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Presents the introductory editorial for this issue of the publication.
Reverse supply chains are receiving increased attention in both academia and practice to address business and environmental sustainability opportunities. As few organizations are adept at both forward and reverse supply chains, subcontracting various activities is imperative. Forging temporary partnerships as a virtual enterprise to take advantage of a short-term market opportunity is one available avenue. Vendor selection that can best achieve combined expertise to complete the entire or strategic portions of a reverse supply chain, while simultaneously forming the virtual enterprise quickly to seize market opportunities, is an emerging and important issue. This paper presents a mixed-integer program that seeks to select vendors that minimize the maximum formation time of a reverse supply chain virtual enterprise, subject to a set of practical decision-making constraints. This model is then integrated into a novel algorithmic technique that generates a portfolio of high-quality and yet diverse solutions of optimal vendor choices, allowing managers to integrate intangible and subjective factors into their final decisions. Numerical examples and computational experiments on simulated data demonstrate the model’s efficiency for generating sets of high-quality solutions and the flexibility for accommodating a range of decision factors. Moreover, this paper sets the stage to further investigate the research nexus of reverse supply chains and virtual enterprises. Keyword: Virtual Enterprise, Reverse Supply Chain, Sustainability, Integer Programming, Solution Portfolios, Diversity
This work proposes and empirically tests a new framework for evaluating the relationship between stakeholder pressures, the adoption of low-carbon operations practices and firms’ carbon performance. It seeks to expand upon stakeholder theory and the natural-resource-based view (NRBV) to understand further the role of operations management in a low-carbon environment. Our theoretical hypotheses were tested through the Partial Least Squares method with bias-corrected and accelerated (BCA) bootstrap confidence intervals. The key findings encapsulate a mixture of expected and unexpected research results: (i) stakeholder pressures influence both barriers and motivators for decarbonising operations management practices; (ii) a variety of barriers and motivators significantly affect the adoption of low-carbon operations management practices; (iii) developing positive relationships with stakeholders is important to overcome barriers from the external environment and enhance organisational competitiveness; (iv) low-carbon operations management has an overall effect on firms’ carbon performance; However, unexpectedly: (v) firms seem to face difficulties in understanding stakeholder pressures when developing low-carbon products and logistics, due to a lack of awareness of the sources of barriers to the adoption of low-carbon management practices; (vi) in terms of stakeholders, competitors tend to exert significant pressure towards the adoption of low-carbon operations, while government does not; (vii) more research is necessary to better understand the apparent weak link between low-carbon logistics and firms’ low-carbon performance.
