In search of ‘interfirm management’ in supply chains: recognizing contradictions of language and power by listening Alex Faria a , Robin Wensley b, * a Pontificial Catholic University of Parana, Rua Imaculada Conceicao, 1155 Bloco Academico, Curtibata-PR, 80215-901, Brazil b Marketing and Strategic Management Group, Warwick Business School, Warwick University, Coventry CV4 7AL, England, UK Abstract This paper reports on a study designed to investigate the ways in which first-tier suppliers, primarily in the auto-supply industry, respond to significant changes in key customer requirements, particularly those related to costs, and how they do or do not transmit such demands to their own suppliers. The key managerial informants, particularly in Brazil but also retrospectively in the UK, raised much more fundamental questions that challenged various central assumptions in the way that supply chain management approaches portray interorganizational choices. Challenges also arose to the extent to which management researchers and their research should be seen as embedded in a particular set of social and political networks that strongly influence the way in which they interpret issues of power and control. D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Supply chain management; Power; Customers; Change; International comparisons 1. Introduction Industrial network researchers have argued that the supply chain management framework (Wynstra, 1995) and other typical US frameworks (Hakansson and Snehota, 1989) are unrealistic because they fail to problematize the importance of social embeddedness. More specifically, they argue that the representation of business practice in such research does not match with the reality of social exchange processes in the context of so-called markets-as-networks. Supply chain management researchers, thus, typically adopt a representation of a network as characterized by concentration of power in the hands of the key customer firm. Conversely, industrial network researchers prefer a noncentralized representation. More recently, in response to some of the adverse reactions from other UK researchers (Oliver and Wilkinson, 1992) against ‘Japanese recipes,’ UK-based supply chain management researchers moved to embrace the knowledge (Lamming, 1993) developed by the IMP Group. They moved towards the IMP Group theories to build a more encompassing framework that relates to the UK and, possibly other European contexts, despite the skepticism of others who argue that the importance of social embeddedness in business practices is more particular to the sociodemocratic Scandinavian context (Wensley, 1995). In this paper, we describe a particular research project that addressed this debate and involved the construction of appropriate midrange theory (Weick, 1989). We started with an interest in a basic model of change in networks developed by Easton and Lundgren (1992), called the ‘flow through nodes’ model. This model provides a framework where one can analyze the managerial options available to an inter- mediate firm faced with a demand for change from a key customer. Our research focused on supply chains with a primary emphasis on the auto industry. As our research developed, we realized that our empirical findings, particu- larly in Brazil but also in the UK, challenged some key principles of the supply chain framework. Despite some reluctance, we noticed that managers’ narratives and speech acts revealed that researchers misrepresent managers and firms. In other words, managers lead us to the discovery that embeddedness is indeed important in network research, but not particularly in the world ‘out there.’ Two levels of reality were identified as internally related (Tsoukas, 1989) to misrepresentations produced by researchers: firstly, in the language shared and reproduced by managers and research- ers in the West or in ‘Westernized’sites, and secondly, in the professional context of researchers and business schools. 0148-2963/02/$ – see front matter D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII:S0148-2963(00)00190-9 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-2476-523923. E-mail address: robin.wensley@Warwick.ac.uk (R. Wensley). Journal of Business Research 55 (2002) 603 – 610