Toward a Supply Chain Practice View

Abstract

A growing body of supply chain management (SCM) literature has relied on the premises of the resource‐based view (RBV) and its extensions like the relational view (RV) to investigate resources and their relationship to performance. Recently, the practice‐based view (PBV) has been proposed as a complementary theoretical foundation for strategic management research. While the PBV primarily focuses on the firm, we note that SCM practices often span firm boundaries and extend to supply chain partners. In addition, there is an opportunity to explicitly consider firm performance as both individual performance and relational performance. We do this by proposing the supply chain practice view (SCPV), in which we extend the PBV to the interorganizational level of analysis—both in terms of practices and performance. We also build upon and extend the PBV's discussion of the interaction of practices and resources by advocating that there are no discrete boundaries between practices and resources and between firm and relational performance; we conceptualize these dimensions as continua as opposed to sets of dichotomies. The SCPV complements the PBV, as well as the RBV and RV, and provides an alternative theoretical lens for the SCM discipline.