Purpose – The paper seeks to examine the changing landscape of supply chain management, marketing channels of distribution, logistics and purchasing. Design/methodology/approach – The authors examine and take stock of the changing nature and landscape surrounding the related disciplines of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue on supply chains and the enterprise. Design/methodology/approach – Introductory review and brief description of research papers in this issue. Findings – To demonstrate the growing complexity and the multiple factors...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue that looks at how enterprises could build competitive advantage through supply chain management. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an overview of competitiveness within a supply chain framework, introduces the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze whether supply networks may be validly treated as complex adaptive systems (CAS). Finding this to be true, the paper turns into the latest concerns of complexity science like Pareto distributions to explain well‐known phenomena of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of packaging design on purchasing decisions in hospitals and to identify inefficiencies in the US hospital supply chain. Recognition of inefficiencies helped to directly relate to the effects on critical factors of operation such as...

Purpose – Interest in product‐level carbon auditing and labelling has been growing in both business and government circles. The purpose of this paper is to examine the practical problems and costs associated with highly disaggregated analyses of greenhouse gas emissions from supply chains....

Purpose – This is a polemical paper challenging both the principle and practice of journal ranking. In recent years academics and their institutions have become obsessive about the star‐ratings of the journals in which they publish. In the UK this is partly attributed to quinquennial reviews...

Purpose – To provide public sector organizations with a development map to achieve employee and customer satisfaction and to align organizational processes for goal achievement. Design/methodology/approach – The paper re‐works the highly influential and widely validated service‐profit...

Purpose – Reverse e‐auctions are increasingly being used in business‐to‐business procurement and have been reported to yield significant price reductions for buyer firms. However, the adoption of online auction formats has raised many concerns among suppliers, often being criticized for...

Purpose – To introduce the special issue focusing on the question: is supply chain management (SCM) an emerging academic discipline? Design/methodology/approach – A brief discussion of the papers in the special issue. Findings – Outlines how the papers stimulate debate on the nature and...