Madeleine Pullman, Lucy McCarthy and Carlos Mena
This pathway paper offers research guidance for investigating illegal supply chains as they increasingly threaten societies, economies and ecosystems. There are implications for…
Abstract
Purpose
This pathway paper offers research guidance for investigating illegal supply chains as they increasingly threaten societies, economies and ecosystems. There are implications for policy makers to consider incorporating supply chain expertise.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors’ work is informed by the team's previous and ongoing studies, research from fields such as criminology, investigative journalism and legal documents.
Findings
Illegality occurs in many supply chains and consists in multiple forms. Certain sectors, supply chain innovations, longer supply chains, and heterogeneous regulations and enforcement exacerbate illegal activities. But illegal activity may be necessary for humanitarian, religious or nationalistic reasons. These areas are under explored by supply chain researchers.
Research limitations/implications
By encouraging supply chain academics to research in this area as well as form collaborative partnerships outside of the discipline, the authors hope to move the field forward in prevention as well as learning from illegal supply chains.
Practical implications
Practitioners seek to prevent issues like counterfeiting with their products as well as fraud for economic and reputational reasons.
Social implications
Governments strive to minimise impacts on their economies and people, and both governments and NGOs attempt to minimise the negative social and environmental impacts. Policy makers need supply chain researchers to evaluate new laws to prevent enabling illegality in supply chains.
Originality/value
As an under-explored area, the authors suggest pathways such as partnering with other disciplines, exploring why these supply chains occur, considering other data sources and methodologies to interdict illegality and learning from illegal supply chains to improve legal supply chains.
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Anne Touboulic and Lucy McCarthy
The purpose of this paper is to explore the current focus of supply chain management (SCM) research; it considers field level and societal constraints and consequently the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the current focus of supply chain management (SCM) research; it considers field level and societal constraints and consequently the potential for change. It details the underlying assumptions in the field, considering the dominant paradigms and stakeholders, and how this has shaped the research we have engaged in as a community of scholars.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a reflective inquiry that seeks to deconstruct the dominant discourses and paradigms in SCM. It offers alternative avenues of inquiry to “traditional” research, considering how different questions, perspectives and approaches might yield different learning for the field. offering alternative avenues to traditional research.
Findings
This is a call for collective action, for solidarity, for a re-imagining of what research in SCM could look like. Research activism is challenging and potentially risky but necessary for the research community to engage in, particularly in light of the global societal grand challenges. Change can take place in the SCM field through collective action and solidarity. Three levels of activism are explored here – acting to solve the grand challenges, acting to change the field and acting as individuals.
Originality/value
This is a “speak-out” piece, which embraces and encourages reflexivity, new methods of doing and writing research as well as different perspectives, and especially a consideration for context and multiple players in the supply chain. The authors contend that it is urgent to re-appropriate our own agency as SCM researchers.
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P. Matthijs Bal, Lee Matthews, Edina Dóci and Lucy P. McCarthy
Scholarly and general interest in sustainable careers is flourishing. Sustainable careers are focused on the long-term opportunities and experiences of workers across dynamic…
Abstract
Purpose
Scholarly and general interest in sustainable careers is flourishing. Sustainable careers are focused on the long-term opportunities and experiences of workers across dynamic employment situations, and are characterized by flexibility, meaning and individual agency. The current paper analyzes and challenges the underlying ideological assumptions of how sustainable careers are conceptualized and advocates the inclusion of the ecological meaning of sustainability and the notion of dignity into the sustainable careers concept.
Design/methodology/approach
Using Slavoj Žižek's (1989, 2001) conceptualization of ideology as fantasy-construction, the authors explore how the use of sustainable careers is influenced by fantasies about the contemporary workplace and the role of the individual in the workplace. This is a conceptual method.
Findings
The authors argue that the concept of sustainable careers is grounded in the neoliberal fantasy of the individual. The paper concludes by presenting an alternative concept of sustainable careers grounded in a dignity-perspective on sustainability, which offers an alternative theoretical understanding of sustainable careers in the contemporary workplace, sharpening its contours and usefulness in theorizing careers.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to systematically analyze the use and conceptualization of sustainable careers in the literate and to expose the ideological underpinnings of the concept. Propositions are developed to be explored by future research.
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Simon Croom, Natalia Vidal, Wellington Spetic, Donna Marshall and Lucy McCarthy
Socially sustainable supply chain (SSSC) practices address pressing social issues and may provide operational benefits as well as positive impacts on society. However, due to gaps…
Abstract
Purpose
Socially sustainable supply chain (SSSC) practices address pressing social issues and may provide operational benefits as well as positive impacts on society. However, due to gaps in the current knowledge, it is difficult to know what practices will provide benefits and what management orientations can maximize the impact of these practices on operational performance. The purpose of this paper is to advance the knowledge on the effect of social sustainability orientation on operational performance by examining the mediating roles of basic and advanced SSSC practices and the moderating role of long-term orientation (LTO).
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected through a survey of US-based companies about their relationships with key suppliers. Confirmatory factor analysis and multiple regression were used to test the proposed moderated mediation model.
Findings
Surprisingly, sustainability orientation predicts operational performance through advanced but not basic SSSC practices. Results also indicate that the effect of sustainability orientation on operational performance is significantly moderated by LTO.
Research limitations/implications
Results are limited by the US context, the cross-sectional nature of the research, the use of a single-respondent survey instrument and the challenges of measuring LTO.
Practical implications
Managers and policymakers should be aware of the limitations of adopting basic SSSC practices on the performance of their operations. Advanced practices provide a more robust business case and significantly and positively impact operational performance. In addition, the interaction of a sustainability orientation and LTO can lead to even greater improvements in firms’ operational performance. Firms with the highest levels of social sustainability and LTOs attain superior operational performance.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the growing literature on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and extends this literature by focusing on social sustainability practices, identifying specific practices that impact and the orientations that maximize operational performance. The authors contribute to the growing literature on the importance of manager’s temporal orientation and provide nuance to emerging SSCM theory by exposing the interplay of these orientations and the impact of SSSC practice adoption.
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Tessa Wright, Lucy Budd and Stephen Ison
This chapter introduces the scope and contents of Women, Work and Transport. The situation concerning the extent of women’s participation in the transport workforce worldwide is…
Abstract
This chapter introduces the scope and contents of Women, Work and Transport. The situation concerning the extent of women’s participation in the transport workforce worldwide is detailed and the challenges facing women transport workers in different world regions and transport modes is highlighted. The chapter describes the structure, contents and key contributions of each of the 21 chapters that are presented in this volume and signposts readers to key material. Although the chapter necessarily highlights some of the many challenges women face when working in highly masculine cultures, this wide-ranging international collection of evidence of the experiences of women transport professionals in both the Global North and Global South also provides numerous suggestions for how employers, governments and trade unions can address, and ultimately overcome, gender segregation in transport. The chapters acknowledge the dramatic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the transport sector, while also pointing to some of the opportunities provided by new greener forms of transport and automation, as well as noting the risks for women workers.
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Donna Marshall, Lucy McCarthy, Paul McGrath and Marius Claudy
This paper aims to examine what drives the adoption of different social sustainability supply chain practices. Research has shown that certain factors drive the adoption of…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine what drives the adoption of different social sustainability supply chain practices. Research has shown that certain factors drive the adoption of environmental sustainability practices but few focus on social supply chain practices, delineate which practices are adopted or what drives their adoption.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors examine the facilitative role of sustainability culture to explain the adoption of social sustainability supply chain practices: basic practices, consisting of monitoring and management systems and advanced practices, which are new product and process development and strategic redefinition. The authors then explore the role played by a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation in shaping and reinforcing the adoption of social sustainability supply chain practices. A survey of 156 supply chain managers in multiple industries in Ireland was conducted to test the relationship between the variables.
Findings
The findings show that sustainability culture is positively related to all the practices, and entrepreneurial orientation impacts and moderates social sustainability culture in advanced social sustainability supply chain adoption.
Research limitations/implications
As with any survey, this is a single point in time with a single respondent. Implications for managers include finding the right culture in the organisation to implement social sustainability supply chain management practices that go beyond monitoring to behavioural changes in the supply chain with implications beyond the dyad of buyer and supplier to lower tier suppliers and the community surrounding the supply chain.
Practical implications
The implications for managers include developing and fostering cultural attributes in the organisation to implement social sustainability supply chain management practices that go beyond monitoring suppliers to behavioural changes in the supply chain with implications beyond the dyad of buyer and supplier to lower tier suppliers and the community surrounding the supply chain.
Originality/value
This is the first time, to the authors’ knowledge, that cultural and entrepreneurial variables have been tested for social sustainability supply chain practices, giving them new insights into how and why social sustainability supply chain practices are adopted.
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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of the “knowledge front” alongside ideas of “home” and “war” front as a way of understanding the expertise of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of the “knowledge front” alongside ideas of “home” and “war” front as a way of understanding the expertise of university-educated women in an examination of the First World War and its aftermath. The paper explores the professional lives of two women, the medical researcher, Elsie Dalyell, and the teacher, feminist and unionist, Lucy Woodcock. The paper examines their professional lives and acquisition and use of university expertise both on the war and home fronts, and shows how women’s intellectual and scientific activity established during the war continued long after as a way to repair what many believed to be a society damaged by war. It argues that the idea of “knowledge front” reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace, and offers “space” to examine the professional lives of university-educated women in this period.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is structured as an analytical narrative interweaving the professional lives of two women, medical researcher Elsie Dalyell and teacher/unionist Lucy Woodcock to illuminate the contributions of university-educated women’s expertise from 1914 to the outbreak of the Second World War.
Findings
The emergence of university-educated women in the First World War and the interwar years participated in the civic structure of Australian society in innovative and important ways that challenged the “soldier citizen” ethos of this era. The paper offers a way to examine university-educated women’s professional lives as they unfolded during the course of war and peace that focuses on what they did with their expertise. Thus, the “knowledge front” provides more ways to examine these lives than the more narrowly articulated ideas of “home” and “war” front.
Research limitations/implications
The idea of the “knowledge front” applied to women in this paper also has implications for how to analyse the meaning of the First World War-focused university expertise more generally both during war and peace.
Practical implications
The usual view of women’s participation in war is as nurses in field hospitals. This paper broadens the notion of war to see war as having many interconnected fronts including the battle front and home front (Beaumont, 2013). By doing so, not only can we see a much larger involvement of women in the war, but we also see the involvement of university-educated women.
Social implications
The paper shows that while the guns may have ceased on 11 November 1918, women’s lives continued as they grappled with their war experience and aimed to reassert their professional lives in Australian society in the 1920s and 1930s.
Originality/value
The paper contains original biographical research of the lives of two women. It also conceptualises the idea of “knowledge front” in terms of war/home front to examine how the expertise of university-educated career women contributed to the social fabric of a nation recovering from war.
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Faye McCarthy, Lucy Budd and Stephen Ison
Only 5 per cent of commercial airline pilots worldwide are women and women who enter the profession may experience negative attitudes and differential treatment on account of…
Abstract
Only 5 per cent of commercial airline pilots worldwide are women and women who enter the profession may experience negative attitudes and differential treatment on account of their gender. Although a growing body of research has focussed on the experiences of women pilots once they are hired, there is a need to examine women’s experiences during their initial (ab initio) training when their personal and professional identities are being developed and contested. Drawing on empirical fieldwork of the experiences of both women and men ab initio pilots undergoing training at two UK-based Flight Schools, this chapter reveals that women cadets not only perceive elements of their professional identities differently from men but that they actively adopt a range of strategies to negotiate potential conflicts between their developing personal and professional identities. The chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to existing studies of gender-dominated professions and offers recommendations to Flight Training Schools and airlines who are seeking to encourage more women to enter the airline pilot profession.