In recent years, building Supply Chain Resilience (SCRES) has gained considerable interest
as the best way firms can face up to disruptions and gain a competitive advantage. The need
for more empirical work on SCRES is well expressed in the literature, but there are few prior
empirical studies on SCRES to date; and their focus has been on the developed world,
especially Western Europe and North America. Yet, developing countries constitute a
significant part of the world population and global supply chains; and there is evidence to
believe that developing countries have also faced disastrous effects of supply chain failures.
And the current global interconnectedness suggests that such effects can propagate into the
developed world. Further, while several potential strategies for improving SCRES have been
proposed in the literature, the relationships between them remain ambiguous, with some
researchers arguing they are independent and others considering them to be interrelated –
meaning they could contradict or reinforce each other, potentially affecting SCRES. This thesis presents findings from the case study of a supply network of 20 manufacturing
firms in the developing country of Uganda, to answer the following related questions: what
do manufacturing firms in Uganda perceive to be the threats to their supply chains? What
strategies do they adopt to build resilience? What are the outcomes of implementing these
strategies? The thesis also investigates how the threats and strategies are interrelated, and
what it means for SCRES. The findings reveal that the context of a developing country
characterised, for example, by weak legal controls and social acceptance of certain customs
and practices can produce threats to SCRES like corruption and dishonest employees that are
less pronounced in the developed world. It is also found that the threats to SCRES are mainly
chronic and endogenous events rather than the exogenous discrete, large-scale catastrophic
events typically emphasised in the literature. This study initially applies Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory to interpret the data,
which shows how environmental conditions, supply chain threats, and resilience strategies
are inherently inter-related. This proves to be a useful theory frame – it emerges that the
systemic nature of the threats to SCRES and of the strategies for dealing with these threats
clearly produces non-linear and non-stationary outcomes. But it was also found that these
systemic relationships among threats, strategies and their outcomes are explained by the
context in which the supply chain is situated. Hence an embeddedness perspective was
adopted to show that the political, cultural and territorial embeddedness of supply networks in
a developing country can produce threats or render resilience strategies either ineffective or
even counterproductive. This study therefore finds that both CAS and embeddedness
perspectives are needed jointly to explain SCRES – it is embeddedness in a developing
country that contributes to the phenomenon of “supply chain risk migration”, whereby an
attempt to mitigate one threat produces another threat and/or shifts the threat to another point
in the supply network. This portrays resilience as a continual process of supply network
members responding to chronic and catastrophic events that may be endogenous and/or
exogenous, and to the outcomes of their own previous responses – not to a specific set of
structures or practices. These findings have implications for managers wishing to build SCRES. For example,
managers are informed that supply chain events of continuous possibilities deserve attention.
Managers are also reminded of the potential migration of threats – they should thus
understand how threats, strategies and potential outcomes are interconnected. Further,
managers should understand the contexts in which their supply chains are embedded.