Mapping Communication along the Supply Chain in a Reputation-Sensitive Environment: Preliminary Insights

2. Supply Chain Relationship Management Literature

SC is defined in literature as the flows of products and information crossing through a company that are managed to achieve linkages and coordination among business processes (Christopher, 2011). The SC activities are focused on optimizing upstream and downstream stakeholder relationships with the aim of increasing profit margins (Bocconcelli & Tunisini, 2007), sustaining competitive advantage and improving organizational performances (Christopher, 2011; Chopra & Meindl, 2010).

Previous SC management studies developing a relationship-based theoretical perspective followed the interaction approach (Hakansson, 1982) and then the network approach (Hakansson & Snehota, 1995) to the analysis of business relationships in industrial contexts, emphasizing the concept of exchange-relationships among customer, supplier and all the other actors involved in the SC. These relationships can be defined as “strings of interactions”, which represent the content of communicative exchanges (Olkkonen et al., 2000) and find their basis in the Social Exchange Theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959), which emphasizes communication as a fundamental tool to create, develop and maintain trust and commitment among the parties acting as interconnected units of a relationship business network (Anderson & Narus, 2004).