Technological and Organizational Transformations: Rethinking Performance, Resilience, and Sustainability

Editorial text

The transformations currently reshaping organizations, industrial systems, and supply chains are technological, environmental, geopolitical, and human in nature. Digitalization and artificial intelligence, sustainability imperatives, increasing risks, the reconfiguration of trade flows, and evolving forms of work are profoundly changing the conditions under which organizations build performance and maintain their capacity to adapt. These developments call for moving beyond a predominantly technological view of transformation. While digital technologies offer new possibilities for automation, visibility, decision support, and resource optimization, their adoption alone does not guarantee improvements in performance, resilience, or sustainability. Organizational capabilities, human skills, coordination mechanisms, and the characteristics of the territories in which activities are embedded also play a decisive role. The six contributions brought together in this second issue of RAILS (Review of Advances in Industry, Logistics & Supply Chains) are structured around this perspective. Through different research topics, empirical settings, and methodological approaches, they address transformation at multiple levels, ranging from changes in industrial models to new forms of work organization, while also examining supply chains, logistics networks, sector-specific applications of artificial intelligence, and territorial dynamics. The issue opens with a bibliometric and thematic analysis devoted to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, organizational performance, and sustainable development. It notably highlights the gradual evolution of the literature from a technology-centered approach toward a more integrative perspective that places increasing emphasis on people, resilience, and sustainability. This evolution finds an empirical extension in the second contribution, which focuses on the digitalization of supply chains in West Africa. The study shows that technology does not automatically generate resilience and sustainable performance: its effects notably depend on the development of organizational and relational capabilities. The question of resilience is then considered within the broader environment of global logistics networks. In the face of geopolitical uncertainties and climate challenges, the third contribution emphasizes the need to further integrate risk management and sustainability imperatives into the design and management of logistics systems. The fourth contribution extends this discussion to the aviation sector by examining, through a systematic literature review, how artificial intelligence and digital technologies can contribute to more sustainable and circular aircraft end-of-life management. The final two contributions shift the focus toward the territorial and human dimensions of these transformations. The study devoted to the Tangier-Tetouan-Al Hoceima region proposes a conceptual model linking the territorial determinants of logistics sustainability to the attractiveness of multinational transport firms, notably highlighting the roles of infrastructure, governance, innovation, human capital, and the energy transition. Finally, the article on telework examines transformations in work organization and shows that telework can now be understood not only as an instrument of flexibility, but also as a factor in employee attraction and retention and, in certain situations, as a form of compensation. Beyond the diversity of their research topics, methods, and levels of analysis, these contributions reveal several common insights. The first concerns the role of technology. Whether in relation to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, supply chain digitalization, or artificial intelligence applied to the circular economy, technology emerges as a major driver of transformation, but not as an end in itself. Its contribution to performance depends on how it is integrated into organizational processes, skills, and capabilities. The second insight concerns the growing convergence between resilience and sustainability. In an environment marked by geopolitical risks, disruptions to flows, environmental constraints, and the energy transition, these two dimensions can no longer be considered separately. Building high-performing industrial and logistics systems now requires reconciling their ability to absorb and overcome disruptions with their capacity to place their activities on a sustainable trajectory. Finally, the contributions in this issue remind us that these transformations always take place within specific contexts. Organizational capabilities, relationships among actors, sectoral characteristics, territorial resources, and employee expectations influence how technologies are adopted and how their effects materialize. This diversity of contexts therefore calls for avoiding universal responses and instead developing a more context-sensitive understanding of transformation processes. A common question thus runs through this issue: how can technological and organizational transformations be leveraged to build industrial and logistics systems that are simultaneously high-performing, resilient, and sustainable? The studies brought together here suggest that the answers to this question lie less in any particular technology or model than in the ability to articulate several dimensions that are often studied separately: technology and organization, efficiency and resilience, performance and sustainability, global dynamics and territorial realities, process transformation and the evolution of work. This perspective is consistent with RAILS’ ambition to foster dialogue among the different perspectives that are currently contributing to the renewal of research in industrial management, logistics, and supply chain management. In this respect, the diversity of methodological approaches, research settings, and levels of analysis represented in this issue constitutes a valuable strength. It enables conceptual frameworks to be confronted with organizational and territorial realities and opens new avenues for research into transformations whose effects increasingly extend beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. We warmly thank the authors for the trust they have placed in RAILS, as well as the reviewers and members of the editorial and scientific committees for their contribution to the preparation of this second issue. We hope that the studies brought together here will stimulate reflection among researchers and practitioners and encourage new contributions capable of shedding light, in all their diversity, on the transformations currently reshaping industrial, logistics, and organizational systems.