Welcome to the 15th CSCMP European Research Seminar

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the CSCMP European research Seminar (ERS) is taking place as a virtual event this year. It is the 15th time that ERS runs of “the stack” as an event where in particular US American supply chain academics meet with their European peers – and vice-versa - to discuss important research issues and how to do excellent research. 

Since the start of ERS, the seminar has been closely related to Journal of Business Logistics (JBL) that is owned by Council of Supply Chain Professionals (CSCMP). Whenever possible, the ERS has taken place in conjunction with the CSCMP Europe conference thereby emphasizing the importance of relevance for the logistics and supply chain management academic discipline. Again, this year the practitioner conference could not take place but hopefully, CSCMP Europe and ERS will run together again in Milan 2021. 

Since 2017, International Journal of Logistics Management (IJLM) has joined the ERS along with JBL. IJLM is grateful to the chairs of ERS and Associate Editors of JBL, Prof. Carl Marcus Wallenburg and Dr. Andreas Wieland for this opportunity. Thank you to them and the whole ERS team!
As a token of appreciation to the CSCMP ERS, we have compiled a “virtual special issue” of IJLM papers with free download for participants during the seminar. The articles are a mixture of invited papers from 2019 where IJLM celebrated its 30th anniversary and articles awarded for excellence by the IJLM Editorial Advisory Board from the same year plus a couple of other great papers showing where IJLM wants to go. 

The invited papers were, firstly, Nilsson (2019), "A complexity perspective on logistics management: Rethinking assumptions for the sustainability era" elaborates on the management and research implications of taking a complex systems approach in what he calls the sustainability era, which we now easily can call a climate change era. Secondly, Touboulic and McCarthy’s (2019) work "Collective action in SCM: a call for activist research” seeks to drive relevance of supply chain research even further by proposing the so-called activist approach where researchers take an active position in their research as an alternative to claiming objectivity. 

The awarded papers are Davis-Sramek, Omar, and Germain (2019), "Leveraging supply chain orientation for global supplier responsiveness: The impact of institutional distance"; Liu and McKinnon’s (2019), "Practical relevance of theory-driven supply chain management research: Evidence from China" as well as Darby, J., Fugate, B. and Murray, J. (2019), "Interpretive research: A complementary approach to seeking knowledge in supply chain management".

Finally, we have inserted a couple of papers that we hope will also help pave the way for future research addressing social responsibility as well as global perspectives of logistics and SCM, namely Gruchmann, Schmidt, Lubjuhn, Seuring and Bouman, M. (2019), "Informing logistics social responsibility from a consumer-choice-centered perspective" and El Baz, Laguir and Stekelorum, (2019), "Logistics and supply chain management research in Africa: A systematic literature review and research agenda.”

I sincerely hope that you will enjoy the virtual ERS 2020 and this virtual issue as well as many other fascinating papers in  the IJLM.

Prof. Britta Gammelgaard, Copenhagen Business School
Editor-In-Chief, International Journal of Logistics Management

Content:

Darby, J., Fugate, B. and Murray, J. (2019), "Interpretive research: A complementary approach to seeking knowledge in supply chain management", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 395-413. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-07-2018-0187 

Davis-Sramek, B., Omar, A. and Germain, R. (2019), "Leveraging supply chain orientation for global supplier responsiveness: The impact of institutional distance", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 39-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-09-2017-0225 

El Baz, J., Laguir, I. and Stekelorum, R. (2019), "Logistics and supply chain management research in Africa: A systematic literature review and research agenda", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 8-38. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-09-2017-0242 

Gruchmann, T., Schmidt, I., Lubjuhn, S., Seuring, S. and Bouman, M. (2019), "Informing logistics social responsibility from a consumer-choice-centered perspective", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 96-116. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-07-2018-0169 

Liu, X. and McKinnon, A. (2019), "Practical relevance of theory-driven supply chain management research: Evidence from China", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 76-95. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-12-2017-0337 

Nilsson, F. (2019), "A complexity perspective on logistics management: Rethinking assumptions for the sustainability era", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 681-698. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-06-2019-0168

 
Touboulic, A. and McCarthy, L. (2019), "Collective action in SCM: a call for activist research", International Journal of Logistics Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-08-2019-0222