Veronica Haydee Villena

Purpose: As buyers and suppliers seek to create value, they face the challenge of creating an environment that promotes coordination and information sharing and discourages opportunism. While the literature suggested dyadic mechanisms to create such an environment, this study focuses on ties beyond the buyer–supplier dyad. Specifically, close connections to one's partner's partners (CPP) are crucial in the realization of benefits for buyers and suppliers.Design/methodology/approach: Drawing from embeddedness theory and governance theory, the authors developed a contingency framework to examine when CPP are beneficial or counterproductive considering two dyadic attributes – relational capital (RC) and partner dependence. Analyses were conducted using data from a dyadic survey complemented with archival data on 106 buyer–supplier relationships (BSRs).Findings: The study reveals that CPP both help and hurt in the realization of benefits. Stark asymmetries exist between the impact of CPP on the buyer and supplier sides. For buyers, CPP exert a direct positive effect on operational and innovation benefits. For suppliers, the effect of CPP on operational and innovation benefits is contingent on buyer dependence and RC – CPP serves as a substitute for buyer dependence and RC. There are no such contingency effects for buyers. Further analysis identifies situations for suppliers when CPP hurt the realization of benefits.Originality/value: The study highlights the importance of CPP to foster efficiency and innovation within BSRs and illustrates how their impact varies across contingency conditions and across the parties within a dyad.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how supply chain actors in an Italian cashmere supply chain reacted to dependence and power use during the Covid-19 crisis and how this affected their perceptions of justice.Design/methodology/approach: The research took a case study approach exploring issues of dependence, power and justice in a multi-tier luxury cashmere supply chain.Findings: The authors found two types of dependence: Craftmanship-induced buyer dependence and Market-position-induced supplier dependence. The authors also identified four key archetypes emerging from the dynamics of dependence, power and justice during Covid-19. In the repressive archetype, buying firms perceive their suppliers as dependent and use mediated power through coercive tactics, leading the suppliers to perceive interactional, procedural and distributive injustice and use reciprocal coercive tactics against the buying firms in the form of coopetition. In the restrictive archetype, buying firms that are aware of their dependence on their suppliers use mediated power through contracts, with suppliers perceiving distributive injustice and developing ways to circumvent the brands. In the relational archetype, the awareness of craftmanship-induced buyer dependence leads buying firms to use non-mediated power through collaboration, but suppliers still do not perceive distributive justice, as there is no business security or future orders. In the resilient archetype, buying firms are aware of their own craftmanship-induced dependence and combine mediated and non-mediated power by giving the suppliers sustainable orders, which leads suppliers to perceive each justice type positively.Originality/value: This paper shows how the actors in a specific supply chain react to and cope with one of the worst health crises in living memory, thereby providing advice for supply chain management in future crises.

The fashion industry’s labor scandals have drawn wide attention, with incidents such as the Rana Plaza in 2013 and Boohoo in 2020. Several multistakeholder initiatives have called for more transpar...

Rural nanostores are the dominant source of packaged products for consumers in rural China, thus the more these stores order from reliable suppliers, the better the product quality available to rural areas. To improve merchandise circulation in rural areas, the Chinese government embarked on the large‐scale “Thousands of Villages” (ToV) program in 2005. One of its key components was the implementation of an information technology (IT) procurement system to facilitate transactions between rural nanostores and the ToV program's certified consumer packaged goods (CPG) suppliers. The nanostores' adoption of the ToV procurement system was encouraged yet voluntary. We study how this system was used initially and how it evolved over time. If effective, this program has the potential to address the growing social disparity between rural and developed areas in China. We first embarked on an exploratory analysis (March 2012) to understand the ToV program from the perspectives of nanostore owners, the ToV's CPG suppliers, and the government. We then collected interview data. In Period 1 (2013–2014), when the technology was still nascent, we found that nanostore owner's trust in the ToV's CPG suppliers, and system value, played key roles for nanostore owners to use the ToV procurement system. In Period 2 (2018–2019), three contextual factors emerged—population demographic shift, improved technology infrastructure, and trust in new [non‐ToV] purchasing platforms—each hindering the ToV procurement system's use. We observed strong government support during the early phases of ToV, but that support evolved from subsidizing the ToV platform and offering associated training (Period 1), to also providing credibility to competing non‐ToV procurement platforms (Period 2). Collectively, the findings identify idiosyncratic challenges that arise when public policies attempt to address developing region problems by reengineering supply chains via IT. We provide implications for IT research about technology management in rural developing areas and for managers to recognize potential pitfalls of managing IT projects in supply bases unfamiliar with advanced IT.

This study unpacks the environmental and social dimensions of supplier responsibility and links each dimension to distinct drivers. Using stakeholder theory and the relational view, we distinguish between two main drivers: stakeholder pressures (i.e., from regulatory agencies, buying firms, and nongovernmental organizations) and relational mechanisms offered by multinational companies (MNCs) (i.e., lean trainings and relational capital). We used a multi‐method research design to study how these drivers uniquely influence supplier responsibility in an emerging‐country context. An in‐depth case study with Philips Lighting and 10 of its Chinese suppliers reveals causal inferences that link stakeholder and relational drivers with each responsibility dimension (environmental vs. social). Audit and survey data from Philips Lighting's 134 Chinese suppliers, complemented with four archival databases, bolster these inferences. Overall, the results show that supplier environmental responsibility can be fostered through both stakeholder pressures and relational drivers; whereas, supplier social responsibility is much harder to address. The integrated methods offer a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of the specifics of supplier responsibility in China and also provide recommendations for MNCs that seek to improve it.

Scholars have called attention to the dark side of collaborative buyer–supplier relationships (BSRs). For instance, the loss of objectivity, relational inertia, and redundant knowledge bases emerging from too much collaboration may result in declining performance. We extend this line of research by investigating the feasibility of potential mitigating mechanisms. Drawing from the literature on governance in inter‐organizational relationships and the interviews with practitioners that have experienced the dark side, we have identified three mechanisms: challenging goals, contractual explicitness, and expectation of continuity. We examine these mechanisms empirically through two consecutive studies. The first study collected data on 132 buying firms and 28 matched suppliers from two sources (survey and archival database). The results provide support for challenging goals and contractual explicitness but offer mixed results for expectation of continuity. The data also allow us to identify buyers suffering from excessive collaboration with their suppliers. In the second study, we gathered qualitative data on five pairs of such buyers and their matched suppliers. Different pairs show different behaviors. Some buyer and supplier firms seem unaware of their predicament, while others are grappling with fighting back the dark side. This qualitative study also offers additional manifestations of the dark side and mechanisms beyond the ones examined in our first study and explains why expectation of continuity received mixed results. This research advances the BSR literature by demonstrating that it is possible to mitigate the dysfunctionalities emerging from too much collaboration and by providing some evidence for its subtle manifestations. It also reveals the managerial complexity surrounding the dark side and provides future research directions for this important topic.

Carbon transparency, once a niche practice, is increasingly becoming institutionalized. Firms are now required to report not only their operations' carbon emissions but also their suppliers'. This research explores the institutional pressures emanating from buyers and industry peers driving supplier firms to disclose high‐quality carbon emission publicly—our concept of carbon transparency. Many firms are increasingly adopting incentives to engage their employees in corporate climate change programs. Thus, we study the impact of three institutional pressures—coercive, mimetic, and normative—and examine when these pressures are more (or less) effective for driving supplier carbon transparency depending on the presence of climate change incentives. We used Carbon Disclosure Project's supply chain program (CDP‐SCP) as our research context. To gain deeper insight into the CDP‐SCP as well as the drivers and challenges of suppliers' carbon transparency, we conducted interviews with three CDP officials, three CDP‐SCP members (i.e., buyers), and six CDP‐SCP participants (i.e., suppliers). To test our hypotheses, we used a unique dataset from CDP‐SCP and complemented it with four other archival datasets for a sample of 835 suppliers operating in 41 countries during the 2013–2015 period. The results show that suppliers without climate change incentives are more vulnerable to coercive and mimetic pressures, whereas suppliers with climate change incentives are more receptive to normative pressure in terms of how much carbon transparency they exhibit. Thus, our study proposes an extensive concept of supplier carbon transparency, provides a comprehensive analysis of its external/internal drivers, and reveals when institutional pressures are more/less effective in eliciting supplier carbon transparency. This research also provides strategies for how buyers, suppliers, and CDP can foster more carbon transparency in supply chains.