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The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), driven by the downstream buyers' power, transfers sustainability responsibilities to the upstream supplier. In contrast to the heavily-focused buyers' perspective in the literature, the authors investigate how this buyer-driven SSCM influences suppliers' performance, using the measure of stock market reaction.

Grounded by the resource dependence theory (RDT), the authors empirically analyze the power effect on suppliers. Event study methodology and regression analysis are used, based on a sample of 1977 paired supplier observations from 1990 to 2016.

The result suggests that although a negative stock market reaction for suppliers in SSCM exists, the effect is less negative at a high level of buyer and supplier dependence. For the investigation of the “consolidated SSCM initiative,” where buyers acquire exogenous power by collaboratively managing SSCM with their peers, the authors uncover that the negative impact of this consolidated SSCM initiative can be mitigated by the high interdependence that generates relational norms in the dyads.

The authors focus on dyadic relationships. Future research can use the study's findings to study the SSCM diffusion to lower-tier suppliers.

This paper has good managerial implications for both suppliers and buyers. The authors propose dependence-based strategies for supplier managers to reduce uncertainty in SSCM. Moreover, buyer managers can use the study's findings to strengthen suppliers' commitment.

The novelty of examining the suppliers' perspective contributes to exploring the supply chain impact of SSCM. The authors extend RDT and show that high dependence is not necessarily detrimental to suppliers in this buyer-driven SSCM context. The interesting finding of interdependence in the context of the consolidated SSCM initiative brings new insights that relational norms constrain the leverage of power in the dyads and are beneficial to the power-disadvantageous suppliers.

Drawing on the social presence theory, this study aims to explore how supplier–customer social media interactions influence supplier observers’ trust in the customers and what mechanisms contribute to variation in trust experience.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese suppliers using WeChat for business-to-business interactions. Data were analyzed in three steps: open coding, axial coding and selective coding.

Findings reveal that varied trust is based not only on the categories of social presence of interaction – whether social presence is embedded in informative interactions – but also on the perceived selectivity in social presence. Observer suppliers who experience selectivity during social and affective interactions create a perception of hidden information and an unhealthy relationship atmosphere, and report a sense of emotional vulnerability, thus eroding cognitive and affective trust.

The findings contribute new understandings to social presence theory by exploring the social presence of interactions in a supplier–supplier–customer triad and offer valuable insights into business-to-business social media literature by adopting a suppliers’ viewpoint to unpack the mechanisms of how social presence of interaction positively and negatively influences suppliers’ trust and behavioral responses.