Governance and social capital formation in buyer-supplier relationships

PurposeBuilding social capital within buyer‐supplier relationships is often associated with high performing supply chains. However, little research has examined the mechanisms by which social capital is formed. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of relational and contractual governance mechanisms on the formation of social capital under varying levels of demand and supply uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual framework is developed, grounded in the literature on supply chain management and social capital theory (SCT).FindingsA series of propositions showed that relational governance leads to the formation of social capital under conditions of supply uncertainty, but is subject to opportunism when customer product demand is uncertain. By contrast, in conditions of high demand uncertainty, contractual governance is associated with social capital formation.Practical implicationsThe paper illustrates the need for managers to consider both the way in which their choice of governance mechanisms (contractual and relational) contributes to social capital, as well as highlighting the contingent nature of these mechanisms depending on the environmental context.Originality/valueThis paper is a novel contribution, applying SCT to the literature on supply chain management.</jats:sec

Determinants of knowledge transfer in inter-firm new product development projects

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the factors which determine the degree of knowledge transfer in inter‐firm new product development (NPD) projects. The authors test a theoretical model exploring how inter‐firm knowledge transfer is enabled or hindered by a buyer's learning intent, the degree of supplier protectiveness, inter‐firm knowledge ambiguity, and absorptive capacity.Design/methodology/approachA sample of 153 R&amp;D intensive manufacturing firms in the UK automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical, electrical, chemical, and general manufacturing industries was used to test the framework. To analyse the data, two‐step structural equation modeling in AMOS 7.0 was used.FindingsThe results indicate that a buyer's learning intent increases inter‐firm knowledge transfer, but also acts as an incentive for suppliers to protect their knowledge. Such defensive measures increase the degree of inter‐firm knowledge ambiguity, encouraging buyer firms to invest in absorptive capacity as a means to interpret supplier knowledge, but also increase the degree of knowledge transfer.Practical implicationsThe paper illustrates the effects of focusing on acquisition, rather than accessing supplier technological knowledge. The paper shows that an overt learning strategy can be detrimental to knowledge transfer between buyer‐supplier, as suppliers react by restricting the flow of information. Organisations are encouraged to consider this dynamic when engaging in multi‐organisational, NPD projects.Originality/valueThe paper examines the dynamics of knowledge transfer within inter‐firm NPD projects, showing how transfer is influenced by the buyer firm's learning intention, supplier's response, characteristics of the relationship and knowledge to be transferred.</jats:sec

Social sustainability and human rights in global supply chains

Purpose: Firms are accountable for upholding worker rights and well-being in their supply base. We unpack the evolution in lead firm thinking and practice about how to assure labor conditions at suppliers. Design/Methodology/Approach: We conducted interviews with the social sustainability leaders at 22 global corporations (“lead firms”) and their sustainability consultants to understand how they think about, and enact efforts, to support labor in their supply base. We complement this with an analysis of stated practice in proprietary supplier codes of conduct for the manufacturing and extractive-related firms in the S&P 500 and FTSE 350. Findings: Our interviews suggest firms follow two distinct and cumulative approaches: a transactional-based approach leveraging collective buyer power to enforce supplier compliance; and a relational-based approach focused on mutual capacity building between lead (buyer) firms and their suppliers. We also see the emergence, in a small subset of firms, of a bottom-up approach that recognizes supplier workers as rights-holders and empowers them to understand and claim their rights. Originality: We identify systematic convergence in supplier codes of conduct. While the transactional and relational approaches are well documented in the supply chain social sustainability literature, the rights-holder approach is not. Its emergence presents an important complement to the other approaches and enables a broader recognition of human rights, and the duty of Western firms to assure those rights

Knowledge sharing in project-based supply networks

Purpose: Project-based supply networks are an emerging form of organizing used to meet a buying organization's operational and innovation goals. Knowledge sharing among suppliers in the network plays a key role in successful project delivery but is challenging to achieve in practice. The authors draw on self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the interactive effect of incentive provisions (penalties and bonuses) and network governance (lead or shared) on knowledge sharing motivation by individual boundary-spanners within project-based supply networks. Design/methodology/approach: A scenario-based behavioral experiment of 217 professionals within the UK using the online platform, Prolific, was conducted. A Hayes Macro PROCESS model was used to analyze the data. The authors pilot-tested the scenario with project management experts, senior managers, and directors. Findings: The findings highlighted that the effectiveness of incentive provisions on knowledge sharing may be dependent on the mode of network governance. Where suppliers have shared responsibility for managing the network (shared governance), bonuses were more effective than penalties in motivating knowledge sharing through support of boundary-spanners’ autonomy needs. However, where the buying organization has transferred responsibility for managing the network to an external third-party organization (lead governance), the authors found no significant difference between the effectiveness of penalty versus bonus provisions in motivating knowledge sharing. Originality/value: Prior research in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) has shown the positive effect of incentive provisions on knowledge sharing motivation, but largely overlooked the effectiveness of such incentives when nested within broader governance mechanisms used in projects and their networks. Moreover, while scholars have started to highlight the importance of governance mechanisms in knowledge sharing at the dyadic level, the authors know very little about the impact of network governance

Conflict and contract use in cross-cultural buyer-supplier relationships: the role of cultural context

Conflict is common within global supply chains, especially where the buyer and supplier span different cultures. In such settings, formal contracts assume an important role in providing a common language that specifies each party’s roles, responsibilities, and liabilities. However, the primacy, use, and interpretation of contracts is subject to the cultural norms of the two parties involved. We adopt a multi- method research design to understand how cultural context affects how suppliers interpret and respond to different contract functions (control vs. coordination) adopted by a buyer firm during conflict episodes. Study 1 involves multiple, in-depth case studies of conflict between three Indian suppliers and six of their international buyers from China, Germany, and the USA. Our findings highlight how the use of contractual control or coordination is interpreted differently depending on the supplier’s cultural context. In particular, a mismatch in contract function use and the supplier’s culturally derived expectations can lead to strong negative emotions and damage to the relationship. In Study 2, we propose and test a set of hypotheses via a scenario-based experiment of German and Chinese managers. We find support for our hypothesized conditional effects, showing that for suppliers from high-context cultures, the buyer’s use of contractual control to address conflict has a significant negative, indirect effect on relationship commitment (via the emotion of anger). We conclude with a discussion of the implications of using contracts to manage conflict in cross-cultural supply chain relationships

Classical field theory. Advanced mathematical formulation

In contrast with QFT, classical field theory can be formulated in strict mathematical terms of fibre bundles, graded manifolds and jet manifolds. Second Noether theorems provide BRST extension of this classical field theory by means of ghosts and antifields for the purpose of its quantization.Comment: 30 p

Background Geometry in Gauge Gravitation Theory

Dirac fermion fields are responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge gravitation theory because the spin structure associated with a tetrad field is not preserved under general covariant transformations. Two solutions of this problem can be suggested. (i) There exists the universal spin structure $S\to X$ such that any spin structure $S^h\to X$ associated with a tetrad field $h$ is a subbundle of the bundle $S\to X$. In this model, gravitational fields correspond to different tetrad (or metric) fields. (ii) A background tetrad field $h$ and the associated spin structure $S^h$ are fixed, while gravitational fields are identified with additional tensor fields q^\la{}_\m describing deviations \wt h^\la_a=q^\la{}_\m h^\m_a of $h$. One can think of \wt h as being effective tetrad fields. We show that there exist gauge transformations which keep the background tetrad field $h$ and act on the effective fields by the general covariant transformation law. We come to Logunov's Relativistic Theory of Gravity generalized to dynamic connections and fermion fields.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, no figure

From Dirac spinor fields to ELKO

Dual-helicity eigenspinors of the charge conjugation operator (ELKO spinor fields) belong, together with Majorana spinor fields, to a wider class of spinor fields, the so-called flagpole spinor fields, corresponding to the class (5), according to Lounesto spinor field classification based on the relations and values taken by their associated bilinear covariants. There exists only six such disjoint classes: the first three corresponding to Dirac spinor fields, and the other three respectively corresponding to flagpole, flag-dipole and Weyl spinor fields. This paper is devoted to investigate and provide the necessary and sufficient conditions to map Dirac spinor fields to ELKO, in order to naturally extend the Standard Model to spinor fields possessing mass dimension one. As ELKO is a prime candidate to describe dark matter, an adequate and necessary formalism is introduced and developed here, to better understand the algebraic, geometric and physical properties of ELKO spinor fields, and their underlying relationship to Dirac spinor fields.Comment: 10 page