Pandemics and Supply Chain Management Research: Toward a Theoretical Toolbox*

By Christopher W. Craighead, Dave J. Ketchen, Jessica L. Darby. Decision Sciences, 2020

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The COVID‐19 pandemic paralyzed the world and revealed the critical importance of supply chain management—perhaps more so than any other event in modern history—in navigating crises. The extensive scope of disruption, massive spillover of effects across countries and industries, and extreme shifts in demand and supply that occurred during the COVID‐19 pandemic illustrate that pandemics are qualitatively different from typical disruptions. As such, pandemics require scholars to take a fresh look at what lenses offer understanding of supply chain phenomena in order to help supply chain managers better prepare for the next pandemic and foster transiliency (i.e., the ability to simultaneously restore some processes and change—often radically—others). To help scholars and managers achieve these aims, we offer an agenda for supply chain management research on pandemics by considering how the key tenets of well‐known and emergent theories can illuminate challenges and potential solutions. Specifically, we consider how resource dependence theory, institutional theory, resource orchestration theory, structural inertia, game theory, real options theory, event systems theory, awareness–motivation–capability framework, prospect theory, and tournament theory offer ideas that can help scholars build knowledge about pandemics’ effects on supply chains as well as help managers formulate responses.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3a404796e546e4be2901514462b40fe76ec4e8b

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Citations in the corpus

Supply Chain Viability and the COVID-19 pandemic: a conceptual and formal generalisation of four major adaptation strategies (2021, background): “Craighead, Ketchen, and Darby (2020) offered the notion of transiliency to capture the ability to simultaneously restore some processes and change others through transformation and resilience.”
Optimization of supply chain networks with inclusion of labor: Applications to COVID-19 pandemic disruptions (2021, background): “For example, Craighead et al. (2020) highlighted a spectrum of theories that they consider powerful tools for illuminating impacts of the pandemic on supply chains; how organizations responded, and also how supply chains and associated processes can be adjusted if and when another pandemic arrives.”
COVID-19 pandemic related supply chain studies: A systematic review (2021, neutral): “Another study (Ketchen and Craighead, 2020) stressed that it is hard to conceptualize the full impacts on SMEs without proper investigation.”