Logistical Blindness in the Boardroom: Documentary Visibility and Decoupling Between Strategic Narrative and Supply Chain Oversight

The growing complexity and vulnerability of supply chains (SCM) have elevated logistics management to a matter of strategic and corporate governance relevance. Yet, although the literature suggests that boards of directors should play a key role in overseeing supply chain resilience and sustainability, a significant gap persists in the empirical evidence regarding how such oversight becomes visible in corporate governance documents. This study addresses this gap through the analysis of public corporate documents from 10 Mexican firms with high operational relevance, all included in the S&P/BMV IPC index. The study adopts an exploratory empirical design based on qualitative content analysis of a corpus of 29 official documents, including annual reports, sustainability reports, and investor presentations. Drawing on Resource Dependence Theory and Institutional Theory, the study employs a theoretically informed coding matrix to identify patterns of SCM oversight visibility. The findings suggest a phenomenon of "Logistical Blindness," characterized by a decoupling between strategic narrative and the documentary visibility of operational oversight. While SCM is presented as a pillar of growth, resilience, or sustainability, its public treatment in governance documents appears concentrated in silos of ethical compliance, sustainability, and risk management, with scarce presence of operational flow metrics. The study further identifies sectoral differences: consumer-sector firms exhibit greater institutional visibility of SCM, whereas infrastructure firms display a deeper documentary invisibility. These findings contribute to the corporate governance and supply chain management literature by showing that SCM gains public visibility primarily through legitimacy, compliance, and risk frameworks, while its operational dimension remains comparatively underrepresented. As a practical implication, the study proposes integrating flow indicators into the governance agenda to strengthen strategic resilience in the context of nearshoring.