Why Theory is Relevant to Supply Chain Research
The Journal of Business Logistics has changed (I recently reported). In their first editorial, the new editors, Stanley E. Fawcett and Matthew A. Waller, share their vision and expectation that “articles published in the Journal of Business Logistics will be grounded in sound theory and make a clear contribution to theory development”. The authors help us to “make sense out of chaos” by clarifying a number of questions: What is theory and should research conversations describe, explain and/or prescribe? What constitutes a valuable theoretical contribution? The authors emphasize that good research must be both influential and interesting and they suggest a three-step action plan to assure that we produce and deliver good theory. The JBL’s editoral is already the second valuable essay about theory development published by an SCM journal within a very short time, the other one being a discussion about conceptual theory development in the Journal of Supply Chain Management. Theory development matters!
Building Theory in the SCM Field
The Journal of Supply Chain Management has published an interesting forum that discusses the conceptual theory development approach within the context of our discipline. In his introducing essay, the co-editor-in-chief Craig C. Carter describes the JSCM’s perspective/philosophy towards conceptual theory development and introduces guidelines for both authors and reviewers. Choi and Wacker examine selected papers over a time period of the last 10 years to reveal good theory-building practices. Ketchen and Hult observe that powerful tools for guiding the theory building process have been developed within the organizational sciences, but have not yet found widespread application within our field. They describe several of these tools and explain how they can be used to enhance theory building within SCM. In her article, Rindova emphasizes the process through which ideas develop into a value-added theoretical contribution. Finally, Skilton’s essay discusses the process of developing theory during the review process for conceptual articles in contrast to empirical articles.
