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

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.

Research at the Intersection of Entrepreneurship, Supply Chain Management, and Strategic Management: Opportunities Highlighted by COVID-19

Since the early 2000s, research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and strategic management has flourished, as has work at the intersection of strategic management and supply chain management. In contrast, little inquiry has occurred at the intersection of entrepreneurship and supply chain management. This presents a tremendous opportunity, as does the relative lack of work bringing together all three fields. We seek to set the stage for exploiting these opportunities by first describing how incorporating a series of key supply chain concepts?omni-channel, last-mile delivery, supply chain agility, supply chain resiliency, and service recovery?could enrich entrepreneurship research. We then explain how the boundaries of key entrepreneurship concepts?opportunity, entrepreneurial orientation, optimal distinctiveness, bricolage, and fear of failure?could be extended to the supply chain context. Both of these moves bring strategic management concepts into play, as well. In accomplishing our tasks, we draw on examples from how firms attempted to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic via moves spanning entrepreneurship, supply chain management, and strategic management.