Supply Chain Resilience

In our new article, Two Perspectives on Supply Chain Resilience (Wieland & Durach, 2021, p. 316), we provide a new definition of supply chain resilience:

Supply chain resilience is the capacity of a supply chain to persist, adapt, or transform in the face of change.

Based on our observation that SCM scholars have often taken an engineer’s perspective to interpret supply chain resilience, we argue that it needs to be complemented with a social–ecological perspective. Our discipline is surprisingly isolated from the ongoing resilience debates in other fields, such as ecology and urban science. Supply chain resilience is not just about “bouncing back” and persistence, as the engineer’s view implies. Supply chain resilience promises to be about “bouncing forth”, adaptation, and transformation. It is time to study the assumptions we make about the supply chain more explicitly. The supply chain is not only an engineered system that needs to be stabilized, as it may be the case with a subway system. It is a fluid system that contains social actors and is anchored in our complex world.

Wieland, A., & Durach, C. F. (2021). Two Perspectives on Supply Chain Resilience. Journal of Business Logistics, 42 (3), 315–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbl.12271