Pergamon European Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management Vol 2, No 2/3, pp. 87-105, 1996 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Oreat Britain. All rights reserved 0969-7012/96 $15.00 + 0.00 0969-7012(95)00024-0 The anthropology of the supply chain Fiefs, clans, witch-doctors and professors Howard Price KPMG Management Consultants, 8 Salisbury Square, London EC4Y 8BB, UK; and Centre for Research in Strategic Purchasing and Supply, School of Management, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK Organizations in the West have learned the importance of organizing their businesses into cross-functional teams, focused on key business processes. In the future, even this will not be enough. Successful businesses will create value by implementing innovations across organiza- tional boundaries: 'cross-functionar teams will become 'cross-organizationar teams. Supply chain management will need to nurture successful innovation within these cross-organizational teams. The fundamental challenges are social rather than technical, involving issues of trust, co-operation, power and politics. As a result of this, the roles and relationships required for best practice supply management are changing. This paper introduces new models that have been developed in order to understand the cultural context of customer-supplier relationships, and the roles and relationships needed for successful innovation in supply chains. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Keywords: supply chain management, innovation, anthropology Imagine a piece of land twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. Picture it wild, inhabited by animals small and large. Now visualize a compact group of sixty human beings, camping in the middle of this territory. Try to see yourself sitting there, as a member of this tiny tribe, with the landscape, your landscape, spreading out around you, farther than you can see. No one apart from your tribe uses this vast space. It is your exclusive home- range, your tribal hunting ground. Every so often the men in your group set off in pursuit of prey. The women gather fruits and berries. The children play noisily around the camp site, imitating the hunting techniques of their fathers. If the tribe is successful and swells in size, a splinter group will set off to colonize a new terri- tory. Little by little the species will spread. Imagine a piece of land twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. Picture it civilized, inhabited by machines and buildings. Now visualize a compact group of six million human beings camping in the middle of this territory. See yourself sitting there, with the complexity of the huge city spreading out all around you, farther than you can see. Now compare these two pictures. In the second scene there are a hundred thousand individuals for every one in the first scene. The space has remained the same. Speaking in evolutionary terms, this dramatic change has been almost instantaneous; it has taken a mere few thousand years to convert scene one into scene two. The human animal appears to have adapted brilliantly to his extraordinary new condition, but he has not had time to change biologically, to evolve into a new, genet- ically civilized species. The civilizing process has been accomplished entirely by learning and conditioning. Biologically he is still the simple tribal animal depicted in scene one. He lived like that, not for a few centuries, but for a million hard years. So much has happened in the past few thousand years, the urban years, the crowded years of civilized man, that we find it hard to grasp the idea that this is no more than a minute part of the human story. It is so familiar to us that we vaguely imagine that we grew into it gradually and that, as a result, we are biologically fully equipped to deal with all the new social hazards. If we force ourselves to be coolly objective about it, we are bound to admit that this is not so. It is only our incredible plasticity, our ingenious adaptability, that makes it seem so. The simple tribal hunter is doing his best to wear his new trappings lightly and proudly; but they are complex, 87