Apple & Foxconn: Financialization across the Pacific
It is always inspirational to find articles that, at first glance, fall out of our discipline, but, at second glance, change the way we think about supply chain phenomena. One of these articles is Froud et al. (2014): Financialization across the Pacific: Manufacturing Cost Ratios, Supply Chains and Power. This article argues “that thirty years ago favourable cost conditions helped build productive power in Asia, whereas now US financial power drives and benefits from low labour costs in China, using the very different supply chain positions of Apple Inc. and Foxconn International Holdings (FIH) as examples”. The article concludes by “observing that the rise of the post-national corporate player changes the alignment between large corporate interests and the US economy where Apple hoards its cash surplus and the success for the stockholders does not align with the broader needs of the US economy and society”. The perspective taken by the authors could be a very interesting complement to contemporary SCM courses.
Froud, J., Johal, S., Leaver, A., & William, K. (2014). Financialization across the Pacific: Manufacturing Cost Ratios, Supply Chains and Power. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 25 (1), 46-57 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2012.07.007
Revolutionizing the Academic Peer-Review Process
Some time ago, an editorial of Nature Human Behaviour has highlighted that “[the] quest for positive results encourages numerous questionable research practices […] such as HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known) and P-hacking (collecting or selecting data or statistical analyses until non-significant results become significant)”. To counteract these very serious problems, that make theory-testing research almost useless, the journal has adopted the registered report format, which “shift[s] the emphasis from the results of research to the questions that guide the research and the methods used to answer them”. Similarly, the European Journal of Personality has recently announced to support the registered report format, too: “In a registered report, authors create a study proposal that includes theoretical and empirical background, research questions/hypotheses, and pilot data (if available). Upon submission, this proposal will then be reviewed prior to data collection, and if accepted, the paper resulting from this peer-reviewed procedure will be published, regardless of the study outcomes.” I can only hope that SCM journals will quickly catch up with this development in other fields.
