Authors: MAJA MAKOVEC BRENCIC; MATEVZ RASKOVIC
A company’s competitive advantage is in great extent embedded and dependent on its supply network (Best, 1990 Lamming et al., 2000 Dyer and Singh, 1998). Similarly, buyer-supplier relationships also have an important impact on company performance and overall business success of a company (Veludo, Macbeth and Purchase, 2006 Ford, 1990 Håkansson, 1982 Håkansson and Snehota, 1995). According to Harland (1996) supply chain management should be viewed as the management of business activities and relationships, with the final goal of buyer-supplier relationship management to achieve a socially desirable and economically acceptable quality of such relationships, which will in turn contribute to the overall goal of the organizations participating in these relationships. While today most buyer-supplier networks are international, not all internationally active companies are the same. The paper examines supply chains as relationship (marketing) networks in transnational companies, a particular type of the generic multinational company under the Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) typology. It first explores the specifics of transnational companies, looks at key elements and constructs of buyer-supplier relationships trough an extensive literature overview and proposes a conceptual model of buyer-supplier relationships that builds both on the use of exploratory network analysis, as well as linear structural model testing methodologies. It approaches the elements and constructs of buyer-supplier relationships both from dyadic, as well as network perspectives to include constructs such as network complexity and structure, distance and experience in the buyer-supplier relationships alongside traditional constructs of trust, commitment, cooperation, communication etc.
Journal: n.a. (n.a. – n.a.)
Web Address: n.a.
Publish Year: 2009
Conference: Marseille, France (2009)