Evolution of the e-commerce enabled short food supply chain (SFSC) in local context: A knowledge management perspective

Reflecting on unsustainable outcomes triggered by the highly industrialised conventional food provision such as resource wastage and vanished producer-customer relationships, short food supply chain (SFSC) as an innovative food management concept has been invented since the last century to facilitate sustainable food provision and reinforce multiple proximities between food producers and customers, and its increasing practices nowadays are drawing more public attention. Nevertheless, despite flourishing application of practices of the SFSC, its theoretical development remains to be contributed as a number of its gaps require solutions—such as the lack of a broadly accepted and accurate definition, and the lack of strengthening its role of food provision in related to the SFSC’s supply chain nature. In response, with the aim of contributing to gap solving, this research first develops and proposes a new definition based on the SFSC’s theoretical essence as dual proximity—i.e., both supply chain and emotional proximities—that is identified through literature review. Then, by integrating the three complementary theories that are respectively introduced from the fields of knowledge and supply chain management—i.e., the knowledge-based view (KBV); the resource orchestration theory; and the supply chain evolution theory—into discussion, this research investigates and discloses a local supply chain evolution mechanism of a particular type of the SFSC practices—i.e., the e-commerce enabled SFSC, hence demonstrating how supply chain operation of the SFSC could emerge and evolve in the given local context. Moreover, as cases of China’s Taobao villages—a booming Chinese rural economic phenomenon that is enabled by the e-commerce platform of Alibaba Group—are chosen to underpin the investigation, this research hence further contributes to theoretical development of the SFSC, since its theorisation has been face the lack of the experiences from world non-developed countries.