Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices
I like open access. The USF Tampa Library hosts a collection of open access textbooks. One of them, which might be useful for many SCM researchers, has been published by Anol Bhattacherjee, a professor of information systems. It is titled Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices. The book, which is succinct and compact, is about the entire research process and it is designed “to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of scientific research”. The initial chapters 1 to 4 give an introduction to research. This includes topics such as “thinking like a researcher” and “theories in scientific research”. The chapters 5 to 8 are about the basics of empirical research (i.e, research design, construct measurement, scale reliability/validity, and sampling). The chapters 9 to 12 are concerned with data collection (i.e., survey research, experimental research, case research, and interpretive research). Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis is explained in the chapters 13 to 15. The last chapter is about research ethics.
The Science of Operations and Supply Chain Management
The Journal of Operations Management has now published two interesting articles about the science of operations and supply chain management. These two articles are intertwined and they were written by Singhal and Singhal (2012). The first article is titled Imperatives of the science of operations and supply-chain management and discusses two opportunities for pursuing radical innovations. The first opportunity is the pursuit of all phases of science (including theory development and theory testing). The second opportunity is the pursuit of multiple perspectives (e.g., based on different methods and different parts of a system). The second article is titled Opportunities for developing the science of operations and supply-chain management and proposes and analyzes ways to seize these two opportunities. It is found that networks of research teams, outliers, and meta-analyses can help to obtain multiple perspectives and to discover radical innovation. In conclusion, both articles will help our community to further develop SCM research.
The Network Inertia Perspective
In their insightful AMR article, Framing interorganizational network change: A network inertia perspective, Kim et al. (2006) argue that it is often unlikely that firms will replace their network partners based solely on economic motivations. The authors use the term “network inertia” for these constraints on network change and define it as “a persistent organizational resistance to changing interorganizational dyadic ties or difficulties that an organization faces when it attempts to dissolve old relationships and form new network ties”. In their theoretical framework, Kim et al. describe causal mechanisms for the action of constraints on network change and formulate twelve propositions. For instance, the likelihood of an organization to change its network ties is higher if its environment is competitive or its status is high, but this likelihood is lower if the organization is large or old. The framework can be applied to different units of analysis, particularly to supply and demand networks.
Kim, Tai-Young, Oh, Hongseok, & Swaminathan, Anand (2006). Framing interorganizational network change: A network inertia perspective. Academy of Management Review, 31 (3), 704-720 DOI: 10.5465/AMR.2006.21318926
Supply Chain Management: A Content Analysis
I just read an article by Vallet-Bellmunt et al. (2011): Supply Chain Management: A Multidisciplinary Content Analysis of Vertical Relations between Companies, 1997–2006. It gives a good overview of SCM research published in journals related to marketing, logistics, management, and marketing channels. The authors find that the work type of most research is empirical in nature, primary information is used more often than secondary information, the information type is mostly quantitative in nature, studies are mainly explanatory-predictive, the period of time in which the research is carried out is mostly cross-sectional, the geographical area is mainly national, and manufacturing samples are used most often. Particularly, the article confirms my suspicion that there is “shortage of studies conducted on the supply chain as a network of enterprises“. Instead, most research turns out to focus on a single enterprise or on the relationships of a single enterprise with its suppliers or customers.
Transaction Cost Economics vs. Supply Chain Management
When Oliver E. Williamson published his article Outsourcing: Transaction cost economics and supply chain management (2008), he confronted SCM research with uncomfortable questions. Surprisingly, it took four years until the first SCM researcher, Paul Zipkin, published A Reply to Williamson’s “Outsourcing …” (Production and Operations Management, Vol. 21, No. 3). Some of them may be provoking, but we should not brush aside the questions raised by Williamson. For example, he states that the “unit of analysis for TCE is the transaction” and asks: “The corresponding unit of analysis for SCM is what?” Zipkin rightly states: “We may be eclectic, but no one can accuse us of being parochial”. But this should be no excuse for us to ignore that our unit of analysis is the supply and demand network. Williamson reminds us that SCM research needs its paradigm. We need a consistent theory of the supply chain rather than eclectically adjusting theories that actually describe other units of analysis.
Interorganizational Relationships
I wish to call attention to an article by Parmigiani and Rivera-Santos, which was recently published in the Journal of Management: Clearing a path through the forest: A meta-review of interorganizational relationships. The authors conduct a review of reviews (meta-review) that were concerned with forms (i.e., alliances, joint ventures, buyer–supplier agreements, licensing, co-branding, franchising, cross-sector partnerships, and networks) and theories (i.e., organizational economics and organization theory) of interorganizational relationships. The authors also propose that any interorganizational relationship combines “traits from two hypothetical, pure relationship forms”: co-exploration and co-exploitation. The former aims to “create new knowledge, tasks, functions, or activities”, whereas the latter aims to “execute existing knowledge, tasks, functions, or activities”. This framework really clears a path through the forest, in which specific theories or forms are the “trees” and the overall nature of these relationships is the “forest”. I believe that this path is interesting for many researchers in our field.
The Relational View in SCM Research
Published in 1998, The relational view: Cooperative strategy and sources of interorganizational competitive advantage by Dyer and Singh remains one of the most influential business papers. Ten years later, the authors discussed their paper in an interview with ScienceWatch.com. They argue that “the main contribution of the [paper] was that it outlined a theory for considering dyads and networks of firms as a key unit of analysis for explaining superior individual firm performance”. The relational view extends both the industry structure view (unit of analysis: industry) and the resource-based view (unit of analysis: firm), because from this view a critical resource can span firm boundaries. The four sources of interorganizational competitive advantage identified by the authors are: (1) relation-specific assets, (2) knowledge-sharing routines, (3) complementary resources/capabilities, and (4) effective governance. While researchers are still searching for the paradigm of SCM research, the relational view can be an important building block to explain the supply and demand network. The relational view has later been extended by Lavie (2006).
Supply and Demand Network Management
“Supply chain” is not the right word. The system it describes is not restricted to the supply side and it does not take the form of a chain. Should it be “supply and demand network management” rather than SCM?
Supply Chains as Complex Adaptive Systems
As recently discussed on this website, the paradigm of SCM research should refer to the system “supply chain” rather than to the system “company” or to the system “supplier-buyer relationship”. In their interesting conceptual note, Supply Networks and Complex Adaptive Systems: Control versus Emergence, Choi et al. (2001) acknowledge the notion of a supply network as a system. The authors go even further and argue that supply networks should be recognized as a complex adaptive system (CAS). Choi et al. propose that many supply networks emerge rather than result from purposeful design by a singular entity. They also emphasize that when managing supply networks, managers must appropriately balance how much to control and how much to let emerge. A similar viewpoint has later been taken by Surana et al. (2005; Supply-chain Networks: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective). Can the notion of a supply chain as a complex adaptive system be a building block for the missing paradigm of our discipline?
A Tale of Supply Chain Integration
“Many years ago there lived an emperor …” Rarely do research articles start like a fairy tale. But have supply chain researchers been taken in by a fairy tale for too long? In their article Supply chain integration improves performance: the Emperor’s new suit?, the authors, Fabbe-Costes and Jahre, observe contradictory statements in the SCM literature: Some authors state “that there is a positive relation between supply chain integration […] and performance”. However, other authors suggest “that integration might be more difficult in practice than in theory, that it should be differentiated and that it is more rhetoric than reality”. The article reviews prior studies on relations between integration and performance and conclude that “the contribution of supply chain integration is not as obvious as logistics and supply chain researchers usually think”. Is supply chain integration the Emperors’ New Suit of business? The article was published in 2007 in the International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management.
