Summary
The authors examine and take stock of the changing nature and landscape surrounding supply chain management, and the related disciplines of purchasing, operations management, logistics and marketing channels of distribution. They identify, describe and synthesize the nature of research in those academic disciplines that are identified to be some of the objectives with respect to supply chain management's integration goals. Their examination highlights the considerable evolution and significant advances occurring within and among these disciplines. Additionally, they find this new landscape to provide both insights and issues for scholarship to those attempting to understand the evolving nature of supply chain management and its related fields. Such insights and issues suggest a number of proposals for progress with regard to SCM's future development.
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Extract
The Domain and Scope of Scm's Foundational Disciplines Insights and Issues to Advance Research
Over the last two decades, supply chains and supply chain management (SCM) have emerged as increasingly important areas of business practice and academic scholarship. First recognized in the 1980s (Oliver and Webber 1982), SCM has attracted intense interest and focus on the part of both practitioners and academics. As with any concept, SCM's development has been accompanied by calls for its more specific understanding and most recently by this journal, for contributions that describe and document its domain and scope.
Recent conceptualizations of SCM detail its role within and across organizations and identify it to include specific activities as well as strategy (Gibson, Mentzer, and Cook 2005). According to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP)1:"Supply Chain Management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities. Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers. In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies. "In this definition, SCM encompasses the planning and management of multiple management activities, including activities common to the field of purchasing (i.e., "sourcing and procurement), functions typically covered under the discipline of operations management (i.e., "conversion"), "logistics management activities", as well as activities otherwise the focus of marketing channel management (i.e., "collaboration with channel partners"). In addition, the CSCMP definition includes the planned "coordination " of management activities across not only multiple functional disciplines but also business partners across the supply chain. According to CSCMP, SCM integrates these various activities and processes through "supply and demand management within and across companies" (www.cscmp.org).Defining SCM to integrate purchasing, operations management, logistics and marketing channels of distribution within and across companies provides more specific understanding of the domain and scope of SCM. Relatedly, a framework of multiple disciplines may serve as a unifying mechanism for advancing existing research in a field, as well as an agenda for future research (Jones 1983). However, as to SCM's goal to integrate these domains, some scholars have observed that "there is little evidence of a move towards the emergence of an integrated approach to the field" and that "the SCM field is fragmented along narrow discipline areas" (Burgess, Singh and Koroglu 2006, p. 716). Following upon the CSCMP definition and addressing the need for an integrated approach, the objectives of this paper are to:(1) describe and overview the nature of research within SCM utilizing a framework of scientific inquiry that highlights relevant dimensions of academic research (see, Kuhn 1962),(2) similarly describe and overview the nature of research in those functional domains identified by the CSCMP definition: purchasing, operations management, logistics and marketing channels of distribution,(3) analyze and assess relevant aspects of this research in an effort to uncover insights and issues for advancing SCM research, and(4) following upon these insights and issues, offer a number of proposals for future research progress in the field.Drawing upon selected literatures we overview and document accepted definitions and the domain of interest for research for each area, the units and levels of analysis applied to research occurring within each, prevalent theories and methods for such research (Kühn 1962) and key trends occurring in this research. These findings are then analyzed and their implications for SCM's future development assessed and discussed.Together, our description and analysis highlights the nature and ongoing changes of research occurring in SCM and in those domains it asp...See the full content of this document
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