Interdisciplinarity in Closed-Loop Supply Chain Management Research

Closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) management has evolved to be a mature area of supply chain management in its own right. Guide and Van Wassenhove (2009) describe how this research began with focusing on tactical and operational issues such as the disassembly of products or shop-floor control and coordination, and later started addressing issues pertaining to the entire reverse supply chain such as product acquisition, supply-chain contracting and incentives. Recently, the literature has begun studying issues at the intersection of other disciplines, drawing on concepts from industrial ecology, studying marketing issues such as the pricing and positioning of new and remanufactured products, etc. It is clear that the research in closed-loop supply chains is moving in an interdisciplinary direction. This is of great value, as the " messier " problems in industry tend to require an interdisciplinary approach. At a recent workshop 1 , invited industry participants 2 shared the issues that they face in closing the loop in their business context. These questions were then grouped primarily along the areas of Industrial Ecology, New Product Development, Marketing, and Economic Development, and discussed by small groups of workshop participants. This chapter builds on these discussions to present some existing research that is relevant to the questions posed, and is therefore necessarily interdisciplinary. A number of open research directions are also presented. We hope that describing industry problems and the current state of the art will prompt researchers to close existing gaps in the literature and increase the practical impact of closed-loop supply chain management research. Table 1 provides a list of teaching material that has significant closed-loop supply chain content and that is at the interface of the above-mentioned areas, to aid in broadening instruction related to CLSC management. This chapter is organized as follows: In §2, we provide short case studies based on each industry participant to provide an account of their closed-loop supply chain activities and the problems they currently face in managing these operations. In §3, we identify the common threads running through the issues raised by these discussions and provide insights from the 2 existing literature. We conclude in §4. is the world's largest provider of commercial carpet tile. It is well recognized for its attempts to be an environmentally sustainable enterprise with the ambitious goal of zero environmental impact by 2020 (Toktay et al. 2006). This is a particularly challenging goal, as the inputs into carpet …