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2025 AOM Annual Meeting

OSCM

HR

SIM

11657: Better Living Through Better Theory: Prescriptive Theorizing for Decent Work in Global Supply Chains

Sunday, July 27, 2025
10:00 - 12:00 CEST (GMT+2)
Location: Bella Center: Hall B- B5-m2
Session Type: PDW (workshop)
Orientation: Research
Shareable link: https://cdmcd.co/LE956D
Supply chain thinking has been described as people blind; people, communities and society are often overlooked in our foundational thinking (Pagell and Wilhelm, 2024). Hence, supply chain management as currently practiced has been linked to social problems such as modern slavery, wage inequality and precarious work (Stevens, 2023). Yet providing decent work across all tiers of the supply chain is a fundamental part of the sustainable development goals and by extension should be core to sustainable supply chain management. Participants in this PDW will actively engage in a prescriptive theorizing exercise to move from the desired end-state of ensuring decent work in global supply chains, to a theory of what this might entail (e.g. Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2022; Hanisch, 2024). Prescriptive theorizing focuses on how things should be and the means to accomplish these desired states (Hanisch, 2024). Providing decent work globally is a well-accepted desired end state. But how to achieve this expectation when considering other supply chains needs such as matching supply with demand to provide time and place utility is unknown. Typically, we would empirically observe practice to determine how to create these conditions; descriptive theorizing (e.g. Hanisch, 2024). But when most supply chains struggle to provide decent work, this approach is unlikely to succeed. Prescriptive theorizing works in reverse to provide new solutions. The workshop will explore the desired end state, explicate what prescriptive theorizing entails, provide participants an opportunity to engage in prescriptive theorizing, and hopefully begin to cure our people blindness.