Professors Linda Hendry and Mark Stevenson from the Department of Management Science received the Outstanding Paper Award from the International Journal of Operations and Production Management (IJOPM), one of the leading journals in their field. The award, which forms part of the 2017 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence, was recently given to them at the European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) conference in Edinburgh.

The accolade is awarded annually to the authors of the paper judged by the editorial team of each Emerald journal to be the best in the previous year. Linda and Mark received the award for their paper entitled “Managing supply chain uncertainty with emerging ethical issues”, which was written with their former PhD student, Dr Eliot Simangunsong.

The paper is based on the food industry in Indonesia and explores the sources of uncertainty within the supply chain of 12 organisations. The work draws particular attention to unethical supply chain practices that create uncertainty within the wider network, including collusion amongst suppliers, unethical influences on government policy, and the abuse of power by large retailers at the expense of smaller competitors. The paper finds the management strategies that aim to reduce an uncertainty at its source lead to better overall supply chain performance than strategies that merely cope with uncertainty, which only have an impact on firm-level performance.

Professor Linda Hendry said: “We are delighted to receive the award for this paper, which raises awareness of important ethical issues in the context of supply chain management”.

As part of the award, the article is now free to download from the journal’s website.