Supply chains and adversity

Fhand, has long loomed ahead of humanity. Many adversities it has created, but to no avail. Humans have been unable to e ectively respond to the impacts of climate change, rendering education impervious to adversity. Irrespective of these two outcomes, overall, humans continuously adapt. Adversity cannot be confined to specific happenings and calamities; they are part of life as much as education is part of adversity. This article is by no means intended to be academic, but rather, an interlink between Disraeli’s quote, the author’s personal opinions, and the subtheme of this year’s Cambridge University Land Society Magazine… supply chains!

El Daouk Third Year Land Economy PhD Student

ormer British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said: “there is no education like adversity”. Life at its essence is as unpredictable as nature is variegated in decoration. Humans innately find comfort in normalcy until calamity thwarts the contemporality of life. Faced with calamity, humans strive to liberate themselves from restraint only to find new normalcy; somewhat like the past but better adapted to the future. In any case, life is ever changing, and it behoves humans to find solace in interim normalcies, until being compelled to find forthcoming ones. It is this very yearning for liberation during adversity in which education is conceived.

All of this sounds dandy. The aforesaid may very well be true in the case of COVID-19, but perhaps less true in the case of climate change. Covid-19 has resulted in a world better adapted to global pandemics and has transformed the rate at which medicine advances. Climate change, on the other

Supply chains fall in the nexus of the global pandemic and climate change, two adversities that humanity is currently facing. Supply chain resilience to disruptions caused by COVID-19 and climate change is the equivalent of the “education” being conceived from “adversity”. Although global supply chains have been impacted di erently by both adversities, they have ended up in the same back door. In the aftermath of COVID-19, supply chains seem to have adapted despite there being no attributable signs of the pandemic before November 2019. In the case of climate change, there was pre-emptive awareness of both climate change, and supply chain vulnerability to environmental threats, such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan and other natural disasters.1 However, the adversities posed by such preordained disasters were of no profound e ect in driving greater supply chain resilience. Supply chains were as disrupted as they would have been ten

1Fiksel, J. et al. (2015). “From Risk to Resilience: Learning to Deal with Disruption”, MIT Sloan Management Review, 56(2), pp. 79-86

2Martin, R. et al. (2016). How regions react to recessions: Resilience and the role of economic structure. Regional Studies, 50(4), pp. 561–585. https://doi.org/10 1080/00343404 2015 1136410 years earlier. Despite this, supply chains eventually re-emerged, seemingly, more resilient. Although the tsunami itself was not the key driving force in change, like the global pandemic, it exposed the diversification and concentration entrenched beneath global supply chains. These are seen by many as double-edged swords bringing both positive and negative implications on supply chains. Nevertheless, the key contribution from such a dynamic has been nurturing resilience.2

As of this paper’s writing, supply chains remain concentrated and diversified. However, they are also being disrupted at an unprecedented level.3 During the outbreak of COVID-19, a consumption shock occurred, thwarting supply chains. Supply chain actors were incapable of meeting demand levels and failed to maintain productivity levels because of lockdowns, lack of logistical mobility, and adversarial stances amongst suppliers.4 Along with the consumption shock, the fast economic recovery of large economies put further pressure on global supply chains to meet global demand. These setbacks were uneven in di erent countries. China, for example, has recovered and even surpassed its pre-Covid 19 export levels, whereas Europe still struggles to grasp the setbacks caused by the pandemic. Thus, some supply chains have seemingly adapted, while others have not. The 2011 tsunami in Japan exposed supply chain vulnerability as suppliers were incapable of resorting to short-term emergency supply chains. It also showed that supply chains, be they concentrated or diversified, were vulnerable to disruptions caused by natural disasters. Even where short-term contingencies were put in place, there had been no guarantee that supply chains would overcome any forthcoming natural disaster. Despite the unfettered uncertainty, and the uneven adjustment seen in global supply chains, some supply chains are becoming more resilient to the two adversities; however, the means through which resilience is created rests in short- and long-term factors, far beyond the mere occurrence of adversity.

In the short run, supply chain concentration creates interdependencies amongst supply chain actors, promoting e ciency.5 In the long run, supply chain actors become reliant on fewer parties, making them more prone to disruptions in the event of a disaster or pandemic.6 As for diversification, the short-term drawback is a lack of supply chain stability. In the long run, however, diversification does create cyclical stability and promotes resilience.7 Their concurrent presence reinforces the constant adaptation of supply chains as the world changes, even though we may not see it at the moment. Therefore, supply chains are continuously evolving in ways that yield short and long-term means of overcoming di erent types of adversities such as those used in this writing.

But then again, does this really concur with adversity being the harbinger of education? The short answer is yes. Yet, there is something that sits between adversity and education before begetting the latter, which ultimately materialises the catena outlined in Disraeli’s quote. The missing interlink is weakness, more specifically, the susceptibility of humans to what is forthcoming. The pandemic and climate change are mere reflections of short- and long-term periods in which vulnerability stands at the doorstep of humanity, exposing its weakness, and eventually pushing it to overcome these challenges. Adversity is not solely an innate feature of education, rather so, both adversity and education are mirrors of one another constantly reflecting the human quest of survival.

3Panwar, R., Pinkse, J., and De Marchi, V. (2022) The Future of Global Supply Chains in a Post-COVID-19 World, California management review, 64(2), pp 5-23

4Kano, L. and Oh, H.C. (2020). “Global Value Chains in the Post-COVID World: Governance for Reliability”, Journal of Management Studies 57/8 (December 2020), pp. 1773-1777; El Daouk, M. (2022). “Introducing halāl to construction supply chains in the UK’s construction sector”, Journal of Islamic Marketing, https://doi.org/10 1108/JIMA-01-2022-0016

5Shearmur, R., & Polèse, M. (2005). “Diversity and employment growth in Canada, 1971–2001: Can diversification policies succeed?” Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 49(3), pp. 272–290

6Kano, L. et al. (2022). Global Value Chain Resilience: Understanding the Impact of Managerial Governance Adaptations. California Management Review, 62(2), pp. 25-45

7Drucker, J. (2011). “Regional industrial structure concentration in the United States: Trends and implications. Economic Geography”, 87(4), pp. 421–452