NEGOTIATION

Negotiation



Negotiation

Introduction

The discipline of supply chain management (SCM) has attracted substantial research interest in recent years. This is evident in the increasing papers, conferences and PhD-dissertations (Gubi , 2003) revolving around the SCM theme.

The discipline of SCM can be regarded as an interdisciplinary field (Chen and Paulraj, 2004), and as such has adopted a wide range of disciplines (Stock, 1997). As a consequence, many research streams have emerged in the SCM discipline. One of the smaller streams is the focus on negotiations and its impact on buyer-supplier relationships in SCM (Giannakis and Croom, 2004). This research stream has emerged, because at the heart and core of SCM lies the need to reach common consensus through mutual understanding between the members of supply chains. Fundamentally, or perhaps ideally, a great part of managing supply chains essentially has to do with communicating and negotiating effectively with supply chain members. Without this communication and negotiating, the supply chain simply ceases to exist, as its modus operandi has gone. In the SCM literature, several authors have already noted this, stating that effective communication has a pivotal role in overall supply chain competitiveness (Ellram, 1995). Several authors have already repeatedly pointed to a positive statistical correlation between information exchanges and improved supply chain competitiveness, profit and performance (Kulp, 2002).

The extant negotiation literature in SCM is, however, small and dispersed, which is evident in its focus on widely, and often technically, different topics. For instance, while Kaufmann and Carter (2004) investigated the feasibility and appropriateness of reverse negotiation auctions, Schoenherr and Mabert (2007) examined the interdependence between bidding requirements and bundle structure (Section 2). As one of the few and more non-technical and general negotiation contributions, Ramsay (2004) concluded that a central link between supply chain members, the negotiation setting or situation, is crucial and found that even though many researchers also have concluded that this is important, an: “… astonishing dearth of empirical information in this area?…?” exists. He continues, stating that: “… there has been no exploration of the implications of [negotiating] for buyer-supplier relationships in particular and no analysis of its implications in the supply chain trading context”. Furthermore, “… the lack of academic interest in negotiation shown by those investigating buyer-supplier interactions is superficially puzzling”. As a consequence, Ramsay (2004) suggests that:

Literature review

This section sums up the extant contributions concerning negotiations in the SCM literature. This is done based on a literature review covering ten top ranked SCM-related journals. The journals were selected on the basis of four recent ranking studies recently carried out (Gibson and Hanna, 2000, 2003; Kumar and Kwon, 2004; Menachof, 2007). Some ranking studies were excluded due to their outdated nature (Daniel and Jones, 1975). It should be noted though, that these rankings are controversial, as different methods lead to different results (Arlbjørn , 2008). The two dominating ranking methods, which is the citation method and the survey method, were mixed by being present in for instance Kumar and Kwon (2004) and Gibson and Hanna (2000, 2003), ...