social sustainability, supplier selection, emerging markets, international sourcing, stakeholder theory,

Power is a central yet underexplored element in supply chain relationships. In this introduction to the Special Topic Forum (STF), we provide a brief overview of key concepts underlying the current literature on power in supply chains. We then highlight open questions that we see at the forefront of the literature and explain how the five STF papers inform these developing research streams. We close by offering directions for future research on power in supply chains.

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A s supply chains spread toward emerging economies, Western buying firms frequently face the question of whether they should commit resources to develop their suppliers in these regions in terms of environmental issues. Supplier development researchers have just begun to consider environmental aspects, and thus far, the peer-reviewed literature has remained primarily qualitative, and often descriptive. Largescale empirical evidence indicating the antecedents and benefits of environmental supplier development for a buying firm is still scarce. Addressing this gap, we use stakeholder theory to complement and extend the work of Ehrgott et al. (2011) and investigate how pressures from customers, governments, and employees act as antecedents to environmental supplier development. Furthermore, we build on the resource-based view to examine how supplier capabilities, buying firm environmental reputation, and organizational learning in the buying firm can result from such supplier development initiatives. We test the resulting model with a sample of 244 corporate procurement executives from the United States and Germany.

Supplier‐induced disruptions are critical events that can either lead to dysfunctional conflict or spark more fruitful collaboration in buyer–supplier interactions. However, the focus on a single level of analysis in existing research has limited our ability to better understand the complex mechanics linking supplier‐induced disruptions and their consequences. Recognizing this need to bridge different levels of analysis, our study builds on event system theory and presents an in‐depth qualitative investigation of 60 response processes following supplier‐induced disruptions in Western–Chinese buyer–supplier relationships. Using fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we explore how cognitive, behavioral, and structural factors across the individual and organizational levels of analysis combine in complex ways to give rise to either dysfunctional conflict or constructive interaction in the aftermath of supplier‐induced disruptions. Because little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of responses to supply chain disruptions, we investigate the specific role of managerial cognition. To do so, we employ a cognitive‐linguistic approach, which maintains that subtle differences in language reflect differences in cognition, for the textual analysis of our 101 interviews across 20 companies. The configurational fsQCA across the individual and organizational level identifies two archetypes associated with dysfunctional conflict and three archetypes associated with constructive interaction. These findings are the foundation of a middle‐range theory for responses to supplier‐induced disruptions that bridges different levels of analysis and accounts for the role of managerial cognition.