Beyond links and chains in food supply: a Community OR perspective
本文从社区运筹学视角，探讨如何帮助食品微型企业通过社区协作而非传统供应链整合来提升绩效，提出两种研究路径：将运筹学方法应用于社区现象，以及研究社区运营。
This theoretical paper complements traditional OR approaches to improve micro-businesses’ performance. When looking at local micro-businesses, we find that current supply chain and operations theory that focuses on efficiency and economic-based criteria for chain and network integration is inapplicable and external organisation inappropriate. An illustration shows how traditional modelling exercises may fall short in better informing independent-minded micro-entrepreneurs on how to collaborate, even though they recognise benefits from such endeavour. The illustration concerns consideration of food micro-producers, not as links constituting a chain, but as members of a community. This paper explores two different approaches to apply Community OR principles: on the one hand, the application of OR methods to phenomena in the ‘community’, and on the other, the development of research on ‘community operations’, which are symbolised as C+OR and CO+R, respectively. These approaches are associated with two different research languages: of needs and for interactions. Main contributions of this paper are: first, we show that collaboration does not always need shared aims; second, we offer a circular process where the identification of collective actions may help organisations to improve individually, and vice versa; and third, we suggest how to develop the role of a stronger collective actor by means of collaboration.