Exploring a Governance Theory of Supply Chain Management: Barriers and Facilitators to Integration

Supply chain management is rapidly growing as both a strategic initiative and an academic discipline. As firms increasingly include their supply chain partners in the development of business strategy, researchers will have to constantly reevaluate the underlying themes and emergent theories of strategic logistics, management, and marketing by introducing new topics and revisiting seminal extant results. As such, this research was developed to explore the important concept of supply chain integration through strategic governance theory development. Since supply chain governance is a relatively new topic, a grounded study of both new and existing integration facilitators and barriers is presented. The study was initiated with a qualitative “managerial” development of scale items followed by a full empirical analysis. The result is an industry based returning to the source methodology for testing current governance related issues in industry. Contributions include the development of multiple dimensions of supply chain governance across facilitators and barriers, an explanation of the interplay between governance facilitators of, and barriers to, integration, a discussion of strategic level managerial implications, and a call for the future extension of governance research into the theory wanting domain of logistics and supply chain management.