Paper info

TRANSNATIONAL SUPPLY CHAINS AS RELATIONSHIP (MARKETING) NETWORKS: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL PERSPECTIVE

MAJA MAKOVEC BRENCIC and MATEVZ RASKOVIC

The paper was published at the 25th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2009.

 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.