Supply Chain Management An Analytic Framework For Critical Literature Review.pdf

European Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management 6 (2000) 67}83
Supply chain management: an analytical framework
for critical literature review
Simon Croom!*, Pietro Romano", Mihalis Giannakis!
!Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
"Department of Management and Engineering, University of Padua, Vicenza, Italy
Abstract
There can be little dispute that supply chain management is an area of importance in the "eld of management research, yet there
have been few literature reviews on this topic (Bechtel and Mulumudi, 1996, Proceedings of the 1996 NAPM Annual Academic
Conference; Harland, 1996, British Journal of Management 7 (special issue), 63}80; Cooper et al., 1997). This paper sets out not to
review the supply chain literature per se, but rather to contribute to a critical theory debate through the presentation and use of
a framework for the categorisation of literature linked to supply chain management. The study is based on the analysis of a large
number of publications on supply chain management (books, journal articles, and conference papers) using a Procite( database from
which the literature has been classi"ed according to two criteria: a content- and a methodology-oriented criterion. ( 2000 Elsevier
Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Supply chain management; works; Buyer}supplier relationships
1. Introduction key, 1998). What we set out to establish in this paper is in
fact the general problem domain of supply chain manage-
This paper is a &thought paper' and arose from our ment, thereby, we hope, contributing to the development
discussions about the nature of the academic study of of a discipline in supply chain management.` Tran"eld
supply chain management, a conversation that has in- and Starkey alsoa note the underlying soft, applied, di-
deed been on going for a number of years (see Croom and vergent and rural nature of management research, and
Saunders, 1995). Our concern was with