Rising international cooperation, vertical disintegration, along with a focus on core activities have led to the notion that

firms are links in a networked supply chain. This novel perspective has created the challenge of designing and managing a network of interdependent relationships developed and fostered through strategic collaboration. Although research interests in supply chain management (SCM) are growing, no research has been directed towards a systematic development of SCM instruments. This study identifies and consolidates various supply chain initiatives and factors to develop key SCM constructs conducive to advancing the field. To this end, we analyzed over 400 articles and synthesized the large, fragmented body of work dispersed across many disciplines. The result of this study, through successive stages of measurement analysis and refinement, is a set of reliable, valid, and unidimensional measurements that can be subsequently used in different contexts to refine or extend conceptualization and measurements or to test various theoretical models, paving the way for theory building in SCM. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Supply chain management; Constructs; Instrument development

1. Introduction The origin of the supply chain concept has been inspired by many fields including (1) the quality revolution (Dale et al., 1994), (2) notions of materials management and integrated logistics (Carter and Price, 1993; Forrester, 1961), (3) a growing interest in industrial markets and networks (Ford, 1990; Jarillo, 1993), (4) the notion of increased focus (Porter, 1987; Snow et al., 1992), and (5) influential industry-specific
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fax: +1-216-687-9343. E-mail addresses: i.chen@csuohio.edu (I.J. Chen), apaulraj@hotmail.com (A. Paulraj).
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studies (Womack et al., 1990; Lamming, 1993). Researchers thus find themselves inundated with terminologies such as supply chains, demand pipelines (Farmer and Van Amstel, 1991), value streams (Womack and Jones, 1994), support chains, and many others. The term supply chain management (SCM) was originally introduced by consultants in the early 1980s (Oliver and Webber, 1992) and has subsequently gained tremendous attention (La Londe, 1998). Analytically, a typical supply chain as shown in Fig. 1 is a network of materials, information, and services processing links with the characteristics of supply, transformation, and demand. The term SCM has been used to explain the planning and control of materials and information flows as well as the logistics activities not only internally
0272-6963/$ see front matter 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jom.2003.12.007 120 I.J. Chen, A. Paulraj / Journal of Operations Management 22 (2004) 119150 Fig. 1. An illustration of a companys supply chain.

within a company but also externally between companies (Cooper et al., 1997b; Fisher, 1997). Researchers have also used it to describe