Conceptualising Supply Chain Resilience Within Social Enterprises

Overview

This study conceptualises supply chain resilience (SCRes) within the social enterprise (SE) context, specifically examining organisations addressing food insecurity and food poverty. The research addresses a gap in existing literature by investigating how SCRes manifests in SEs and whether SE approaches to building resilience differ fundamentally from commercial sector practices.

Methods and approach

An in-depth narrative literature review was conducted to synthesise findings across interdisciplinary domains. The narrative approach was adopted to accommodate the cross-disciplinary nature of the inquiry, integrating perspectives from supply chain management, social enterprise studies, and food security research.

Key Findings

The analysis reveals structural disadvantages for SEs in managing supply chain disruptions, including constrained access to financial resources for shock absorption and limited management capacity allocated to planning and risk mitigation activities. SEs employ compensatory mechanisms centred on network engagement and diagonal cross-sector collaboration involving diverse actor types. Organisational characteristics including local community embeddedness, social capital mobilisation, and operational flexibility function as mechanisms for SCRes development. The research synthesises these findings into a conceptual framework depicting SE-specific pathways to supply chain resilience that diverge from commercial firm models.

Implications

The research establishes SCRes as a distinct construct within SE contexts, with implications for theory development in supply chain management and social enterprise scholarship. Recognition of SE-specific resilience mechanisms necessitates differentiated analytical frameworks and challenges assumptions derived from commercial supply chain literature. Understanding how SEs leverage non-financial resources and relational assets expands conceptual understanding of resilience building in resource-constrained organisational settings. Practitioners in SEs may benefit from explicit recognition of their distinctive operational capacities as deliberate resilience strategies rather than deficit positions relative to commercial comparators. The framework facilitates identification of leverage points for policy and institutional support tailored to SE supply chain contexts.