Is there a right research design for your Supply Chain study?

The field of Supply Chain Management has seen rapid advances in recent years. However, questions of how to conduct empirical research are rarely addressed. This volume brings together a number of papers that address both how different research techniques can be applied in conducting research on and in supply chains. As it is shown in this book, the discipline seems to adapt Stock's (1997) suggestion of borrowing by applying a huge variety of research methods in order to study the phenomena of and in supply chains. It also seems that new approaches to empirical research have to be used in order to explore the full meaning of supply chain management. This also means that the applied methods reach beyond the established techniques. This introduction offers some insights into the overall contribution of the papers. Therefore, the structure of this paper mirrors the subsequent sections of the book.