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Firms experience that an increasingly complex supply base is a costly investment. In order
to keep specialized suppliers but to reduce the effort of managing it, OEMs contract
second-tier firms and direct them to first-tier suppliers. We conduct four embedded case
studies in the international automotive industry to record types and possible motivations
of directed sourcing. Our findings show that directed sourcing triads may be set up to
achieve operational efficiencies but also for strategic reasons such as to gain access to
foreign markets. This research contributes to literature on triadic supply chains in general
and network buyer-supplier relationships specifically.
Organizations face increased pressure from stakeholders to incorporate a
plethora of corporate responsibility (CR) and sustainability aspects in their
business practices. Legal and extra-legal demands are dynamically changing;
almost no organizational function is unaffected. Owing to the outsourcing
wave of the last decade, in particular purchasing and supply management
(PSM) plays an ever more important role in assuring sustainable production
of the firm’s products offered in the marketplace. The supply base of many
Western firms has become increasingly global and spend volumes have shifted
towards emerging countries. In order to avoid the risk of reputational damage
to the buying company, the PSM department must ensure that their international
suppliers comply with their corporate codes of conduct and that environmental
and social misconduct at supplier premises does not occur. In
this paper, ‘‘sustainability’’ refers to the pursuit of the tripartite of economic,
environmental, and social performance.We contribute to prior research in the
fields of sustainability and CR by extending insights of the dynamic capabilities
view to analyze how the PSM function integrates sustainability
aspects in its global supplier management processes. Based on four case
studies in the chemical industry, we propose that profound sustainable global
supplier management (SGSM) capabilities are a source of competitive advantage.
These capabilities are path dependent and particularly valuable when
organizations are receptive to external stakeholder pressure. Early movers in
the field of SGSM reap competitive benefits to a notable extent as a result of
resource accumulation and learning processes over time.