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Acknowledgements: Received: December 2009 Revised: June 2010, October 2010 Accepted: January 2011
Introduction
Over the last ten years, supply chain vulnerability (SCV) and its managerial counterpart supply chain risk management (SCRM) have received considerable attention by practitioners as well as academics (see for reviews [58] Tang, 2006; [39] Rao and Goldsby, 2009). The impact of one entity in the supply chain failing, e.g. financially can lead to a number of entities closing down and in some instances the whole supply chain shuts down. The risk implications of the entwined global marketplace that characterise today's supply chains have also been evidenced vividly in the recent global financial crisis. Moreover, incidents like the seemingly unlikely volcano eruption in Iceland make companies aware of how little control they have over many of the risks they are confronted with. Still, some companies appear to be able to weather the occurrence of hazardous events more effectively than others. They can sustain by coming back to normality or to a new state from which they can operate.
The apparent ability of some supply chains to recover from inevitable risk events more effectively than others has more recently triggered a debate about supply chain resilience (SCRES). Whereas SCRM focuses on the identification and management of risks for the supply chain in order to reduce its vulnerability ([20] Jüttner et al. 2003), SCRES aims at developing the adaptive capability to prepare for unexpected events and to respond to disruptions and recover from them ([38] Ponomarov and Holcomb, 2009). SCRES is based on the underlying assumption that not all risk events can be prevented. SCRM is well explored and a wide range of empirical studies can be cited which investigate the SCRM approach of single companies (e.g. [34] Norrman and Jansson, 2004) or industries ([18] Johnson, 2001; [50] Sinha et al. , 2004; [2] Blos et al. , 2009), explore the current state of action across industries (e.g. [19] Jüttner, 2005), identify risk drivers ([63] Wagner and Bode, 2006) or confirm the risk reduction effect of strategies such as early supplier involvement ([70] Zsidisin and Smith, 2005), supplier development ([30] Matook et al. , 2009) or new designs ([80] Khan et al. , 2008). However, for SCRES, only conceptual works can be cited...