This study aims to examine how firms’ priorities for improving supply chain resilience have evolved from the pre-COVID to the post-COVID period by analyzing Twitter discourse on supply chain-related issues during periods of disruption.
The study employs text analytics, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis as its primary methodological approaches. The analysis draws on approximately 200,000 tweets posted between 2019 and 2022, capturing discourse on global supply chain resilience across the pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID phases.
Our study results indicate a shift from efficiency-focused discussion, which dominated the pre-COVID era and point to an emphasis on risk and disruption-oriented discussions. There is a focus on themes like supply chain visibility, risk mitigation strategies and the growth of digital transformation. Resilience does not emerge as a dominant theme in the post-recovery phase. This shows a misalignment between information processing demands (IPD) and capabilities. Thus, the findings help extend organizational information processing theory (OIPT) to crisis-driven supply chain contexts.
This study contributes to the extant literature by conceptualizing the pandemic as a context for understanding humanitarian supply chain characteristics. This demonstrates how such conditions reshape resilience-related discourse in commercial supply chains. It further extends the theoretical lens of OIPT by highlighting the dynamic and temporal nature of alignment between IPD and capabilities.
