A Dyadic Study of Control in Buyer-Supplier Relationships

Control of supply chains has been discussed in supply chain literature from various viewpoints. While previous studies have generally examined only buyer's perspectives of control, we expand on such previous research by comparing both the buyer's and supplier's views. In this paper our objective is to analyze why the control is distributed in a certain way in the buyer-supplier relationship, and how does the distribution of control affect the buyer-supplier relationship. We categorize the explanations for the distribution of control. We argue that control in the buyer-supplier relationship might look different from buyer's and suppliers' perspectives. We used a multiple case study methodology with six dyadic buyer-supplier relationships and conducted 43 interviews.