Gunilla Jönson

Logistics and the environment: Is it an established subject?

The issue of environmental implications of logistics systems is one of the future challenges to logisticians. The purpose of this paper is to explore the logistics and supply chain management (SCM) discipline to see how the scientific community handles this challenge. Observations in the primary literature have revealed that there are weak ties between the logistics/SCM discipline and the environmental discipline. Our analysis indicates that the literature seems to be unbalanced: knowledge about assessing “impact of logistics on environment” is missing, and most emphasis is on “impact of environment on logistics”. Knowledge about implementation comes mainly within reverse logistics literature, which has been described by scholars as exploratory and anecdotal. When comparing the subject logistics/supply chain management and environment (log/SC and environ) with other subjects in the logistics literature, less attention has been paid to “log/SC and environ”. Moreover, almost half the articles on “log/SC and environ” are published outside the primary logistics-related journals.

The Environmental Implications of Electronic Commerce - A Critical Review and Framework for Future Investigation

There are accelerating trends for the implementation of electronic commerce (e‐commerce) as an extra marketing channel for selling products globally via the access of the Internet. This is expected to influence the shape of future cities and the conservation of natural resources. This paper critically reviews the current research work to date regarding the environmental implications of e‐commerce. The main observation is that there are difficulties to generalise the results. There is a general agreement that it is highly difficult, if not impossible, to state if the damaging effects of e‐commerce on the environment can weigh over the advantageous effects or the contrary. One proposition in this context is that instead of looking at e‐commerce as “a vehicle driving towards freely satisfying the market needs”, we should look at e‐commerce as “a cart attached to our vehicle towards sustainable development”.

Experiential learning in retrospect: a future organizational challenge?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a retrospective reflection over unconscious, emergent learning among employees of an organization and to suggest how to capture these moments of experiential learning for future organizational learning.Design/methodology/approach – Action research in organizations is undertaken in interaction with the employees of the organization studied. The outcome is characterized by a deep understanding of the individuals as well as of the course of events in the system. The paper therefore applies action research, focusing on the experiential learning from daily actions in the case organization at Volvo Cars’ production plant in Sweden.Findings – The conclusion is that an evolution toward a learning organization, as exemplified by the case studied, is not identified until after it actually happens, i.e. in retrospect. It is suggested that the competence build‐up recognized in retrospect should become an integral part of future educational programs. The multidiscipli...

Postponement strategy in food supply chains – an empirical investigation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevancy/feasibility of the postponement strategy in food supply chains. The paper also aims at discussing the windows of opportunities for the growth of use of postponement by identifying the factors/drivers/enablers in the adoption of this strategy. It is out of the scope of this paper to survey a specific market/country, or answer how much or how many; it only captures as many cases as possible and build a categorised picture of postponement against the various food commodities by using semi-structured interviews. Our research results show that food postponement is a relevant strategy across the different types of food commodities/categories (frozen, hilled/fresh and long shelf life). Moreover, the results also show that this is not limited to one form of postponement as one may expect (such as logistics postponement or repacking display packs for instance), but is in fact related to the various forms of postponement.

Horizontal Environmental Assessment of Postponement Strategy – A Delphi-based Investigation

Abstract Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), in addition to other sister methods, represents nowadays a renown established tool for carrying out environmental assessment. Yet, this tool is in fact a kind of “vertical assessment” while the other axis, i.e. horizontal environmental assessment, is still yet an emerging topic proposed and discussed by Abukhader and Jonson (2003) [4]. This paper builds on and extends their work through testing two proposed ideas. For this purpose, Delphi method is employed to run an experiment of assessing postponement strategy (a strategy in logistics management field) using the Horizontal Environmental Assessment model. The aim is to discuss possibilities and limitations of carrying out this first-of-its-kind environmental evaluation, and whether it is possible to arrive at or formulate an environmental judgment on supply chain strategies (Postponement strategy taken as a case in this paper).