Guoqing Zhao, Swansea University

Samuel Fosso Wamba, TBS Business School

Maciel M. Queiroz, FGV EAESP

Over the last decade, supply chains have been repeatedly disrupted by large-scale shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, geographical conflicts (e.g., Russia-Ukraine war, US-China trade tensions), and climate change-related disasters such as the 2021 Henan floods and the 2024 Spanish floods. These events have illustrated how disturbances at one level can cascade across other levels, leading to systemic failure.

While supply chain resilience has emerged as a dominant theme in supply chain management, the literature remains fragmented, often focusing on a single level of analysis and lacking a systemic understanding. One prominent research stream emphasizes the development of supply chain resilience capabilities, such as collaboration, knowledge management, risk management culture, flexibility, leadership, redundancy, visibility, and information sharing. Another stream explores the role of advanced technologies, including big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and robotics in fostering supply chain resilience. Additional research pathways have also received considerable attention, such as conceptualizing supply chain resilience through vulnerability reduction and disruption management strategies; designing and quantifying resilient supply chain networks; measuring supply chain resilience to performance; and assessing risks and measuring their impacts. Collectively, these studies have generated valuable insights into the conceptualization, construction, and measurement of supply chain resilience, but relatively few have approached it from a systemic perspective.

In particular, limited attention has been paid to how cross-level interactions shape supply chain resilience. This gap has led to growing calls for research that adopts systems thinking, positioning resilience as a dynamic, multi-level capability rather than a collection of isolated practices. Supply chain resilience should be understood as a multi-level framework spanning individuals, organizations, and supply chains, with studies examining cross-level interactions. Additionally, supply chain resilience should be conceptualized as the ability of a system to bounce back, adapt, and transform following disruptive events, with research integrating system perspectives such as socio-ecological and engineering resilience. More recent scholarship has advocated for more contextualized understandings of supply chain resilience.

This special issue aims to advance a systemic understanding of supply chain resilience by exploring cross-level interactions, building a multi-level framework, and fostering theoretical innovations. While supply chain resilience has been studied extensively, most research remains at a single level of analysis, either individual, organizational, or network. This special issue seeks to overcome this fragmentation by inviting contributions that explain how supply chain resilience emerges from the dynamic interplay across levels, and how these interactions shape both theoretical development and managerial practice.

Potential topics

• Conceptualizing supply chain resilience as a multi-level framework
• Integrating individual, organizational, supply chain, and environmental levels to develop a systemic and multi-level understanding of supply chain resilience
• Advancing a systemic perspective by conceptualizing supply chain resilience as a form of socio-ecological resilience or socio-technological resilience
• Developing a contextualized understanding of supply chain resilience by examining how it manifests across different environments, such as diverse cultural, institutional, and geographical settings
• Investigating how individual-level factors, such as personal traits, leadership styles, and managerial cognition, influence the implementation of supply chain resilience strategies
• Mechanisms by which resilience at one level influences (or conflicts with) resilience at another
• Applying and extending theoretical frameworks such as systems theory, socio-technological theory, panarchy theory, and middle-range theory in the area of supply chain resilience
• Developing new models or frameworks that explain supply chain resilience as an emergent system property
• How digital platforms, AI, IoT, blockchain, and digital twins mediate resilience interactions across individuals, organizational and supply chain levels
• Tools, frameworks, and capabilities that managers can use to align resilience actions across organizational boundaries
• Balancing efficiency, flexibility, and redundancy across different levels of the supply chain

Timeline

• June 1, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• October 1, 2026: Closing date for manuscripts submission

Social marketing has long been positioned as a discipline capable of improving societal wellbeing by applying marketing principles to influence behaviour in socially beneficial ways. Early contributions that imagined marketing being used beyond the commercial realm laid the foundation for the field's formal emergence in the early 1970s. Over the decades, social marketing has advanced its understanding of how to encourage and sustain behaviour change, yet the contemporary landscape presents challenges of a fundamentally different scale.

Increasing environmental degradation, climate instability, resource pressures, and persistent social inequities highlight the need for social marketing approaches capable of addressing system-wide issues. While behaviour remains a central concern, scholars have argued that meaningful progress requires attention to macro-level structures and the dynamic interactions among actors, networks, institutions, and infrastructures. Social marketing is therefore being called upon not merely to promote individual behaviour change, but to support the creation of sustainable futures through coordinated, multi-level forms of change.

This shift has been accompanied by growing engagement with systems-oriented and impact-focused frameworks that seek to guide, justify, and evaluate social marketing's contribution to sustainability transitions. These include macro and systems social marketing perspectives, emerging governance-oriented impact frameworks, and theory-driven approaches, which collectively emphasise public value creation, institutional change, and societal wellbeing. At a global level, these perspectives also align social marketing with broader sustainability agendas, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, positioning the discipline as a contributor to long-term environmental, social, and economic resilience rather than short-term behavioural outcomes alone.

This Special Issue provides an opportunity to advance this conversation by showcasing cutting-edge research, conceptual development, and methodological innovation. We welcome work that critically examines social marketing's evolving role in shaping environmental, social, and economic sustainability, and that considers how the field can contribute to societal transitions during a period of intense global uncertainty. We encourage conceptual and empirical papers, including qualitative and quantitative research.

Potential topics

• Critical reviews of social marketing's development and its relevance to sustainability
• Conceptual and theoretical contributions linking social marketing to sustainable futures
• Social marketing and its application to addressing environmental and social challenges
• Systems social marketing and multi-actor, multi-level approaches to sustainability
• Social marketing models and frameworks for climate action, circular economy, waste reduction, and resource stewardship
• Social marketing interventions promoting sustainable consumption and production
• Community-based social marketing and collective approaches to sustainable behaviour change
• Social marketing supporting policy development, institutional change, and governance for sustainability
• Ethical considerations in sustainability-focused social marketing, including autonomy, power, and representation
• Social marketing communication strategies for sustainability, including narrative, identity, and social norms
• Digital, AI-enabled, and technology-supported social marketing for sustainable behaviour change
• Segmentation and audience insight for sustainability-oriented social marketing
• Evaluation and measurement of social marketing's societal impact in sustainability contexts
• Social marketing applications in public health that intersect with sustainable futures
• Social marketing for prevention, long-term behaviour maintenance, and resilience-building
• Branding, value creation, and market-shaping activities within social marketing for sustainability
• Cross-cultural and international challenges in social marketing for sustainable futures

Timeline

• October 30, 2026: Closing date for manuscripts submission