About

This page contains some thoughts and musings on the interaction between two organisations, hence InterOrganisational.

The starting point is the subject area of Supply Chain Management, but as an interorganisational phenomenon, it relates to the intersection of various subject areas, in particular logistics, purchasing, innovation, operations management and marketing.

Why?

A great number of concepts have been used by academics to describe and understand what takes place when two organisations exchange goods/and or services; dyads, relationships, demand chains, supply chains, value net, value grids, networks, partnerships, collaboration….the list will be updated as needed.

Interorganisational…is a broad term, yet not as value laden and biased as many of the other concepts that make us comfortable.

The blog is informed by this confusion.

Arni Halldorsson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southampton. Teaching activities relate primarily to logistics and supply chain management.

Research interests are broadly defined as: Logistics and supply chain management addressing theoretical as well as managerial problems that relate to inter-organisational relationships. This combination is pursued by conceptualising “inter-organisational asymmetries” and -alignment as a means to a) manage the firm in a supply chain, and b) to manage the particular supply chain through inter-organisational relationships. Key words are: inter-organisational relationships, third party logistics, reverse logistics, outsourcing, and qualitative research methodology in logistics and supply chain management.

Gyöngyi Kovács is a Professor in Supply Chain Management and Corporate Geography at the HANKEN School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and the Director of the Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research Institute (HUMLOG Institute). Her teaching activities relate primarily to logistics and supply chain management, as well as to corporate sustainability and of course humanitarian logistics.

Gyöngyi’s research interests include logistics research and teaching methods, corporate environmental and social responsibility in supply chains, industrial ecology, reverse logistics, supply chain collaboration, and humanitarian logistics. In essence, the main interest is to look beyond traditional business logistics and to address problems in supply chain management that arise from different areas. Since Jan 2008, Gyöngyi serves as a (European) regional editor of the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management and since its foundation, as the co-editor of the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management.