Suchergebnisse

Purpose
Sourcing intermediaries, commonly known as agents or trading companies, represent a useful organisational solution for assisting companies to manage supply risks and to overcome the liability of foreignness. However, the landscape of global business is experiencing rapid and fundamental changes, which leads us to ask whether intermediaries will continue to play a role in global sourcing. This paper aims to understand how sourcing intermediaries ensure a lasting position in the changing setting of global sourcing and information sharing.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper investigates the operations of both Chinese and Nordic (Finnish and Swedish) intermediaries in sourcing from China by analysing qualitative data collected over a period of four years.


Findings
Through the lens of information asymmetry, this paper identifies four distinct informational roles that are used by intermediaries to reduce information asymmetry between suppliers and buyers located in different countries. The paper also examines intermediaries' signalling activities under these roles in a cross-border triad.


Originality/value
The paper contributes to the scientific debate on the usefulness of intermediaries by underlining intermediaries' informational advantage, which provides a new explanation for the survival of intermediaries in a rapidly changing business context. Additionally, this study contributes to research on intermediation strategies by empirically examining both Chinese and Western intermediaries, highlighting the importance of institutional contexts in affecting intermediaries' informational roles.

AbstractThis study investigates the challenges Chinese manufacturing suppliers face in global value chains (GVCs) and how they respond to the challenges through GVC upgrading facilitated by e‐commerce. A multiple case study approach on nine case companies of three company size categories in the Chinese nonwoven fabric product industry was employed. The findings reveal four categories of internal challenges (i.e., a product development challenge, a human resource challenge, a financial resource challenge, and an intellectual resource challenge) and two categories of external challenges (i.e., a market challenge and a macroeconomic challenge) faced by the Chinese suppliers in the e‐commerce context. Furthermore, strategic responses undertaken by Chinese manufacturers are identified and are further related to various types of economic, environmental, and social upgrading by applying the GVC framework. Unlike most extant research on the phenomenon of sourcing from China that approaches it from the viewpoint of global buyers, this study examines the phenomenon from the perspective of Chinese suppliers. Through the theoretical lens of GVC analysis and its core concept of upgrading, this study contributes to GVC research by shedding light on the impact of e‐commerce on suppliers' GVC upgrading practices.