Research seminar | Weaving a new supply logic? Revisiting the Minjinyu 5179 incident - Jan 30, 2025
Paper title and abstract
Weaving a new supply logic? Revisiting the Minjinyu 5179 incident
Abstract: This seminar examines the dominant metaphor of the supply chain, critiquing its depiction as a stable, linear construct detached from broader economic, environmental, and geopolitical realities. Despite its appeal, the conventional model struggles to address volatility and disruptions such as pandemics, climate change, and geopolitical tensions. The presentation challenges this oversimplification by emphasizing the fluid, embedded, and deeply human nature of supply systems. The Minjinyu 5179 incident, a collision between a Chinese trawler and Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in 2010, serves as a focal point. This event, marked by geopolitical conflict and trade restrictions on rare earth elements (REEs), highlights the entangled relationship between structural forces—such as resource dependencies and industrial strategies—and surface-level disruptions, including protests, strikes, and market fluctuations. Adopting a critical realist perspective, the talk employs the metaphor of "supply weaving" to illuminate how geopolitical power, historical legacies, and resource flows (the warp) intersect with observable events and adaptive responses (the weft). This approach seeks to foster a richer understanding of supply systems that moves beyond simplistic narratives of disruption and control, engaging with tensions that generate new patterns of interaction, fragility, and resilience.
About Michael Lewis
Trained as a mechanical engineer, Mike received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and began working at Warwick Business School in 1995 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard Business School and Georgetown University. He joining the University of Bath’s School of Management in 2004. His early research focused on the meaning and management of effective manufacturing practice but, over time, he has expanded his interests to address questions of efficiency and effectiveness in various public and private sector service settings – from fast fashion retail to care homes, from management consultancy to nuclear storage. Building on the strong legacy of supply chain research at Bath, Professor Lewis studies the management of complex business relationships and contracts (PFI/PPP). He is the author of numerous journal articles as well as several books, including a widely adopted and translated textbook on Operations Strategy (co-authored with Nigel Slack, Emeritus Professor at Warwick Business School). He was a long-standing Member of the Advisory Council to the Chartered Management Institute and was recently a member of agovernment expert group reporting on the measurement of UK industrial activity. He is currently a theme leader for the Cabinet Office/IPA Project Excellence Initiative and an academic scholar in the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures, an initiative focused on ageing.