THE ROLE OF CLAN IN THE HYBRID AND ALTERNATIVE MODES OF SUPPLY CHAIN GOVERNANCE

Background: Recent studies in the domain of supply chain management underline the significance of the contractual and relational aspects of governance, at the same time ignoring the relevance of classical hierarchy. To respond to this challenge, our study posits that the market and hierarchy are both embedded in the wider social context, and as such they can only apply to some degree of relational aspects, referred in this research to as clan. Concomitantly, clan rarely acts as a sole mode of supply chain governance; quite the contrary, it can be either a hybrid (anchored between market and hierarchy) or an alternative (neither market nor hierarchy) mode of governance. By returning to the classical roots of governance of market and hierarchy as two bipolar modes, the goal of the paper is to compare diverse modes of supply chain governance (with the emphasis on the hybrid and alternative modes) in terms of the strength of clan.

Methods: The study involves two stages of multivariate statistical analysis. In the first step, the variables indicating certain modes of market and hierarchy of upstream and downstream dyads were narrowed down to the main underlying multi-item constructs through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Varimax Rotation. In the second step of the analysis, the factor scores obtained through the PCA for market and hierarchical governance were used in cluster analysis.

Results: The study reveals that the hybrid modes of governance (especially relational governance) anchored between bipolar modes of market and hierarchy demonstrate a higher portion of clan in comparison to hierarchy as the sole mode of governance in triadic supply chains. At the same time, triadic supply chains run by both market and hybrid governance do not differ from each other, as they indicate similar and significantly higher mean ranks for clan. The study reveals that the alternative (neither market nor hierarchical) modes of governance do not indicate higher portion of clan as compared to market and hierarchy as two sole modes of governance in triadic supply chains.

Conclusions: The study shows that as the mode of governance clan takes a leading role in the hybrid modes of governance as compared to the alternative mechanisms. This may suggest that either the hybrid modes are much stronger enhanced by social dimensions encapsulated in clan than the alternative modes or the essence of clan in the hybrid modes is not the same as the essence of clan in the alternative modes of governance. Consequently, we conclude that the silver bullet for solving this problem may reside within the nature of clan, which is significantly different in both modes of governance.