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Considering the transformational impact of technological advances in modern retail on the consumer experience and the associated growth of experimental studies in consumer-centric supply chain management (SCM) research, this paper presents a practical overview of key steps in the design of scenario-based experiments (SBEs) in the context of retail SCM.

Following a conceptual approach, this paper discusses essential aspects in the designing process, including the connection to theory, vignette design considerations, experimental checks and ensuring managerial relevance.

This paper presents a resource for SCM researchers in their pursuit of designing rigorous, context-focused SBEs in consumer-centric retail SCM research. Major design considerations and potential pitfalls are highlighted.

A well-designed experiment, including its vignettes, manipulations and checks, offers strong potential to inform actionable guidance for managers in the feasibility, strategy design, customization and consumer segmentation of retail SCM strategies.

This paper connects the steps in the design of SBEs to consumer-centric retail SCM questions, supporting future research in this realm.

Despite the important role that suppliers have in enhancing the environmental performance of a buyer firm, previous research has not investigated the individual-level motivations of supplier employees (representatives) in supplier-to-supplier environmental knowledge sharing. Thus, we use insights from the coopetition literature to examine how buyer firms can encourage supplier-to-supplier environmental knowledge sharing with the aim of improving the buyer’s environmental performance.

We empirically test our model using an online vignette-based experiment administered to supply chain managers. We contextualized our results using insights from interviews with senior managers representing firms operating in a broad array of industries.

We find that a supplier representative’s personal environmental values influence their commitment to an environmental consortium with a rival firm, and they are subsequently willing to share proprietary environmental knowledge. In turn, these relationships are moderated by situational factors including competitive intensity and buyer power.

The study of coopetition is an emerging stream of research in operations management. Our findings improve the understanding on how a focal actor within a buyer–supplier coopetitive network can promote environmental knowledge sharing behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the social process of Big Data and predictive analytics (BDPA) use for logistics and supply chain management (LSCM), focusing on interactions among technology, human behavior and organizational context that occur at the technology’s post-adoption phases in retail supply chain (RSC) organizations.

The authors follow a grounded theory approach for theory building based on interviews with senior managers of 15 organizations positioned across multiple echelons in the RSC.

Findings reveal how user involvement shapes BDPA to fit organizational structures and how changes made to the technology retroactively affect its design and institutional properties. Findings also reveal previously unreported aspects of BDPA use for LSCM. These include the presence of temporal and spatial discontinuities in the technology use across RSC organizations.

This study unveils that it is impossible to design a BDPA technology ready for immediate use. The emergent process framework shows that institutional and social factors require BDPA use specific to the organization, as the technology comes to reflect the properties of the organization and the wider social environment for which its designers originally intended. BDPA is, thus, not easily transferrable among collaborating RSC organizations and requires managerial attention to the institutional context within which its usage takes place.

The literature describes why organizations will use BDPA but fails to provide adequate insight into how BDPA use occurs. The authors address the “how” and bring a social perspective into a technology-centric area.

Supply chain (SC) professionals are increasingly working alongside business partners of diverse backgrounds, which has been argued to engender both innovation and creativity but also found as potentially detrimental to SC relationships and performance. To reconcile these views, this study explores two mechanisms – supplementary (similarity) and complementary fits – at the surface (observable traits) and deep (unobservable characteristics) levels and their impact on a focal firm representative’s perception of a SC partner’s trustworthiness.

Model was tested using survey data from 285 managers involved in interorganizational SC relationships.

Results indicate that a focal firm representative’s perception of supplementary and complementary fits with a SC partner positively impacts their perception of the partner’s trustworthiness. However, the effects of similarity at both surface and deep levels and complementarity weaken each other.

Understanding the mechanisms of diversity in SC relationships is crucial for fostering trustworthiness and achieving organizational objectives. Firms should evaluate both supplementary and complementary fits when hiring or assigning roles. Embracing a complementary fit not only promotes diversity but also mitigates the negative impact of similarity bias, ultimately strengthening trustworthiness within the organization's SC ecosystem.

By simultaneously examining individual and combined effects of two unique mechanisms of supplementarity and complementarity at the surface and deep levels, this study sheds light on inconsistent findings of the effects of diversity in the SCM literature.

This study follows the tenets of the resource dependence theory (RDT) to investigate the effects of four dimensions of industry-level environmental uncertainty – munificence, dynamism, complexity and innovative intensity – on a shipper's cross-buying (i.e. outsourcing across multiple service categories) in logistics outsourcing arrangements.

Negative binomial regression was used to test the hypotheses with a sample of US manufacturers. Measures were developed through information acquired from a proprietary database of 3PL companies obtained through Armstrong and Associates, Inc. and publicly available industry measures from the US Manufacturing Census and Compustat.

The findings indicate that individual dimensions of environmental uncertainty exhibit distinct influences on shippers' cross-buying in their logistics outsourcing arrangements. Specifically, the growth and initial innovative intensity of shippers' industries lead to an increased number of logistics service categories outsourced to 3PLs, while industry dynamism and exceptionally high innovative intensity drive the opposite effect.

These findings provide valuable guidance to 3PLs with respect to decisions related to the acquisition of specialized transportation, storage, information systems and personnel assets to serve specific industries. The findings highlight industry conditions that are more likely to lead shippers to outsource across a wider array of logistics service categories and, as a result, potentially yield higher customer retention and profit margins.

While extant 3PL literature posits that shippers' individual strategic orientations and capabilities impact their outsourcing strategy, this study contributes to the literature by providing a theoretical-based empirical examination of the industry-level influencers of such behavior.

Over the past two decades, technological advances have spurred companies to design collaborative processes. Yet most such efforts are difficult to implement, with only a few resulting in sustained competitive advantages. The purpose of this paper is to leverage the tenets of socio-technical theory to examine how collaborative process design may lead to improved collaborative performance.

The authors employ a multi-method – survey and interview – approach to examine the roles of technical and social initiatives in mitigating resistors to collaborative performance, and identify both the short-term appeals of technology investments and long-term social resistors that inhibit additional performance gains.

While initial investments in information technology yield alluring gains, performance benefits diminish as social resistors create limiting conditions. The dynamic capability for firms to recognize and respond to the dual and integrative nature of technical and social systems is required for firms to overcome powerful limiting conditions and change resistors through collaborative process design in order to cultivate new value-creation processes.

This study is the first in the discipline to utilize socio-technical systems theory to examine an issue in supply chain process redesign. The multi-method approach elaborates the difficulty inherent in cultivating new value-creation processes. The results collectively illustrate a need for recognizing the influence of both the reinforcing and limiting processes. Whereas, technical initiatives enable new capabilities, social initiatives remove fear, create vision, and inculcate skills, enabling technology adoption and process change.

Trust has long been viewed as a potential governance mechanism. However, recent research discloses substantive incongruities in trust conceptualization and operationalization – especially in the supply chain buyer/supplier context. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirically grounded conceptualization of trust and to explore the trust-construction process.

The authors used the communications rationality approach to elaborate a three-stage qualitative study of supply chain trust. The authors first monologically examine trust by interviewing managers from over 50 companies (as described). The list of trust behaviors are then dialogically refined through 11 focus studies comprised of over 250 managers into different trust dimensions (as agreed upon). Finally, the authors used two in-depth, dyadic case studies to examine the dynamic trust construction process (as witnessed).

The authors find divergence in the way academics define trust and the way companies operationalize trust. Missing in action is the notion of benevolence. In the supply chain setting, managers describe trust as consisting of credibility and relationship commitment. Companies use an iterative approach to signal trustworthiness. However, ambiguity increases the costs and decreases the effectiveness of proactive trust construction as a form of supply chain governance.

The authors specify and evaluate novel constructs used to signal trustworthiness and document why and how companies struggle to use the signaling process efficiently and effectively. For some, this is an issue of managerial commitment. For others, this represents a lack of understanding of trustworthiness signals and the trust-construction process. Ultimately, the authors develop a more robust conceptualization of inter-organizational trust and present a roadmap for proactive trust construction.

The accurate measurement of demand variability amplification across different nodes in the supply chain, or “bullwhip effect,” is critical for firms to achieve more efficient inventory, production, and ordering planning processes. Building on recent analytical research that suggests that data aggregation tends to mask the bullwhip effect in the retail industry, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether different patterns of data aggregation influence its measurement.

Utilizing weekly, product-level order and sales data from three product categories of a consumer packaged goods manufacturer, the study uses hierarchical linear modeling to empirically test the effects of data aggregation on different measures of bullwhip.

The authors findings lend strong support to the masking effect of aggregating sales and order data along product-location and temporal dimensions, as well as the dampening effect of seasonality on the measurement of the bullwhip effect.

These findings indicate that inconsistencies found in the literature may be due to measurement aggregation and statistical techniques, both of which should be applied with care by academics and practitioners in order to preserve the fidelity of their analyses.

Using product-weekly level data that cover both seasonal and non-seasonal demand, this study is the first, to the author’s knowledge, to systematically aggregate data up to category and monthly levels to empirically examine the impact of data aggregation and seasonality on bullwhip measurement.

Given the tension between the rationale for and resistance to supply chain integration (SCI), the authors aim to provide an update on the rhetoric and reality of SCI and extend theory related to adoption and efficacy of integration strategies.

The authors employ a multi‐method – survey and interview – replication approach to gauge the extent to which companies are increasing their engagement in SCI and assess integration's influence on firm performance.

Despite managerial awareness of SCI's potential benefits, levels of integration have remained relatively unchanged over time. Integration is positively related to operational performance and firm performance – primarily through its influence on productivity and customer service. The interviews indicate some firms are beginning to manage value co‐creation initiatives across multiple tiers of the supply chain. They also reveal awareness of integration's competitive potential is insufficient to mobilize resources and mitigate resistance to collaboration. Commitment is a superordinate enabler.

Multi‐method, replication research is rare, but it is necessary to understand collaboration dynamics. The authors' approach enables them to delve into the paradox between the positive performance impact and the lack of progress toward greater integration. Theoretically, they link commitment and capability. Managerially, they propose a maturity framework that managers can use to benchmark their own SCI initiative.

Friendships, an important form of people’s everyday relationships with others, have been studied by many scholars from different disciplines. However, there is limited research on friendship in the context of childhood, particularly that of Chinese rural children. This chapter presents findings from an in-depth study on Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of friendships with peers in the context of a rural primary boarding school. Data for this research were collected through an intensive five-month study, using an ethnographic approach, in a rural primary boarding school (given the pseudonym ‘Central Primary School’) in the western area of China in 2016. This chapter discusses parents’ influences on children’s selection of friends, particularly their ‘good’ friends, and their understandings of the functions of making friends in the context of rural China. It unpacks parents’ interventions on children’s friendships by discussing the moralised hierarchical relationship between children and their parents – children are expected to show obedience to parents. Then, it argues that the Confucian-collectivist values construct a relationship between a child’s individual achievement and their family’s collective good, which makes friendship not only an individual issue but also a collective one too.