Supply Chains Transitions, Production Systems Resilience and Industrial Strategy

Introduction

Recent geopolitical events and the revival of industrial strategies across the globe have a huge impact on Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) (Bednarski et al. 2025; Spring et al., 2017; Srai et al., 2023). Focused upon public investment, sectoral targeting, strategic trade and procurement, and place-based policies, these industrial strategies are seeking to re-draw manufacturing and international chains, drive technological upgrading, decarbonise production and enhance domestic production resilience (Day & Merkert, 2023; De Propris, 2024; Pegoraro et al., 2021). At the same time, new technologies (e.g. AI, robotisation, IoT, space-tech) associated with Industry 4.0 are disrupting the technological foundations of industries and supply chains, transforming the nature of markets and challenging the parameters of firms’ existing operations (De Propris & Bailey, 2020; Frank et al., 2024; Lu et al., 2025).

These shifts are not merely background conditions for OSCM scholars; they represent an important and under-researched transformation. Recent work in IJOPM (e.g., Charpin & Cousineau, 2025; Day et al., 2025; Duong et al., 2025; Handfield et al., 2020; Roscoe et al., 2022) has shown how sociopolitical forces expose vulnerabilities and adaptation challenges across supply chains. Building on this foundation, this Special Issue looks to focus upon how deliberate, strategic industrial policy interventions are actively restructuring production architectures, technological trajectories, and supply network configurations.

Industrial strategy, spanning digital, green, defence, and strategic trade domains, now plays a central role in shaping operational decisions, technological adoption, sourcing models, supplier development practices, and broader ecosystem governance. Yet its implementation is also unleashing disruptive and displacement effects with wider effects that impact managers and firms and play out across manufacturing global supply chains in advanced economies and across the Global South, industrial sectors and regions, with winners and losers.

For the OSCM community, these transformations demand new theoretical and empirical inquiries into how production systems and supply operations are being reconfigured, how firms reposition and dynamically reconfigure capabilities within emerging ecosystems, and how technological upgrading, resilience, and competitive advantage are shaped by national and regional industrial strategies.

The objective and ambition of this Special Issue are to bring together two separate debates in OSCM, and in industrial strategy to explore these (and related) issues through a collection of papers that considers how managers, businesses, global supply chains and manufacturing more broadly can best adapt and thrive in a new era of industrial strategy.

We encourage theoretical contributions that develop new frameworks for understanding production system renewal, capability building, and technological sovereignty under industrial strategy regimes. We particularly welcome sector-specific studies that explore how industrial strategy is reshaping operational models, supply network structures, and technological pathways within industries such as semiconductors, clean energy, steel, automotive, and defence. Comparative studies across countries or regions are encouraged to capture the varied impacts of industrial strategy across different economic, political, and institutional contexts.

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijopm. Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/ijopm.

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.

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Author guidelines

Guest Editors

Lisa De Propris
University of Birmingham - UK

Katri Kauppi
Aalto University - Finland

Michael Lewis
University of Bath - UK

Philip Tomlinson
University of Bath - UK

Email for submissions: mnsprt@bath.ac.uk