In search of 'interfirm management' in supply chains: recognizing contradictions of language and power by listening

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the ways in which first-tier suppliers, primarily in the auto-supply industry, respond to significant changes in key customer requirements, particularly those related to costs, and how they do or do not transmit such demands to their own suppliers. The key managerial informants, particularly in Brazil but also retrospectively in the UK, raised much more fundamental questions that challenged various central assumptions in the way that supply chain management approaches portray interorganizational choices. Challenges also arose to the extent to which management researchers and their research should be seen as embedded in a particular set of social and political networks that strongly influence the way in which they interpret issues of power and control. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.