Bridges over troubled water: Suppliers as connective nodes in global supply networks

Increasingly, industrial selling and purchasing is embedded in supplier networks extending national borders. The internationalisation of supply activities adds considerable complexity to the coordination tasks performed by suppliers. Traditionally, supply chain management was upstream-oriented, focusing on the leading contractor's supply chain management. However, the increased demand for flexibility echoes down in supply network, decentralising the coordination task. We focus on subcontractors as connective nodes in supply networks and outline how coordinative roles are linked to the diversity of exchange nodes. We develop a typology for the coordinating roles taken on by subcontractors and use case studies to ground our explorative efforts empirically.