Critical Engaged SCM Research
The Journal of Supply Chain Management is doing an excellent job of stretching the boundaries of our discipline. I know from various conversations with colleagues that I am not the only fan of the journal. I would like to give an example of a very powerful recent JSCM paper: Touboulic, McCarthy, & Matthews (2020). It is entitled Re-Imagining Supply Chain Challenges Through Critical Engaged Research. The authors explore “how engaged research can support the development of the theory and practice of supply chain management (SCM) and present critical engaged research as an extended form of engaged research”. Check out the following video from the authors explaining their vision of critical engaged SCM research.
News from the Journal of Business Logistics (Guest Post by the New Editors)
In today’s guest post, Glenn Richey and Beth Davis-Sramek highlight what will guide them in their tenure as the new Co-Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Business Logistics.
What a pivotal time for those of us engaged in logistics and supply chain research! As the world experiences a global pandemic on a scale that no institution was fully prepared to handle, its effects have reverberated throughout supply chains across all industry sectors. One result should be the development of new research questions that may challenge long-standing theoretical frameworks and relationships. The aftermath of the pandemic also presents another opportunity for the field. As academics in the U.S., we traditionally heard questions along the lines of, “what exactly is a supply chain?” Now, however, we hear things like, “What must be done to fix ‘the’ supply chain?” As this question indicates, we find ourselves in a unique situation to educate a broader population on the economic and humanitarian importance of effective SCM.
As the incoming co-editors of the Journal of Business Logistics, we look forward to embracing these opportunities. We lay out our strategic priorities in an editorial in the last issue (Supply Chain Management and Logistics: An Editorial Approach for a New Era). They include expediting the review process and increasing the number of number of published manuscripts. Importantly, we also recognize that scholarly contributions from our international colleagues are critical in enhancing the reach and reputation of JBL. In the coming weeks, we will update the Editorial Review Board and ask a smaller group of scholars to serve as JBL Senior Editors. Now and in the future, we welcome feedback about how to advance our goals, how to serve our community of scholars, and how to disseminate the implications of our research to a broader set of stakeholders.
Robert Glenn Richey Jr is Chair of the Department of Supply Chain Management at Auburn University. Beth Davis-Sramek is the Gayle Parks Forehand Professor at the Department of Systems and Technology at Auburn University.
2020 SCM Best Paper Award Winners
Two of the leading operations & supply chain management journals have just announced their best paper award winners at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. The Journal of Operations Management’s Jack Meredith Best Paper Award 2020 goes to two winning papers: Wiengarten, Fan, Pagell & Lo’s (2019) paper is titled Deviations from Aspirational Target Levels and Environmental and Safety Performance: Implications for Operations Managers Acting Irresponsibly; and Bavafa & Terwiesch’s (2019) paper is titled Work after Work: The Impact of New Service Delivery Models on Work Hours. Journal of Supply Chain Management’s Annual Best Paper Award goes to Kim, Wagner & Colicchia’s (2019) paper The Impact of Supplier Sustainability Risk on Shareholder Value. Two other papers were shortlisted by JSCM: Longoni, Luzzini, Pullman & Habiague (2019): Business for Society is Society’s Business: Tension Management in a Migrant Integration Supply Chain; and Lanier, Wempe & Swink (2019): Supply Chain Power and Real Earnings Management: Stock Market Perceptions, Financial Performance Effects, and Implications for Suppliers. Congratulations to the author teams!
Never Miss a Call for Papers Again
Have you ever missed a relevant call for papers (CfP) from one of your favorite SCM journals? It can indeed be quite tedious to regularly track all the different CfPs that are out there. Sunny Hasija from The Ohio State University has now provided a solution for us. His webpage specialtopicforums.com is generated nightly by scraping the websites of some of the leading SCM journals and other related journals for any CfPs. As a result, it contains a list of CfPs from these journals. Some journals might still be missing, but already now this provides a great overview. This website will surely be of great use to the entire SCM community. Well done, Sunny!
2018 Impact Factors of SCM Journals
Claviate Analytics have recently published their newest InCites Journal Citation Reports. It is great to see that the 2018 impact factors of all but one journals related to supply chain management have increased again, which highlights the rapidly growing relevance of our discipline. Two journals have an impact factor larger than 7: Journal of Operations Management (7.776; +2.9) and Journal of Supply Chain Management (7.125; +1.0). With an impact factor larger than 5, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management (5.212; +1.0) has now arrived in the first league of management journals. Other SCM-related journals with high impact factors are: Supply Chain Management: An International Journal (4.296; +0.5), Management Science (4.219; +0.7), International Journal of Operations & Production Management (4.111; +1.2), Journal of Business Logistics (3.171; +0.3) and Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management (3.089; −0.6). But there are even more SCM journals with an impact factor around 2: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (2.667; +0.9), Operations Research (2.604; +0.3), International Journal of Logistics Management (2.226; +0.5), Production and Operations Management (2.171; +0.4) and Decision Sciences (1.960; +0.3). Although the impact factor is certainly an imperfect proxy of a journal’s quality, I can only hope that rather conservative qualitative rankings, such as the ABS-AJG list, the UT Dallas list or the FT50 list, will finally be adapted to this new reality. This step is urgently needed!
Impact Factors of Supply Chain Management Journals
Note: The following text refers to a previous version of the JCR impact factors. A more recent version are the 2018 JCR impact factors (see there).
More than many other management disciplines, SCM has been very successful to professionalize and reinvent itself. A good indication for this development are the 2017 JCR journal impact factors, which have just been released. Many, although not all, impact factors of SCM journals have improved. The journal with the highest impact factor among SCM journals and the seventh-highest one among more than 200 management journals is Journal of Supply Chain Management (6.105). Three SCM journals have impact factors between 4 and 5: Journal of Operations Management (4.899), International Journal of Production Economics (4.407) and International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management (4.215). IJPDLM is now even the Emerald journal with the highest impact factor, which is a great achievement! Two other SCM journals range between 3 and 4: Supply Chain Management: An International Journal (3.833) and Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management (3.667), but International Journal of Operations & Production Management (2.955) and Journal of Business Logistics (2.891) also come close to 3. Both International Journal of Logistics Management (1.776) and Decision Sciences (1.641) were able to improve their impact factors and get closer to 2. It might take some time until our journals will finally be acknowledged by qualitative rankings such as CABS’s AJG and VHB-JOURQUAL, as such rankings tend to be quite conservative. However, with such high impact factors there should be no doubt anymore that SCM plays in the same league as accounting, marketing and finance.
CfP: Participating in the Wider Debate on Resilience
The Journal of Business Logistics has a call for papers for a Special Topic Forum on Participating in the Wider Debate on Resilience (PDF). Submissions are due: June 1st, 2019. The editors for this JBL Special Topic Forum are Andreas Wieland (Copenhagen Business School) & Christian F. Durach (ESCP Europe Business School).
The Role of Circular Supply Chains in the Circular Economy
The circular economy is gathering momentum: In the future this model could, for example, mean that smartphones will not be sold and consumed anymore, but companies like Apple and Samsung will then keep scarce resources and sell a smartphone service to users instead of a product to consumers. These users will then be required to bring back the phone after a specified amount of time. California Management Review has now published a special issue on the circular economy. Several of the articles of that special issue refer to supply chains and supply chain management; and several of the authors have published in SCM journals before. This indicates that “supply chain thinking” and “circular thinking” are increasingly stimulating each other. I would even go so far to say that the 21st century’s supply chain management has to shift from linear to circular. This also has implications for our research. What we might need to re-think is whether the “chain” in “supply chain management” is still the right expression.
Getting Starry-eyed about Journals (Guest Post by Alan McKinnon)
My guest post today comes from Alan McKinnon who for several years has been raising concerns about the academic obsession with journal rankings and low rating of logistics/SCM journals. He has just published a new paper updating his earlier arguments.
In a paper that I wrote five years ago I argued that the development of logistics/supply chain management (SCM) as a discipline was being impaired by the relatively low ranking of specialist journals in this field. I was surprised and heartened by the favourable response I received both from logistics/SCM researchers and academics in other disciplines experiencing a similar problem. I have now returned to the journal ranking debate with a sequel to my original article which reviews recent literature on the subject, analyses new data on the validity of the journal ranking as an indicator of research quality and discusses the recalibration of logistics/SCM journals since 2010/11. The literature challenging the principle, practice and application of journal ranking has been steadily expanding and becoming more critical. Regrettably this is not deterring university managers from basing many recruitment, promotional and resource allocation decisions on the rating of journals. Data generated by the UK government’s assessment of university research (REF) has confirmed that, in the field of business and management, the journal ranking is an unreliable predictor of the quality and impact of an individual journal paper. In this analysis, papers published in lower ranked journals tended to be under-valued, a finding of particular relevance to logistics/SCM journals as they tend to be on the 2nd or 3rd tiers of the major journal lists. Since 2010/11, there has been some overall improvement in the relative standing of these journals, though a couple have been downgraded in the widely-used ABS list. Fortunately the backlash against journal rank “fetishism” has begun with bottom-up campaigns such as DORA and top-down, government-led initiatives in countries such as the UK and Australia aiming to make research assessment fairer, more transparent and more rigorous.
Alan McKinnon is Professor of Logistics in Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg and Professor Emeritus at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. You can find out more about his research and publications at www.alanmckinnon.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @alancmckinnon.
McKinnon, A.C. (2017). Starry-eyed II: The Logistics Journal Ranking Debate Revisited. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 47 (6). DOI: 10.1108/IJPDLM-02-2017-0097
2015 Harold E. Fearon Best Paper Award Winners
The Journal of Supply Chain Management has recently announced the winner of the 2015 Harold E. Fearon Best Paper Award, which is the award for the best paper published in that journal. The award goes to an article by Kim & Choi: Deep, Sticky, Transient, and Gracious: An Expanded Buyer–Supplier Relationship Typology. Herein, the authors propose an expanded typology of buyer–supplier relationships, which they theorize in two orthogonal aspects: “(1) relational posture, that is, how two firms regard each other (as cooperative partners or as adversaries) and (2) relational intensity, that is, how much two firms’ operations are interlinked (closely tied or arms-length)”. And these are the two finalists for the 2015 Harold E. Fearon Best Paper Award: Examining Absorptive Capacity in Supply Chains: Linking Responsive Strategy and Firm Performance by Dobrzykowski, Leuschner, Hong & Roh, and When Buyer-Driven Knowledge Transfer Activities Really Work: A Motivation–Opportunity–Ability Perspective by Kim, Hur & Schoenherr. Hopefully, you will enjoy reading these insightful articles as much as I did.
Kim, Y., & Choi, T. (2015). Deep, Sticky, Transient, and Gracious: An Expanded Buyer-Supplier Relationship Typology. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 51 (3), 61-86 DOI: 10.1111/jscm.12081
Dobrzykowski, D., Leuschner, R., Hong, P., & Roh, J. (2015). Examining Absorptive Capacity in Supply Chains: Linking Responsive Strategy and Firm Performance. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 51 (4), 3-28 DOI: 10.1111/jscm.12085
Kim, H., Hur, D., & Schoenherr, T. (2015). When Buyer-Driven Knowledge Transfer Activities Really Work: A Motivation-Opportunity-Ability Perspective. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 51 (3), 33-60 DOI: 10.1111/jscm.12077
