تعدیل رابطه ی نظری و عملی در تحقیقات مدیریت زنجیره تامین Balancing theoretical and practical relevance in supply chain management research

Introduction Supply chain management (SCM) is still a young discipline. In order to gain a strong foothold and recognition among other academic disciplines, SCM scholars have been advised to improve consistency/effectiveness in their research (Mentzer and Flint, 1997; Flynn, 2008; Mentzer, 2008), to ground the contributions more on established theories (Defee et al., 2010; Halldórsson et al., 2007, 2015; Stock, 1997), to incorporate philosophy of science issues (Arlbjørn and Halldórsson, 2002; Aastrup and Halldórsson, 2008), and to develop new theories (Choi and Wacker, 2011; Ketchen and Hult, 2011; Wacker, 2008). SCM scholars, as is the case with researchers from other disciplines, have been witnessing an increased performance focus on not only academic output in high-ranking peer-reviewed academic journals, but also publishing articles in journals with significant impact factors (Adler and Harzing, 2009; Alvesson and Sandberg, 2013; Martin, 2012; McKinnon, 2013, 2017). This development has led to debates in academia concerning both its positive and negative effects on continuing or striving to become a bold researcher (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2013; Lambert and Enz, 2015; Simpson et al., 2015). One issue is that the customers of such journals most often are other academics, and not practitioners (Martin, 2012), which point to a need for emphasizing what is relevant. The discussion on rigor and relevance of research has come up several times during the last decades (Banks et al., 2016; Lambert and Enz, 2015; Markides, 2007; Thomas et al., 2011). This debate is centered on discussions about whether one should pursue rigorousness in their research at the expense of usefulness of the research or vice versa. Rigor is an issue in all types of research (i.e. quantitative, qualitative, or modeling) and is concerned with operationalizing variables, defining the right measures, scales, etc. (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011; Mentzer and Flint, 1997). Relevance is a question about whether the specific research is useful – either to theory or practice (Mentzer, 2008). Relevance and rigor concepts have often been discussed as exclusive choices; Mentzer (2008), on the other hand, has mentioned that both are necessary and not mutually exclusive. This research makes an attempt to interpret that extant research in SCM discipline is unbalanced with a stronger focus on rigor, with the risk of drifting into irrelevance (Christopher and Ryals, 2014; Narasimhan, 2018). Due to increased focus on journal ranking, discussions of the “relevance of research” seems relevant to revisit. Moreover, this exercise is of paramount importance because previous discussions of relevance are unclear about what type of relevance is in focus (either theoretical or practical). Being an applied discipline (Frankel et al., 2008; Goldsby and Zinn, 2016; Lambert and Enz, 2015; Thomas et al., 2011), the discussion of what is meant by relevance among supply chain academics is not trivial. There are important voices of concern about the apparent lack of practical relevance that needs to be addressed (Ellinger and Chapman, 2016; Lambert and Enz, 2015; McKinnon, 2013, 2017; Narasimhan, 2018; Näslund, 2008; Tang, 2016; Toffel, 2016; Woxenius, 2015).