Making sense of supply chain management: a comparative study of aerospace and construction

Stuart Green, Scott Fernie and Stephanie Weller

Construction Management and Economics, 2005, vol. 23, issue 6, 579-593

Abstract: Current recipes for learning across business sectors too often fail to recognize the embedded and contextual nature of management practice. The existing literature gives little emphasis to the symbiotic relationship between supply chain management and the broader dynamics of context. The aerospace and construction sectors are selected for comparison on the basis that they are so different. The UK aerospace sector has undergone extensive consolidation as a result of the imperatives of global competitive pressures. In contrast, the construction industry has experienced decades of fragmentation and remains highly localized. An increasing proportion of output in the aerospace sector occurs within a small number of large, globally orientated firms. In contrast, construction output is dominated by a plethora of small firms with high levels of subcontracting and a widespread reliance on self-employment. These differences have fundamental implications for the way that supply chain management is understood and implemented in the two sectors. Semi-structured interviews with practitioners from both sectors support the contention that supply chain management is more established in aerospace than construction. The introduction of prime contracting and the increasing use of framework agreements within the construction sector potentially provide a much more supportive climate for supply chain management than has traditionally prevailed. However, progress depends upon an improved continuity of workload under such arrangements.

Keywords: Consolidation; context; industry structure; sense-making; supply chain management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01446190500126882 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:23:y:2005:i:6:p:579-593

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446190500126882

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().