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The purpose of this paper is to provide a holistic paradigmatic lens through which the supply chain collaboration phenomena – including collaborative inventory management – can be understood and explained.

As theory‐building research, the paper explores the environmental conditions and managerial processes that promote or hinder supply chain collaboration from a variety of theoretical lenses including contingency theory, the resource‐based view of the firm, the relational view of the firm, force field analysis, constituency based theory, social dilemma theory, and resource‐advantage theory.

To demonstrate how an integrated theoretical framework can help us understand the dynamics of supply chain collaboration, the paper uses the framework to explicate the evolution and state of collaborative inventory management.

The framework can accurately depict and explain highly publicized collaborative failures and successes. It is also possible to draw from the model's core propositions to design prescriptive remedies for the challenges managers encounter as they seek to build collaborative inventory management capabilities.

Supply chain collaboration is a complex and dynamic phenomenon; however, existing management theories only describe locally observed phenomenon. As a result, it is a struggle to both explain existing “collaborative” behavior and provide prescriptions for leveraging collaboration to achieve differential supply chain performance. This holistic, integrative model delineates the path to collaborative success by exploring the connections among motivations, goals, mechanisms, resistors, and learning loops.

Trust has long been viewed as a potential governance mechanism. However, recent research discloses substantive incongruities in trust conceptualization and operationalization – especially in the supply chain buyer/supplier context. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirically grounded conceptualization of trust and to explore the trust-construction process.

The authors used the communications rationality approach to elaborate a three-stage qualitative study of supply chain trust. The authors first monologically examine trust by interviewing managers from over 50 companies (as described). The list of trust behaviors are then dialogically refined through 11 focus studies comprised of over 250 managers into different trust dimensions (as agreed upon). Finally, the authors used two in-depth, dyadic case studies to examine the dynamic trust construction process (as witnessed).

The authors find divergence in the way academics define trust and the way companies operationalize trust. Missing in action is the notion of benevolence. In the supply chain setting, managers describe trust as consisting of credibility and relationship commitment. Companies use an iterative approach to signal trustworthiness. However, ambiguity increases the costs and decreases the effectiveness of proactive trust construction as a form of supply chain governance.

The authors specify and evaluate novel constructs used to signal trustworthiness and document why and how companies struggle to use the signaling process efficiently and effectively. For some, this is an issue of managerial commitment. For others, this represents a lack of understanding of trustworthiness signals and the trust-construction process. Ultimately, the authors develop a more robust conceptualization of inter-organizational trust and present a roadmap for proactive trust construction.

Despite over 30 years of focus on supply chain collaboration, companies continue to struggle to achieve collaborative advantage. To better understand why some companies are able to collaborate for competitive advantage and others can't, the authors explore how managerial commitment enables collaborative capabilities.

The authors employed a longitudinal inductive study, interviewing companies with reputations for intense supply chain collaboration at four different times over 20 years.

The authors identified managerial commitment as a super-ordinate enabler. They describe the dynamics of commitment development and explore three types of commitment: instrumental, normative and transformative. The authors document key antecedents and outcomes of each type of commitment.

Theory regarding the antecedents to commitment to collaborative capability is underdeveloped. The authors elaborate these antecedents and the dynamics that enable or undermine the commitment necessary to build effective collaboration capabilities.

The authors provide insight (i.e. a practical and actionable roadmap) into the process companies use to cultivate commitment to collaboration and value co-creation.

Collaboration is critical to value co-creation, including effective supply chain risk mitigation and lasting sustainability efforts. The authors elaborate a theory of commitment dynamics that explains why most companies never go beyond basic levels of collaboration. At the same time, the authors provide a roadmap for deep, transformative collaboration.

Over the past two decades, technological advances have spurred companies to design collaborative processes. Yet most such efforts are difficult to implement, with only a few resulting in sustained competitive advantages. The purpose of this paper is to leverage the tenets of socio-technical theory to examine how collaborative process design may lead to improved collaborative performance.

The authors employ a multi-method – survey and interview – approach to examine the roles of technical and social initiatives in mitigating resistors to collaborative performance, and identify both the short-term appeals of technology investments and long-term social resistors that inhibit additional performance gains.

While initial investments in information technology yield alluring gains, performance benefits diminish as social resistors create limiting conditions. The dynamic capability for firms to recognize and respond to the dual and integrative nature of technical and social systems is required for firms to overcome powerful limiting conditions and change resistors through collaborative process design in order to cultivate new value-creation processes.

This study is the first in the discipline to utilize socio-technical systems theory to examine an issue in supply chain process redesign. The multi-method approach elaborates the difficulty inherent in cultivating new value-creation processes. The results collectively illustrate a need for recognizing the influence of both the reinforcing and limiting processes. Whereas, technical initiatives enable new capabilities, social initiatives remove fear, create vision, and inculcate skills, enabling technology adoption and process change.

The purpose of this paper is to benchmark the viability of collaborative supply chain (SC) business models for small businesses.

Survey data was collected from 81 companies with 100 or fewer employees, 169 companies with 101‐500 employees, and 308 companies with more than 500 employees. To help contextualize the findings, eight in‐depth interviews with small firms were conducted.

Benchmarking the viability of collaborative SC business models using a contingency, resource‐based‐view assessment paradigm reveals a perplexing paradox. Managers at small firms suggest that the majority of the benefits of SCM are within their reach. They also note that the barriers to implementation do not intimidate them. However, they also report that they are not actively pursuing SCM as a strategic weapon. Our research shows that the best way to avoid the cost squeeze and death spiral encountered by small business in today's global SC environment is to create the collaborative capabilities promoted by SCM. That is, while large firms leverage size firms must leverage creative collaboration to insinuate themselves into competitive SC teams to drive long‐term growth. We recommend three alternative SCM strategies based on the small firm's growth strategy.

The small‐business literature on supply chain management (SCM) is relatively scant and provides conflicting views of SCM's viability. This research represents a unique multi‐method approach that shows that SCM is applicable to the world of small business.

This chapter explores the role that social media can play to support entrepreneurs in managing complex interfirm communities. As companies increasingly operate in highly connected environments, it is important to move beyond corporate networks, and understand and build corporate social communities (CSCs) that underpin organizations.

The authors conducted 14 case studies at member firms of GS1 Australia — a not-for-profit association dedicated to the development, implementation, and promotion of information technology standards to improve supply chain management.

The gathered data illustrate a number of common challenges managers typically encounter in their supply chain operations. In response to these challenges, the authors propose distinct ways in which CSCs can leverage and transform interfirm relationships and support operational goals.

The empirical investigations were limited to the supply chain context, and Australian companies. The benefits pertinent to CSCs were only explored conceptually. Further studies should address these limitations.

We provide empirical evidence supported by theoretical insights that CSCs are powerful tools that community designers and managers can leverage to transform business-to-business (B2B) relationships.

The originality of this study resides in advancing theoretical understanding and providing practical managerial guidance on how to best deploy CSCs in a supply chain context. Additionally, we consider the role CSCs play in different stages of B2B relationships, and the reasons why most managers are hesitant to adopt CSCs.

Complexity has been called the 21st-century supply chain (SC) challenge. Most SC managers view it as a necessary evil, ever-present, costly and tough to manage, and few prioritize it. Still, anecdotes suggest some leverage it to drive operational excellence. This study aims to explore how they do it, delving into the development of a complexity management capability, under what circumstances it emerges and its effect on competitiveness.

To better understand why, and how, companies develop (or not) a distinctive SC complexity management capability, this study employed an inductive study of 10 leading European companies, each operating a complex SC.

Although SC complexity raises costs, increases disruptions and makes decision-making difficult, few companies have made complexity management a priority. Among those, most focus on reducing or absorbing complexity to improve operational excellence. A few invest to develop a distinctive SC complexity management capability. They manage complexity for market success. The interaction among competitive pressures, managerial attitudes and investments delineate a dynamic capability development process.

Despite extensive research on complexity drivers, the tools used to manage SC complexity and the impact of SC complexity on performance, the interplay among factors that promote, or hinder, the development of an SC complexity capability continues to be poorly understood. By mapping the complexity capability development process, this study explicates a more nuanced approach to managing SC complexity that can yield a competitive edge.

SC complexity prevails because the dynamic, iterative complexity capability development process is overlooked. Managers can use the complexity capability roadmap to assess the cost/benefits of pursuing a distinctive complexity management capability more accurately.

This study demystifies the development of a complexity management capability, showing how some companies develop the capability to distinguish between value-added and value-dissipating complexity and thus become empowered to leverage SC complexity for competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the non-linear aspects of the asymmetry-performance relationship under varying conditions of trust and innovation. Its novel approach is useful for addressing the strategic elements of supply chain management (SCM) relationships based on trust and innovation decisions.

Results are based on a study of 90 managers from small- and medium-sized firms in Spain. Instead of a classical linear relationship analysis, the authors performed a non-linear analysis, using polynomial modeling and Warp 3 partial least squares method, which provides a more nuanced view of the data and constitutes an original approach to empirical research in SCM.

This study adds a new viewpoint on SC relationships by suggesting that not all trust and innovation development leads directly to performance improvement. The principal finding is, in varying trust and innovation contexts, that the influences of asymmetry on performance have uneven characteristics and follow non-linear paths.

This study focuses on only one particular institutional environment in one country. The data are also cross-sectional, which makes it difficult to empirically test causality.

The findings provide rational insights to managers on when it is appropriate to reduce (or not) asymmetric relationships with partners.

Trust and innovation are important and ones of the key requirements of supply chain relationships in any environment, this study argues that the interactions of key SCM elements that drive members to better performance are more complex and non-linear.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inadequacies of current business education in the tackling of the educational challenges inherent to the advent of a data-driven business world. It presents an analysis of the implications of digitization and more specifically big data analytics (BDA) and data science (DS) on organizations with a special emphasis on decision-making processes and the function of managers. It argues that business schools and other educational institutions have well responded to the need to train future data scientists but have rather disregarded the question of effectively preparing future managers for the new data-driven business era.

The approach involves analysis and review of the literature.

The development of analytics skills shall not pertain to data scientists only, it must rather become an organizational cultural component shared among all employees and more specifically among decision makers: managers. In the data-driven business era, managers turn into manager-scientists who shall possess skills at the crossroad of data management, analytical/modeling techniques and tools, and business. However, the multidisciplinary nature of big data analytics and data science (BDADS) seems to collide with the dominant “functional silo design” that characterizes business schools. The scope and breadth of the radical digitally enabled change, the author are facing, may necessitate a global questioning about the nature and structure of business education.

For the sake of transparency and clarity, academia and the industry must join forces to standardize the meaning of the terms surrounding big data. BDA/DS training programs, courses, and curricula shall be organized in such a way that students shall interact with an array of specialists providing them a broad enough picture of the big data landscape. The multidisciplinary nature of analytics and DS necessitates to revisit pedagogical models by developing experiential learning and implementing a spiral-shaped pedagogical approach. The attention of scholars is needed as there exists an array of unexplored research territories. This investigation will help bridge the gap between education and the industry.

The findings will help practitioners understand the educational challenges triggered by the advent of the data-driven business era. The implications will also help develop effective trainings and pedagogical strategies that are better suited to prepare future professionals for the new data-driven business world.

By demonstrating how the advent of a data-driven business era is impacting the function and role of managers, the paper initiates a debate revolving around the question about how business schools and higher education shall evolve to better tackle the educational challenges associated with BDADS training. Elements of response and recommendations are then provided.

The purpose of this study is to elaborate theory regarding the reasons why collaboration strategies fail. The relational view posits that supply chain integration can be a source of competitive advantage. Few firms, however, successfully co-create value to attain supernormal relational rents.

This study uses a quasi-longitudinal, multi-case interview methodology to explore the reasons why collaboration strategies fail to deliver intended results. The authors interviewed managers at 49 companies in Period 1 and managers at 57 companies in Period 2. In all, 15 companies participated in both rounds of interviews.

This study builds and describes a taxonomy of relational resistors. The authors then explore how sociological and structural resistors reinforce each other to undermine collaborative behavior. Specifically, the interplay among resistors: obscures the true sources of resistance; exacerbates a sense of vulnerability to non-collaborative behavior that reduces the willingness to invest in relational architecture; and inhibits the development of essential relational skills and organizational routines.

This research identifies and describes the behaviors and processes that impede successful supply chain alliances. By delving into the interplay among relational resistors, the research explains the detail and nuance of inter-firm rivalry and supply chain complexity. Ultimately, it is the re-enforcing nature of various resistors that make it so difficult for firms to realize relational rents.