2021/03/04 by Andreas Wieland, Christian F. Durach · 642 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · #Innovation and Socioeconomic Development #Supply Chain Resilience and Risk Management #Sustainable Supply Chain Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/jbl.12271
published in Journal of Business Logistics 42(3), 315-322 (Wiley)
crossref issued 2021/03/04 · crossref published 2021/03/04 · crossref published-online 2021/03/04 · openalex publication_date 2021/03/04 · crossref created 2021/03/05 · crossref published-print 2021/07/01 · crossref deposited 2023/08/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29 · crossref indexed 2026/08/06
Abstract More than a decade ago, other fields started to challenge the equilibrium‐focused meaning of resilience. They suggested that resilience does not just relate to the ability of a system to “bounce back” after an impeding event, but also to the capacity to adapt and transform. The operations and supply chain management literature remains surprisingly disconnected from these debates. This essay sets out to further our theoretical knowledge of what resilience means (or means to others) by disentangling two prominent perspectives of resilience—engineering resilience and social‐ecological resilience—and offering an updated definition of supply chain resilience. We integrate and discuss these perspectives in the context of our understanding of the supply chain as a system. The goal is to outline the potential links and inconsistencies of these perspectives with supply chain management (SCM). From there, we seek to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what resilience means in SCM. Supply chain resilience is then no longer understood in terms of stability, but in terms of adaptation and transformation.