Some stakeholders want deeper integration into grocery supply networks, and the 4PL model could apply to diverse sectors and circumstances. This study shows that barriers to such integration are created by power plays among lead stakeholders in grocery retailing that inhibit horizontal collaboration regardless of cost or other benefits.

The study investigates an under‐researched aspect of horizontal supply chain collaboration in the highly relevant retail grocery sector: a high volume, mass market industry that requires an enormous logistics infrastructure and highly embedded networks of relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a thorough understanding of the adoption of logistics and supply chain management (SCM) in practice, particularly at a strategic level, through an investigation of the four perspectives taxonomy of the relationship between logistics and SCM.

Based on a comprehensive literature review, three specific research questions are proposed. The empirical work addresses these questions and comprised three phases: focussed interviews, a questionnaire survey and focus groups.

The findings provide a usage profile of the four perspectives and indicate a divergence between the understanding and adoption of logistics and SCM principles and concepts at a strategic level in firms. The findings also identify the critical success factors (CSFs) and inhibitors to success in addressing this divergence.

The insights generated using the authors’ methodologically pluralist research design could be built upon to include case studies, grounded theory and action research. Replicating the research in other geographical areas could facilitate international comparisons.

The findings allow practitioners to compare their perspectives on the relationship between logistics and SCM with those of their peers. The CSFs and inhibitors to success provide a rational basis for realising the strategic potential of logistics and SCM in practice.

New insights are generated into practitioner perspectives vis-à-vis logistics vs SCM. A fresh understanding of those factors which drive and hinder the adoption of strategic SCM is also developed and presented.

Many traditional retailers use the internet as a complementary business channel while “pure player” retailers only sell products via the internet. The question of who is better at offering electronic physical distribution service quality (e‐PDSQ) is open to debate. But, despite e‐PDSQ's importance there are few empirical studies and most have focused on general service quality of internet shopping or web site design. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and empirically test a conceptual framework for e‐PDSQ from the consumer's perspective.

This paper follows a two‐stage paradigm for scale and construct development, which is presented in a framework based on the concept of order fulfilment as a key driver in e‐PDSQ. Consumer postal surveys were conducted in Edinburgh, UK.

The consumer survey confirmed the appropriateness of the adopted e‐PDSQ framework. The finding that price is the most important online purchasing criteria is in accordance with Verdict which suggests that price is the principle motivator in the home delivery market as the retailing market is getting more price‐transparent and consumers are becoming more price‐sensitive.

Earlier work has provided insight into how e‐PDSQ, represented by availability, timeliness and reliability. This paper extends this work and empirically tests and confirms an e‐PDSQ framework to investigate differences between multi‐channel and pure player retailers, and provides a parsimonious set of e‐PDSQ variables and constructs for retailers to use to design and operate their online offerings.

This study reviews scholarly work in sustainable green logistics and remanufacturing (SGLR) and their subdisciplines, in combination with bibliometric, thematic and content analyses that provide a viewpoint on categorization and a future research agenda. This paper provides insight into current research trends in the subjects of interest by examining the most essential and most referenced articles promoting sustainability and climate-neutral logistics.

For the literature review, the authors extracted and sifted 2180 research and review papers for the period 2008–2023 from the Scopus database. The authors performed bibliometric and content analyses using multiple software programs such as Gephi, VOSviewer and R programming.

The SGLR papers can be grouped into seven clusters: (1) The circular economy facets; (2) Decarbonization of operations to nurture a climate-neutral business; (3) Green sustainable supply chain management; (4) Drivers and barriers of reverse logistics and the circular economy; (5) Business models for sustainable logistics and the circular economy; (6) Transportation problems in sustainable green logistics and (7) Digitalization of logistics and supply chain management.

In this review, fundamental ideas are established, research gaps are identified and multiple future research subjects are proposed. These propositions are categorized into three main research streams, i.e. (1) Digitalization of SGLR, (2) Enhancing scopes, sectors and industries in the context of SGLR and (3) Developing more efficient and effective climate-neutral and climate change-related solutions and promoting more environmental-related and sustainability research concerning SGLR. In addition, two conceptual models concerning SGLR and climate-neutral strategies are developed and presented for managers and practitioners to consider when adopting green and sustainability principles in supply chains. This review also highlights the need for academics to go beyond frameworks and build new techniques and instruments for monitoring SGLR performance in the real world.

This study provides an overview of the evolution of SGLR; it also clarifies concepts, environmental concerns and climate change practices, particularly those directed to supply chain management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceived service quality influences both a shipper's satisfaction and subsequent loyalty in third‐party logistics outsourcing relationships.

Critical service dimensions are identified and their impact on satisfaction and loyalty are developed into a theoretical model, which in turn is examined empirically using structural equation modelling from a survey of 235 industrial companies in Finland.

The results support the satisfaction‐loyalty model in a logistics outsourcing context confirming that service perceptions influence loyalty through a shipper's overall satisfaction with the service provider.

The empirical study is limited to Finland and data were collected before the financial crisis of 2008‐2009 which affected the economy and this industrial sector. The theoretical constructs and model also need to be validated and tested further across a wider empirical context.

Logistics service providers recognise the importance of service quality in outsourcing relationships. However, while the continuity of the current relationship is supported by good service quality, the efforts to extend the scope of the outsourcing arrangement need to be examined on a different basis.

The paper is one of the first to investigate and confirm the service‐satisfaction‐loyalty paradigm in a logistics outsourcing context.