Third-Party Logistics

Third-Party Logistics



Third-Party Logistics

Methodology

When conducting an investigation of the state of knowledge in a field or subject, three basic approaches have been used (Li and Cavusgil, 1995). One approach is the Delphi method through which experts who are familiar with the area are surveyed. The second approach is meta-analysis in which empirical studies on the specific subject are gathered and statistically analysed. This approach has been applied by Ashenbaum et al. (2005) for estimating the TPL growth rate in the US. The third approach, the one adopted in this study, is content analysis—a research method for systematic, qualitative and quantitative description of the manifest content of literature in an area. At a general level, the procedure for conducting content analysis is centred on two major steps (Li and Cavusgil, 1995; Seuring et al., 2005): (1) definition of sources and procedures for the search of articles to be analysed and (2) definition of categories instrumental to the classification of the collected articles. These have been applied in the present review of TPL literature and are described in detail in the following sections.

Literature search procedures

The first step of the analysis consisted of searching for articles relevant to the purpose of this study. The search was limited to academic journals and utilized several methods.

Initially, 23 journals in the areas of logistics and transportation, operations management, business/marketing and general management covering the time period 1989-2006 were searched for articles dealing with any aspect of TPL. The choice of these outlets was based on previous studies that identified and ranked the journals making the highest contribution to the transportation/logistics discipline (e.g. Fawcett et al., 1995; Ferguson, 1983). For the literature search “third party logistics”, “logistics outsourcing”, “logistics alliances” and several other relevant descriptors were used. The full text of each article was reviewed in order to eliminate those articles that were not really related to TPL. As a result of this search, 97 articles were identified. An additional search was conducted using the same descriptors in ProQuest, ScienceDirect and EBSCO databases. Thereby, 48 other papers were found. Finally, the reference sections of key articles were scanned for additional citations; this yielded 7 other articles. By these procedures, a total of 33 journals and 152 articles were identified. The reference list to this paper contains all the collected articles. Although this search may not be exhaustive, it is believed that the journals selected and the articles reviewed comprise a reasonably representative and comprehensive body of the research work being accomplished in this area.

Table 1 shows the distribution of articles in the various journals from 1989 to 2006. The indicated time frame has been divided into three periods in order to identify trends in the chronological progression of research on TPL. The figures in the table indicate that research on TPL did not begin to appear significantly in scholarly journals until the mid-to-late 1990s and has increased since. Indeed, only 11 articles have been published between 1989 and 1994, while contributions published in the last period (2001-2006) ...