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Value co-creation (VCC) represents actors’ joint, communal or shared value-creating processes. However, while existing research has advanced important VCC-based insight, the use of differing metatheoretical lenses to study VCC incurs a risk of theoretical fragmentation, thus potentially hampering this research stream’s continued development. We, therefore, undertake an in-depth review of the corpus of VCC research that focuses on its common conceptual underpinnings as anchored in differing perspectives.

To explore this objective, we undertake an extensive review of extant VCC literature, based on which we develop an integrative conceptual framework of VCC.

We propose an integrative, metatheory-unifying definition and framework of VCC that reflect its core hallmarks and dynamics across its adopted theoretical perspectives. Based on the framework, we also derive a set of fundamental propositions (FPs) that synthesize VCC’s core tenets.

VCC conceptualizations grounded in differing metatheoretical perspectives reveal the concept’s core interactive, value-creating nature across metatheoretical perspectives. Though VCC emanates from interactivity between any actor constellation, unifying different metatheories of VCC uncovers important insight.

The study suggests that for effective value co-creation, managers need to establish agreed-upon institutional arrangements, facilitate positive actor relationships and experiences and address challenges like collaboration, transparency, empathy and skill development while ensuring that affective, cognitive, economic and social dimensions of success are met for all actors involved. Successful initiatives require seamless communication, mutual understanding, cost-benefit favorability and public recognition of contributions.

Given VCC’s rising strategic importance, a plethora of studies have investigated this concept from differing metatheoretical perspectives, yielding potential VCC-based fragmentation. Addressing this gap, we take stock of the VCC literature with a view to distilling the concept’s core, trans-metatheoretical hallmarks, as synthesized in the proposed framework and FPs of VCC.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study investigates the role of individual cultural values on the adoption of socially sustainable supply chain management (socially SSCM) for Chinese suppliers facing the normative institutional pressures of guanxi (interpersonal relationships).

Using empirical data collected in three waves from 205 Chinese manufacturers supplying international markets, the proposed theoretical model is tested through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results indicate that guanxi has a positive impact on socially SSCM, and this positive effect is strengthened when the individual cultural values of the supplier's representative embody high collectivism and low uncertainty avoidance.

This study highlights the leading role of guanxi in improving socially SSCM practices due to its normative institutional force. In addition, the findings suggest that future studies should consider individual differences in supply chain partners, which may lead to distinct reactions when facing normative institutional pressures.

This study suggests international buyers should adopt guanxi management with their Chinese suppliers to encourage them to adopt socially SSCM. In addition, managers should note that the guanxi strategy is more effective when the supplier's representative collectivism is high and uncertainty avoidance is low.

This study contributes to socially SSCM research in emerging economies by unveiling the role of guanxi as a key driver of socially SSCM in the Chinese market and providing empirical evidence of the moderating effect of individual culture on the guanxi normative institutionalization process.

Tragic incidents such as the Rana Plaza building collapse call into question the value and effectiveness of supplier codes of conduct (SCC) used in multi-tier supply chains. This paper aims to investigate the barriers to sub-supplier compliance and the drivers from the perspective of suppliers that adopt a double agency role by complying with buyer-imposed SCC while managing sub-supplier compliance on behalf of the buyer.

This research adopts a sequential, mixed-methods approach. The qualitative phase develops a conceptual model with the aid of the extant the literature and semi-structured interviews with 24 senior manufacturing professionals. The quantitative phase then uses a hierarchical regression analysis to test the conceptual model using survey data from 159 apparel suppliers based in India.

The findings reveal that sub-supplier compliance is positively impacted by effective buyer–supplier governance and by the focal supplier having a strategic partnership with the sub-supplier. Conversely, price pressure on sub-suppliers adversely impacts their compliance, while institutional pressure on them to comply is generally ineffective.

The context of the study is limited to the garment industry in India.

To improve SCC compliance rates, buyers and focal suppliers should actively develop strategic partnerships with selected upstream supply chain actors; should set a reasonable price across the supply chain; and, should include specific sub-supplier compliance requirements within the supply contract. The findings also suggest the need to develop social sustainability protocols that are cognisant of regional contexts.

The absence of prior research on SCC implementation by sub-suppliers, this study represents a pioneering empirical study into such multi-tier sourcing arrangements. It provides strong support that sub-supplier governance arrangements differ from those typically found in the focal supplier layer. It also provides empirical evidence of the critical factors that encourage sub-supplier compliance within the apparel industry of a regionally developing economy.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the supply chain (SC) operations of importing used vehicles into New Zealand and how such SCs affect business practices and performance.

The study uses an exploratory qualitative semi-structured interview approach to interview the different stakeholders involved in the global used vehicle SC.

The research identifies the overall network structure of the used import vehicle SC from Japan to New Zealand and characterises key aspects of its operations and network connections. This paper finds that Japanese buying agents have integrated increasing numbers of services to provide a trouble-free trading platform, which has created a direct-import model for used vehicle companies in New Zealand.

The findings and recommendations are useful in designing and managing the used vehicle SC for all stakeholders and effective real-time management of uncertain factors.

The paper primarily analyses SC operations by researching the cooperation and coordination between SC components and networks, based on providing the flow of used vehicles from Japan to New Zealand. It constitutes a pioneering practice-perspective research paper in this domain.

Circular economy (CE) has gained considerable attention from researchers and practitioners over the past few years because of its potential social and environmental benefits. However, limited attention has been given in the literature to explore the drivers and barriers in CE implementation in emerging and developing countries besides China. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers and barriers to implementing a CE in Pakistan’s automobile manufacturing industry.

This study adopts an explorative approach to understand the drivers and barriers at the micro-level CE implementation in Pakistan’s automobile industry. The research design includes both qualitative and quantitative methods using a survey instrument and interviews to gather data. The use of the two main sources of data provides the opportunity for triangulation of the data to improve the validity of the findings, and enables greater inferences from the results.

This study shows that “profitability/market share/benefit” (30 percent), “cost reduction” (22 percent) and “business principle/concern for environment/appreciation” (19 percent) are the top three drivers. Similarly, “unawareness” (22 percent), “cost and financial constraint” (20 percent) and “lack of expertise” (17 percent) are the top three barriers in implementing CE principles in Pakistan automobiles industry.

This study considers only Pakistan automobiles industry, and the practical implications potentially limit to emerging Asian economies.

This study is the first of its kind that has investigated the drivers and barriers of CE at the organizational level in the automobile industry of Pakistan. Thus, it helps to advance the understanding of the subject matter and enables the formulation of effective policies and business strategies by practitioners for upscaling CE and sustainability.

The study aims to synthesize existing knowledge and proposes a research framework for building a resilient supply chain (SC) through artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It also identifies existing literature gaps and paves the way for a future research agenda.

A systematic literature review has been carried out to identify the peer-reviewed articles from Scopus and Web of Science databases. Then, the selected articles published between 2012 and 2023 are analyzed using descriptive and thematic analysis methods to unearth research gaps and offer new research directions.

Descriptive and thematic analysis reveals the overall development of literature on the role of AI for supply chain resilience (SCR). Based on the findings of the thematic analysis, the motivation, application, capability and outcome (MACO) framework has been developed and propositions have been proposed. Several future research directions have also been suggested in terms of theory, context and methodology (TCM).

The study provides a fresh perspective on the integration of AI technology within the realm of SCR. The developed MACO framework serves as a practical tool for supply chain management (SCM) professionals, offering a nuanced understanding of AI's applications across various functional areas to streamline operations, minimize waste and optimize resource utilization, thereby helping them in strategic planning.

This study contributes to the literature on the role of AI for building SCR by uncovering gaps, offering research directions and developing propositions for future research directions.

This study aims to address the topic of ethics, responsibility and sustainability (ERS) orientation of students enrolled in schools of economics and management master’s degrees. It examines the effect of educational background and gender on Portuguese students’ orientation towards ERS, as well as the extent to which there is a relation between the scientific area of the master degree in which the student is enrolled and his/her ERS orientation.

The authors used a sample of 201 students from several master degrees offered by the School of Economics and Management of a large public Portuguese university and analysed their ERS orientation using a survey by questionnaire.

Findings suggest that there are differences in orientation across gender, with female students valuing ERS more than their male counterparts. Educational background has minimal effects on the responses. It was also found some sort of selection effect in terms of the scientific area of the master degree and ERS orientation.

This study contributes to the literature by analysing the issue of whether students with an educational background in economics and management present different ERS orientation than their counterparts, as well as by examining whether there is some sort of self-selection into the study of disciplines in which ERS orientation is likely to be a week. As far as the authors are aware, this is the first study analysing this type of issue regarding ERS.

The agricultural supply chain is susceptible to disruptive geopolitical events. Therefore, agri-food firms must devise robust resilience strategies to hasten recovery and mitigate global food security effects. Hence, the central aim of this paper is to investigate how supply chains could leverage digital technologies to design resilience strategies to manage uncertainty stemming from the external environment disrupted by a geopolitical event. The context of the study is the African agri-food supply chain during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The authors employ strategic contingency and dynamic capabilities theory arguments to explore the scenario and conditions under which African agri-food firms could leverage digital technologies to formulate contingency strategies and devise mitigation countermeasures. Then, the authors used a multi-case-study analysis of 14 African firms of different sizes and tiers within three main agri-food sectors (i.e. livestock farming, food-crop and fisheries-aquaculture) to explore, interpret and present data and their findings.

Downstream firms (wholesalers and retailers) of the African agri-food supply chain are found to extensively use digital seizing and transforming capabilities to formulate worst-case assumptions amid geopolitical disruption, followed by proactive mitigation actions. These capabilities are mainly supported by advanced technologies such as blockchain and additive manufacturing. On the other hand, smaller upstream partners (SMEs, cooperatives and smallholders) are found to leverage less advanced technologies, such as mobile apps and cloud-based data analytics, to develop sensing capabilities necessary to formulate a “wait-and-see” strategy, allowing them to reduce perceptions of heightened supply chain uncertainty and take mainly reactive mitigation strategies. Finally, the authors integrate their findings into a conceptual framework that advances the research agenda on managing supply chain uncertainty in vulnerable areas.

This study is the first that sought to understand the contextual conditions (supply chain characteristics and firm characteristics) under which companies in the African agri-food supply chain could leverage digital technologies to manage uncertainty. The study advances contingency and dynamic capability theories by providing a new way of interacting in one specific context. In practice, this study assists managers in developing suitable strategies to manage uncertainty during geopolitical disruptions.

Agriculture value chains (AVCs) have experienced unprecedented disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic, with lockdowns and stringent social distancing restrictions making buying and selling behaviours complex and uncertain. This study aims provide a theoretical framework describing the stakeholder behaviours that arise in severely disrupted value chains, which give rise to inter-organisational initiatives that impact industry sustainability.

A mixed-methods approach is adopted, in which uncertainty theory and relational governance theory and structured interviews with 15 AVC stakeholders underpin the initial conceptual model. The framework is empirically validated via partial least squares structural equation modelling using data from an online survey of 185 AVC stakeholders based in India.

The findings reveal that buyer and supplier uncertainty created by the COVID-19 lockdowns gives rise to behaviours that encourage stakeholders to engage in relational governance initiatives. Progressive farmers and other AVC stakeholders welcome this improved information sharing, which encourages self-reliance that positively impacts agricultural productivity and sustainability.

The new framework offers farmers and other stakeholders in developing nations possibilities to sustain their AVCs even in dire circumstances. In India, this also requires an enabling ecosystem to enhance smallholders' marketing power and help them take advantage of recent agricultural reforms.

Research is scarce into the impact of buyer and seller behaviour during extreme supply chain disruptions. This study applies relational governance and uncertainty theories, leading to a proposed risk aversion theory.