THE EVOLVING NATURE OF THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF TRIADIC SUPPLY CHAINS. THE PERSPECTIVE OF EMBEDDEDNESS

E stablishing and nurturing relationships is a central theme when investigating the competitive advantage of supply chains. Building upon the theory of strategic management, two prominent views regarding relationships as the source of competitive advantage can be distinguished, namely the Resource Based View (RBV) and the relational/network view. The RBV suggests that the competitive advantage is dependent upon resources, capabilities and assets that are housed within individual companies. Among the intangible resources one may distinguish relationships, which are critical for the competitive advantage of a particular actor (Das, Teng, 2002). In other words, establishing relationships is a way to building own key competences determining the competitive advantage. The second view – the relational/ network view underscores that the competitive advantage is derived for all actors involved in the process of resource sharing. Consequently, the network competitive advantage enables all network companies to produce a supernormal profit that cannot be yielded in isolation, and can be only generated through the joint idiosyncratic contributions of the supply chain actors (Dyer, Singh, 1998). The common premise of the resource-based view and the network view is underscoring the role of relationships in deriving the competitive advantage of supply chains. However, in line with these two views, relationships contribute differently to the competitive advantage. Essentially, the RBV considers the firm as the primary unit of analysis, and emphasizes the importance of internal resources residing within individual companies (Dyer, Singh, 1998). Consequently, an individual company as a beneficiary, is able to improve its competitive advantage. On the other hand, the network view highlights the network as the unit of analysis, and emphasizes the role of reciprocal resource sharing in achieving and sustaining the competitive position of all companies involved (Dyer, Singh, 1998). Prior research predominantly investigated the effects of relationships on performance from the standpoint of either one actor in the network or the dyadic arrangement (Son et al., 2016). As a consequence, this has left a gap between traditional theories of the firm and findings concerning the interconnected firms, that can potentially form supply chains. To bridge this gap, we employ the network perspective by referring to triads, more specifically – triadic supply chains depicted as the smallest unit of network (Choi, Wu, 2009). Moreover, prior studies, when elaborating on performance within supply chains, are mostly anchored in either the resource-based view or the dyadic view, as two complementary, but distinct concepts. Consequently, there is a dearth of studies that expand the concept of network competitive advantage as the extension of relational view, and subsequently compare the RBV and network views of competitive advantage from the supply chain perspective. In order to address the above-mentioned gap, we seek to combine two prominent views of the competitive advantage, namely the resource-based view and network view with embeddedness as an important facet of the social capital. Generally, embeddedness is a denial of atomization and highlights that exchange relations are embedded within the larger social system in which they occur and develop. In essence, “Embeddedness refers to the fact that economic action and outcomes . are affected by actors’ dyadic (pairwise) relations and by the structure of the overall network of relations” (Granovetter, 1992, p. 33). Therefore, embeddedness suggests, that no organization is ‘suspended in a vacuum’ and each operates under the influence of social network in which the companies are embedded. In the supply chain context embeddedness can be defined as the extent a firm relies on a network of other actors (Kim, 2014). Accordingly, the goal of the paper is twofold. First, it aims to provide cumulative additions to our understanding the role of embeddedness in shaping distinct, but complementary views on the competitive advantage of supply chains. Second, it seeks to demonstrate that the competitive advantage of supply chains has a dynamic and evolving character. Consequently, by giving practical examples, we show that in some situations, the resource-based competitive advantage might migrate into the network competitive advantage, and vice versa. To achieve these goals, we employ the narrative literature review method to depict verbal descriptions of past studies concentrating on the theories and empirical frameworks which are of interest in this paper (King, He, 2005). Consequently, this method was used to aid in deeper understanding of how the relationships are shaped by the social capital to derive the competitive advantage of supply chains. Likewise, the narrative literature review method was also applied to underscore that the competitive advantage of supply chains is not given once and for all, and due THE EVOLVING NATURE OF THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF TRIADIC SUPPLY CHAINS. THE PERSPECTIVE OF EMBEDDEDNESS