From Salvage Accumulation to Regenerative Attunement: An Abductive Close Reading of Tsing for Regenerative Supply Chain Theory

Background: Regenerative supply chain research seeks to move beyond minimal-harm sustainability toward forms of organizing that preserve, restore, and enhance social–ecological systems. However, existing work often explains regeneration through principles, capabilities, and governance arrangements while giving less attention to the uneven socioecological conditions and appropriative dependencies that shape supply-chain activity. Methods: This conceptual study uses an abductive close reading of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a sole-source textual dataset. The analysis combines an immanent reading of the complete monograph with a theory-informed reading that places Tsing’s concepts in dialogue with regenerative supply-chain scholarship. Results: The study develops two linked theoretical shifts. First, it conceptualizes supply chains as patchy socioecological assemblages composed of firms, livelihoods, infrastructures, ecological processes, and disturbance histories that only partially cohere under managerial control. Second, it defines regenerative attunement as the ongoing, place-sensitive reconfiguration of supply-chain scale, timing, governance, and value distribution so that economic activity helps reproduce rather than merely appropriate socioecological capacities. Conclusions: These concepts extend regenerative supply-chain theory by clarifying the relationships among supply-chain structure, value appropriation, temporal plurality, and distributed governance, while providing directions for managerial diagnosis and future empirical research.