Virtual Seminar Sessions
Over the last few weeks JSCM’s European team has broadcast a series of short impulse sessions on specific methodological topics.
The broad goal of these sessions was twofold: a) to encourage participants to think about new methodological approaches and research questions, and, b) to provide them with a forum to discuss their experiences or concerns related to these methodological topics with experts.
Each of these sessions takes place via Zoom on a Thursday at 4:00pm CET / 10 AM EST and are running for about an hour.
Our first session took place on February 18: Analyzing and Theorizing Supply Networks with Tingting Yan and Jury Gualandris moderating.
“This roundtable focuses on what is NOT obvious when analyzing and theorizing supply networks. We will spend time in exploring the unique and under-addressed features of supply networks. Participants are encouraged to share experiences about theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges related to the study of supply networks. We will have two 25-minute sessions and a few de-brief opportunities. By the end of the session the participants (and ourselves) will have a better understanding of the distinctive features of supply networks, prominent gaps existing in the literature and methodological challenges deserving our attention.”"
Jury and Tingtings slides are below:
Our Session on February 25th was entitled “Case study methods in practice” and was moderated by Miriam Wilhelm and Zhaohui Wu
Zhaohui Wu and Miriam Wilhelm reflected on current practices of doing (and publishing) case study-based research in Operations and Supply Chain Management. Some of the key issues that will be discussed include sampling strategies, reporting methodology, and persuasion with case studies.
Our March 4th session was entitled : Configurational Approaches and was moderated by Craig Carter and Lutz Kaufmann
SCM faces many “grand challenges”, like climate change, disruptions, networks, and digitalization, where causality is complex. Studying causally complex phenomena using configurations – meaningfully distinct groups of observations within a sample – therefore seems promising. Correlational thinking (and with it using linear approaches leading to generalizable results) is predominant in the field of SCM, and linear thinking certainly continues to be useful. However, limiting theorization and perspectives solely to linear thinking – i.e., not having configurational theorizing and approaches in one’s toolkit – is not a good thing, both for individual scholars and the broader SCM discipline. Established configurational approaches (typologies and taxonomies) have recently been complemented with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), sometimes called a “neo-configurational” approach, which is drawing on set-theory. This session covered the configurational approach and contrasted it with the correlational one.
Upcoming Sessions
March 11: Context and Manipulations in Experiments moderated by Scott DuHadway and Henrik Franke
Register here: https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Ykd-6qrDspGdBO6yRwORpPV1MCKiVaXeAH
March 18: Research ethics and integrity moderated by Erik van Raaij and Mark Pagell
Register here: https://ucd-ie.zoom.us/meeting/register/u50qf-6srjIiE9MevLoSVwyeuzapzGAezTq5
Upon registration participants will be sent the link to join the zoom session; because of the sessions’ interactive nature, there will be no recording available.