Academic Positions in Supply Chain Management
Are you considering an academic career in supply chain management? Akadeus and Academy of Management’s Career Center offer interesting collections of open positions in business schools worldwide. If you are looking for a teaching or research position in North America, then the following webpages might be helpful: Decision Sciences Institute Placement Services and INFORMS Career Center (both pages contain some positions outside North America, too). In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the most important hub for academic positions at more senior levels is academics.com. Selected logistics/SCM-related positions can be found on the vacancies page of VHB’s WK Logistik (in German, but usually contains offers in English, too). A British webpage about academic employment is jobs.ac.uk; it is not restricted to positions in the UK. SCM positions are also announced on the Logprofs mailing list. Good luck with your application!
Rethinking Corporate Social Compliance in the Supply Chain
Managers are increasingly under pressure to ensure that their products bear attributes like “fair”, “ethical”, “green”, or “social”. Hereby, it becomes clear that solutions cannot just be found in the manager’s company, but in the company’s end-to-end supply chain. This has led companies to audit every company along their global supply chains against the own standards, which resulted in a large volume of auditing. The Rana Plaza building collapse, however, tragically showed that this top-down approach seems to fail. Departing from this observation, a new EY report, Human Rights and Professional Wrongs (pdf), provides an excellent summary of the problem and a set of recommendations for improvement. For example, the authors recommend to use third-party certifiers and auditors more strategically, to prevent orders from factories that have not had their status assessed, and to maintain longer relationships with a smaller number of suppliers. These recommendations could help to sharpen a blunt sword.
A Fourth Star for Germany
So far, Germany has won the FIFA World Cup three times, in 1954, 1974 and 1990, and there is a good chance that it will win it a fourth time this weekend. So, why is this a topic for a supply chain blog? Well, according to a report by Spiegel Online (in German), Adidas has already prepared its supply chain operations and started to put a fourth star, symbolizing the number of World Cup victories, on some of its newly produced Germany soccer jerseys. “We have always believed in the fourth star and prepared ourselves for various scenarios already long before the World Cup”, a spokesperson told the newspaper and added: “We are prepared for a successful outcome. In the case of a possible victory of the Germany national football team, first jerseys with the fourth star will be commercially available in the course of next week.” (It has to be mentioned that Adidas is also prepared for a victory by Argentina.)
Update (2014-07-13): Germany were, indeed, crowned world champions for the fourth time.
A Trail Guide to Publishing Success
Are you currently conducting conceptual, qualitative, or survey research? Are you also aiming to publish the results in a top journal? Then I have some tips for you that could bring you one step closer to your goal. These tips can be found in a recent JBL editorial: A Trail Guide to Publishing Success: Tips on Writing Influential Conceptual, Qualitative, and Survey Research. Herein, the authors identify and describe agreed-upon basics that can help to “(1) increase consistency in the review process, (2) reduce publication cycles, and (3) begin to roll back the length of articles”. For three types of research (conceptual, qualitative, and survey research), best practices are presented for crafting articles. I especially like a table with warning signs “that authors are wandering down a perilous path”, which can be used as a check list for your own research. These warning signs might also help reviewers to evaluate the quality of a manuscript.
Fawcett, S., Waller, M., Miller, J., Schwieterman, M., Hazen, B., & Overstreet, R. (2014). A Trail Guide to Publishing Success: Tips on Writing Influential Conceptual, Qualitative, and Survey Research. Journal of Business Logistics, 35 (1), 1-16 https://doi.org/10.1111/jbl.12039
