Strategic Themes in the Haulier Business: A Systematic Literature Review of Road Freight Transport

Purpose: This article provides a comprehensive review of the strategic management of transport and logistics services and to identify promising avenues for future research in the field.
Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review is conducted based on articles published between 2011 and 2016 in international peer‐reviewed journals. 55 selected articles deal with strategic elements concerning hauliers, such as service offerings, costs and revenues.
Findings: Themes of hauliers’ strategizing that are discussed in the literature, namely carrier selection revisited, professionalism, innovation, horizontal collaboration, planned and emergent strategies, and value propositions.
Research limitations/implications: The research expands on the previous literature on logistics and transport and adds knowledge about hauliers as part of the transport and supply chain.
Social implications: In highly ranked transport journals, only two per cent of the published articles concern haulier strategizing, thus, knowledge development concerning the socio-economic and managerial problems of practitioners and policy makers is delimited.
Original/value: The study contributes to a strategic perspective by identifying transdisciplinary avenues of research that are likely to likely to encourage hauliers to be innovative.