Survey Research Design in Supply Chain Management
Survey research is one of the most important methodologies in our discipline. Over time, the demands on survey research in SCM have increased – for good reasons. In particular, the design of survey research must reduce the risks of both common method bias and respondent bias. In their important 2018 editorial, entitled Survey Research Design in Supply Chain Management: The Need for Evolution in Our Expectations, Flynn and her coauthors (2018) distinguish between four types of survey research designs. Only one of them, Type 4, sufficiently avoids these two biases. “[A] Type 4 design employs multiple respondents, with the independent and dependent variables addressed by different respondents. It contains some polyadic [i.e., not just one company] constructs, which are addressed by appropriate respondents from different sources.” Anyone who designs a survey in SCM should therefore read this editorial carefully and strictly adhere to the recommendation to use a Type 4 design. Otherwise they risk that the study has no chance of being published in a high-quality academic journal.
Flynn, B., Pagell, M., & Fugate, B. (2018). Survey Research Design in Supply Chain Management: The Need for Evolution in Our Expectations. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 54 (1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12161
Authorship of Academic Papers
Every departmental coffee machine has probably already witnessed heated discussions on the subject of authorship. Indeed, there are no generally accepted standards for assigning authorship. McNutt and her coauthors (2018) define authorship as follows: “Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it; AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author’s contribution to the study); AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.” One thing should be said clearly: Providing a few comments on a text certainly does not constitute “substantial contributions” and, thus, authorship – even if you are a supervisor.
Why Is the SCM Discipline So Silent About the Climate Crisis?
The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released today. Bringing together the latest advances in climate science, it addresses the most updated physical understanding of the climate system. Even without this new IPCC report, it should be clear that our planet is in an existential crisis: The scale and intensity of the recent floods in Germany have broken all records and the ongoing fires in Greece have reached biblical proportions; Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said these fires showed “the reality of climate change”. Devastating fires are also raging in Russia, Italy, Turkey, and various other places. Attribution studies show that the recent record-breaking heatwaves in Siberia and Western North America would have been impossible without man-made climate effects (Ciavarella et al., 2020; Philip et al., 2021). Much of the greenhouse gas emissions are generated in global supply chains. Possible solutions to the climate crisis, thus, include new supply chain structures, processes, and business models. Yet, despite the existential threat to our species from this crisis, our discipline has so far been strangely silent. Therefore, I hope that as many SCM scholars as possible will now read the 42-page Summary for Policymakers of the new IPCC report from cover to cover. Our discipline simply cannot continue to ignore the elephant in the room.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021): Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva, Switzerland. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/#SPM
2021 SCM Best Paper Award Winners
Two of the leading operations & supply chain management journals have recently announced their best paper award winners. First, the Journal of Supply Chain Management’s best conceptual paper for 2020 is Fabrice Lumineau and Nuno Oliveira’s paper Reinvigorating the Study of Opportunism in Supply Chain Management. Grounded in a review of empirical studies of opportunism, the authors “provide suggestions about research designs and data sources that support an agenda that steers research to refine and develop the theory about opportunism”. JSCM’s best empirical paper for 2020 is Suurmond, Wynstra and Dul’s paper Unraveling the Dimensions of Supplier Involvement and their Effects on NPD Performance: A Meta‐Analysis. This meta-analysis is based on 11,420 observations from 51 studies and “provides strong theoretical and practical insights on the important phenomenon of supplier involvement”. Second, the Journal of Operations Management’s Jack Meredith Best Paper Award goes to Jillian A. Berry Jaeker and Anita L. Tucker, who published an article that is entitled The Value of Process Friction: The Role of Justification in Reducing Medical Costs. These authors examine “‘justification’—an otherwise non-value-added process step that introduces process friction by forcing workers to explain the rationale for requesting an optional service”. Congratulations to the authors of these great papers!
Lumineau, F., & Oliveira, N. (2020). Reinvigorating the Study of Opportunism in Supply Chain Management. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 56 (1), 73-87. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12215
Suurmond, R., Wynstra, F., & Dul, J. (2020). Unraveling the Dimensions of Supplier Involvement and their Effects on NPD Performance: A Meta‐Analysis. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 56 (3), 26-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12221
Berry Jaeker, J. A., & Tucker, A. L. (2020). The Value of Process Friction: The Role of Justification in Reducing Medical Costs. Journal of Operations Management, 66 (1-2), 12-34. https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1024
