Business Success: : A Way of Thinking about Strategy, Critical Supply Chain Assets and Operational Best Practice

Citation

Croom, S. (1998), "Business Success: : A Way of Thinking about Strategy, Critical Supply Chain Assets and Operational Best Practice", International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 409-410. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijopm.1998.18.4.409.1

The significance and theoretical justification for a supply chain perspective of competitive success is clearly and eloquently supported in this new book from one of the leading UK academics in the field. Andrew Cox, Professor of Strategy and Procurement Management at Birmingham University, has in a relatively short period of time established a reputation for his thoughtful, forthright and compelling analysis of business management, and in this book he sets out to challenge much of the orthodoxy in business theory and practice from a philosophical and epistemological stance. I found this work to be a welcome, if contestable, addition to the rather limited literature which critically discusses operations performance and improvement. In it, he eschews any notions of empiricism (much against many of the writers in the operations management and operations strategy field), and clearly sets out his stall under a Popperian banner of rational deductive thought ‐ i.e. that which is founded upon a priori reasoning. Whilst this will not be to everyone’s taste or conviction, he nonetheless provides a cogent and well reasoned argument firmly within that school of thought.

It is Cox’s argument that academics and practitioners alike need to adopt a different way of thinking about business success, at the core of which are concerns for entrepreneurism, and the identification and leverage of critical supply chain assets. Tapping into these concepts or phenomena, he argues, requires business nous, first, to inform the appropriate analysis of supply chains, and second, to support managerial risk‐taking in developing or changing supply chain structures and relationships in order to gain effective control of the critical assets. In his reasoning Cox draws on Michael Porter’s five forces model, Oliver Williamson’s transaction cost economics and John Kay’s competitive advantage model as his main theoretical antecedents. He offers some useful criticism of the strengths and weaknesses of both Porter’s and Kay’s approaches, yet paradoxically by adopting Williamson’s asset specificity arguments wholesale makes little acknowledgement of its inherent weaknesses (see Dietrich, 1994). His analysis is interesting, well written, and in many respects well reasoned. Of concern to the readers of this journal however, he makes no reference to the manufacturing and operations strategy debate, particularly the seminal works of Hill, Platts‐Gregory, New and Slack. Also for me his selective handling of the resource‐ and knowledge‐based views of strategy gave rise to some serious misgivings regarding the identification, value and development of capabilities founded on strategic or critical supply chain assets (see Amit and Schoemaker, 1993; Ford et al., 1986; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Teece et al., 1992).

Notwithstanding these criticisms, Cox has produced a powerful, demanding text. His stated purpose in publishing this book was to pose some concepts and ideas as “work in progress” as he makes clear in his preface. He should be warmly welcomed for exposing himself in this way, while at the same time providing a very valuable theoretical contribution to the field. Read this book. Think about it. Take issue or support it. Don’t ignore it. Such theoretical debate is long overdue in our field, and it is my hope that Cox will stimulate others to take up the mantle of critical theory in the management of operations.