Foreign firms face many supply chain‐related difficulties in China. These include China’s overburdened, underdeveloped physical infrastructure; inexpert, underfunded state‐owned distribution companies; an enormous, fragmented distribution and logistics sector; and regional protectionism....

An efficient supply chain is becoming increasingly important as globalization and technological advancement combine to make the modern marketplace more competitive than ever. An example of this can be seen at Matsushita, a Japanese‐based industry leader who has had to fight to remain...

Purpose – This research aims to empirically investigate the effect of outsourcing on firm level performance metrics, providing evidence about outsourcing influences on a firm's cost‐efficiency, productivity and profitability. Design/methodology/approach – This study is concerned with...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the stream of China‐related POM research over 25 years (1980‐2005) to determine trends in quantity, topical coverage, research contribution, and data sources. Design/methodology/approach – From 31 POM‐relevant journals, 144 articles...

Prior to the economic reform movement, China’s centrally planned, three‐tier system dominated the distribution sector. After the 1980s, this system gradually shifted away from the socialist mode to the free market mode. Today, China’s distribution system lies somewhere between these two...

Purpose – Outsourcing emerged as a popular operational strategy in the 1990s and most of current literature was established in the same time. However, the result of outsourcing is still vague. The purpose of this article is to point out gaps in the current literature and examine the link...

To date, most research on outsourcing is modeled from the client's perspective. In this paper, we approach the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) outsourcing contracts from the vendors' perspective. Since a vendor always has the option to accept or not accept...

This paper introduces a new concept of least community that is as homogeneous as a random graph, and develops a new community detection algorithm from the perspective of homogeneity or heterogeneity. Based on this concept, we adopt head/tail breaks–a newly developed classification scheme for...

This paper aims to measure the efficiency of urban street networks (a kind of complex networks) from the perspective of the multidimensional chain of connectivity (or flow). More specifically, we define two quantities: flow dimension and flow capacity, to characterize structures of urban street...