Adaptive supply chains have become a strategic imperative as organizations confront persistent disruptions, sustainability pressures, and accelerating digital transformation. While research on supply chain resilience, sustainability, and digitalization has expanded rapidly, the field remains fragmented in terms of how adaptive performance is measured, compared, and benchmarked across organizations and contexts. Existing studies often emphasize best practices or firm-specific capabilities, offering limited insight into relative performance, maturity trajectories, and configuration-level advantages.
Benchmarking: An International Journal is uniquely positioned to address this gap by advancing comparative, measurement-driven research that enables systematic evaluation of adaptive supply chain performance. This special issue responds directly to BIJ’s mission by prioritizing explicit benchmarking logic, focusing on performance metrics, maturity models, typologies, and performance frontiers that support meaningful cross-organizational and cross-contextual comparison.
The special issue adopts a socio-technical configuration perspective, recognizing that adaptive supply chain performance emerges from the interaction of human decision-making, digital technologies, governance mechanisms, and sustainability practices. Rather than treating adaptation as an abstract capability, contributions are expected to operationalize adaptability through measurable constructs and benchmarking frameworks that reveal performance gaps and configuration-based differences.
Theoretically, the special issue encourages the use of performance configuration theory, contingency-based performance measurement, socio-technical performance systems, and benchmarking maturity and frontier perspectives, with theory serving as an analytical enabler rather than an end in itself. Empirically, the issue welcomes rigorous comparative designs that employ quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches to benchmark adaptive supply chains across industries, countries, and institutional environments.
By emphasizing metrics, indices, maturity trajectories, and comparative performance outcomes, this special issue extends BIJ’s tradition of publishing research that is empirically grounded, managerially relevant, and decision-oriented. The contributions will clarify which adaptive supply chain configurations perform better, under what conditions, and why, offering actionable insights for managers, policymakers, and scholars.
List of Topic Areas
Indicative topics include, but are not limited to:
- Benchmarking adaptive supply chain performance across industries and regions,
- Performance metrics and composite indices for adaptive, sustainable, and resilient supply chains,
- Supply chain maturity models and benchmarking trajectories,
- Socio-technical configurations and comparative performance outcomes,
- Benchmarking digital and AI-enabled supply chain systems,
- Performance frontiers and efficiency analysis of adaptive supply chains,
- Cross-country and institutional benchmarking of supply chain adaptability,
- Governance, collaboration, and coordination as benchmarked performance drivers,
- Comparative analysis of sustainability and resilience performance trade-offs.
Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q4, H-Index 21
Guest Editors
Dr. Aamir Rashid, City University of New York, USA, Email: arashid6@york.cuny.edu
Dr. Rizwana Rasheed, City University of New York, USA, Email: rizwana.rasheed@csi.cuny.edu
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key Deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st June 2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31st December 2026
