This paper evaluates ways in which labour issues in global value chains for medical gloves have been affected by, and addressed through, the COVID‐19 pandemic. It focuses on production in Malaysia ...and supply to the United Kingdom's National Health Service and draws on a large‐scale survey with workers and interviews with UK government officials, suppliers and buyers. Adopting a Global Value Chain (GVC) framework, the paper shows how forced labour endemic in the sector was exacerbated during the pandemic in the context of increased demand for gloves. Attempts at remediation are shown to operate through both a reconfigured value chain in which power shifted dramatically to the manufacturers and a context where public procurement became higher in profile than ever before. It is argued that the purchasing power of governments must be leveraged in ways that more meaningfully address labour issues, and that this must be part of value chain resilience.
In many organizations, the role of purchasing is in a transition from a reactive order taker, into a proactive and internally integrated business partner. Building on a Resource-Based View and ...Capability-Based View, this study explores how purchasing professionals' involvement and proactive efforts in sourcing processes affect sourcing project outcomes, in terms of both value creation and supply risk reduction. The authors gathered data on 112 sourcing projects from a large, private financial services company with in-depth and structured interviews with key stakeholders. A structural model deploying the research hypotheses was analyzed using the Partial Least Squares technique. The results reveal that, driven by early involvement of and responsibility granted to the purchasing professional, purchasing proactivity enhances value creation and supply risk reduction sourcing outcomes. Specifically, proactivity mediates the effect of purchasing's involvement on value creation.
This study empirically establishes the importance of purchasing proactivity, serving as critical capability of purchasing professionals. Following a dyadic logic, this impacts industrial marketers. More specifically, when purchasers build capabilities to show proactive behavior to enhance value creation and risk reduction, marketers need to develop capabilities to facilitate purchasers in their endeavors.
•Purchasers' proactive attitudes enhance value creation and risk reduction.•For purchasers to maintain a proactive approach, they must pursue early and active involvement in the sourcing process.•Suppliers may require a set of boundary spanning capabilities when facing more proactive and strategic purchasers.•Marketers can broaden their conception of value creation by helping purchasers building their own value contribution.
Public procurement and the quality of labour in the NetherlandsIn labour-intensive sectors, public procurement’s focus on price competition and efficiency jeopardises job quality. This study shows ...procurement’s negative impacts in all job quality dimensions in four sectors in the Netherlands. Employing an actor-institutionalist lens, the research investigates these problems by analysing several actor positions, interactions, and orientations. The findings show a ‘wicked problem’ in which the stakeholders in procurement do not share the same problem definition and experience a limited and unclear scope of actions. However, the article shows that actors have opportunities to enhance job quality in the context of procurement at the national, sectoral and local levels.
Public sector procurement is increasingly seen as an important instrument for inducing innovation in the private sector. Yet, a broad range of different concepts, each with their own associated ...rationales, and approaches, are used in literature and practice to describe the stimulation of innovation through public procurement. Due to a lack of an overview on the use of concepts, rationales and approaches to stimulate innovation through public procurement in literature and practice, it remains difficult for public organisations to decide why, how, and to what extent they will stimulate innovation in the private sector through public procurement. The contributions of this article to mitigate this problem are threefold. First, it provides a review of the different streams of literature, dichotomies and typologies on public procurement with respect to inducing innovation. Second, it discusses various approaches to stimulate innovation through public procurement individually and compares them in a structured overview. Finally, it provides guidance on the suitability of the use of these approaches in different situations.
This paper examines the existing literature on green supplier selection. In total, 60 articles are reviewed, all published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2011. The articles are analyzed ...in terms of several general variables such as type of research and theoretical viewpoint, as well as more specific variables such as the supply chain position considered, stages of the supplier selection process studied, and the perspective taken on environmental criteria. The main findings are threefold. First, analytical research, focusing on developing normative decision models for the final stage in green supplier selection is clearly most dominant, employing a wide range of techniques. Second, empirical research is less prominent and generally lacks a clear theoretical background. Third, very little conceptual research has been done linking green supplier selection to an organization's strategy. Research on green supplier selection is highly fragmented and in danger of overemphasizing the technical aspects of supplier selection. Based on this review of the articles, a conceptual model of green supplier selection is presented, aimed at integrating the different dimensions of green supplier selection and identifying directions for future research.
•This article is a systematic review of the literature on green supplier selection (GSS) between 1991 and 2011.•Analytical research which relies on mathematical decision models for the final selection stage is most dominant.•A conceptual model, based on the literature review, indicates key dimensions of GSS: strategic alignment, decision-making tools, supplier selection process, and supply chain context.•We argue that future research on green supplier selection requires addressing the interrelationship between the four dimensions.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, unusual consumer behavior, such as hoarding toilet paper, was reported globally. We investigated this behavior when fears of consumer market disruptions started ...circulating, to capture human behavior in this unique situation. Based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, we propose a structural model connecting exposure to online information sources (environmental stimuli) to two behavioral responses: unusual purchases and voluntary self-isolation. To test the proposed model, we collected data from 211 Finnish respondents via an online survey, and carried out analysis using PLS-SEM. We found a strong link between self-intention to self-isolate and intention to make unusual purchases, providing empirical evidence that the reported consumer behavior was directly linked to anticipated time spent in self-isolation. The results further revealed exposure to online information sources led to increased information overload and cyberchondria. Information overload was also a strong predictor of cyberchondria. Perceived severity of the situation and cyberchondria had significant impacts on people's intention to make unusual purchases and voluntarily self-isolate. Future research is needed to confirm the long-term effects of the pandemic on consumer and retail services.
•We investigate people's purchase and isolation behavior during the COVID19 pandemic.•Information source exposure leads to information overload (IO) and cyberchondria.•IO had a negative effect on perceived severity, whereas cyberchondria had a positive impact.•Perceived severity (PS) positively affected intentions to self-isolate and unusual purchases.•Purchase self-efficacy reinforces the influence of PS on unusual purchases.
Estamos a las puertas de un relevo generacional en los servicios GLAM públicos (bibliotecas, archivos, museos, centros de documentación) y el panorama que nos adelantan los actuales modelos de ...contratación auguran un aumento del número de externalizaciones. Es previsible la incorporación de una cohorte de nuevos profesionales que trabajarán para las diferentes administraciones sin ser empleados públicos y realizando, en muchas ocasiones, labores de carácter permanente. Esta nota se va a centrar en la problemática de la contratación pública vía externalización, en la oportunidad que, para promover la sostenibilidad, la equidad y la innovación, tienen las administraciones públicas si utilizan su gran "poder de compra" con criterios de responsabilidad social y en el papel de las asociaciones profesionales en la regulación de nuevos ecosistemas laborales.
Since governments are the largest buyers globally, they have enormous purchasing power. Government purchasing, therefore, has potential to be leveraged to improve social outcomes, such as helping ...disadvantaged communities, ensuring labor rights, and minimizing negative environmental impacts. However, as yet, there is little understanding about social public purchasing research in the field of public administration. We provide a theoretical framework for organizing research around social public purchasing. We then survey both the scholarly and practitioner research on social public purchasing in order to develop a clear understanding of the critical knowledge gaps and the potential for important social public purchasing research.
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