Managing Imbalanced Supply Chain Relationships for Sustainability: A Power Perspective

By Anne Touboulic, Daniel Chicksand, Helen Walker. Decision Sciences, 2014

342 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study adopts a power perspective to investigate sustainable supply chain relationships and specifically uses resource-dependence theory (RDT) to critically analyze buyer-supplier-supplier relationships. Empirical evidence is provided, extending the RDT model in this context. The concept of power relationships is explored through a qualitative study of a multinational company and agricultural growers in the UK food industry that work together to implement sustainable practices. We look at multiple triadic relationships involving a large buyer and its small suppliers to investigate how relative power affects the implementation of sustainable supply-management practices. The study highlights that power as dependence is relevant to understanding compliance in sustainable supply chains and to identifying appropriate relationship-management strategies to build more sustainable supply chains. We show the influences of power on how players manage their relationships and how it affects organizational responses to the implementation of sustainability initiatives. Power notably influences the sharing of sustainability-related risks and value between supply chain partners. From a managerial perspective, the study contributes to developing a better understanding of how power can become an effective way to achieve sustainability goals. This article offers insights into the way in which a large organization works with small and medium size enterprises to implement sustainable practices and shows how power management-that is, the way in which power is used-can support or hinder effective cooperation around sustainability in the supply chain.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c7d743d2cbbc758b5c4e72bd2bd1eed595b44c0

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Information Systems

1. Xiaojun Wang
2. Maria Caridi
3. Jury Gualandris
4. Min Zhou
5. Federico Caniato
6. Matteo Kalchschmidt
7. Hing Kai Chan
8. Xu Chen

In Strategy and Management

1. Xiaojun Wang
2. Jury Gualandris
3. Min Zhou
4. Federico Caniato
5. Matteo Kalchschmidt
6. Hing Kai Chan
7. Xu Chen

Citations in the corpus

• Firms’ green R&D cooperation behaviour in a supply chain: Technological spillover, power and coordination (2019, background): “This finding is in line with that of existing literature (Touboulic et al., 2014; Chen et al., 2017b)—i.”
• Collaboration for Sustainability in the Food Supply Chain: A Multi-Stage Study in Italy (2017, background): “Additionally, RDT studies the relationships established to deal with such dependencies [38] that reduce or increase power of resource’s providers [15,16].”
• Developing environmental and social performance: the role of suppliers’ sustainability and buyer–supplier trust (2016, background): “Second, another characteristic of SSCM research is that much papers study the sustainability performance of manufacturing firms, while very few papers analyse SSCM implications for suppliers (Akamp and Müller 2011; Touboulic, Chicksand, and Walker 2014).”
• Manufacturer and retailer coordination for environmental and economic competitiveness: A power perspective (2017, background): “Referring to resource-dependence perspective, power depends on the criticality of the commercial and operational resources and the availability of alternatives for souring the same resource (Cox et al., 2002; Touboulic et al. 2014).”