روندهای گذشته، حال و آینده از مدیریت عرضه و خرید: مروری بر ادبیات گسترده

This research aims to evaluate the state of the art of Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM). This is carried out through a wide, in-depth, and structured examination of published works. More than one thousand papers (i.e., 1055) published in 20 peer-reviewed journals were collected and analyzed to provide a snapshot of PSM research, including the extent of the overall production, the background theory used, the unit of analysis, the research method, and the main topics investigated. Other literature reviews related to PSM have been conducted in the past but have focused primarily on specific topics and/or considering a narrower set of publications. Furthermore, the authors define a framework useful for analyzing the PSM literature and outline the state of the art of PSM research from a content-specific perspective, including an evaluation of the maturity of PSM research as a discipline.

This study aims to assess the current state of the art and the trends of Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) by conducting a broad and structured examination of peer-reviewed journal articles in recent years. Following Monczka, Handfield, Guinipero, and Patterson (2010), we refer to PSM as the “strategic approach to planning for and acquiring the organization's current and future needs through effectively managing the supply base.” We therefore make a distinction between PSM and the broader concept of Supply Chain Management (SCM), which is commonly referred to as “a process-oriented approach to managing product, information, and funds flows across the overall supply network, from the initial suppliers to the final end consumers” (Metz, 1998). In other words, we focus on the source side of the well-known SCOR model promoted by the Supply Chain Council (SCC, 2008), and we exclude topics dealing with planning, production, distribution, and logistics. As a matter of fact, all these processes require specific tools and techniques. As a consequence production planning, distribution, logistics and others have consolidated as stand-alone, though interconnected academic disciplines. Similarly, PSM increasingly gained its autonomy over the years both in research and practice. On the one hand academic journals explicitly address PSM issues; on the other hand, companies increasingly design specific PSM organizational roles and responsibilities. In the end, we look at PSM as a stand-alone academic discipline within the broader field of SCM. This is in line with what Larson and Halldorsson (2002) define as the unionist perspective over this issue (see Fig. 1). There are few doubts about the increased relevance of PSM for companies of various industries including manufacturing and services. Business organizations have experienced rapid external environmental and internal organizational changes due to increasing i) outsourcing, ii) globalization, and iii) e-business. Massive outsourcing has occurred in many sectors; as a result, companies tend to spend more money on procurement and to buy not just commodities but also more specialties and customized services. Globalization in trade, commerce and finance has stressed the need to seek opportunities for global sourcing and, in many cases, to revisit make-or-buy strategic decisions, thus combining offshoring and outsourcing. Finally, the advent of the Internet in all business functions and processes has posed challenges and created opportunities for e-procurement, e-auctions and other practices in the field of PSM. The combined effect of outsourcing, globalization and e-business has raised several critical issues for PSM as a function within organizations as a process that spans organizational boundaries and as a profession. Both companies and the purchasing professional face new challenges as PSM becomes more strategic and complex. Moreover, PSM has gained growing attention among business schools, where the subject is increasingly taught in both open enrollment programs and corporate training courses. Several handbooks and textbooks have appeared over the last twenty years – e.g., Van Weele, Monczka, and Lysons – thus corroborating the perception of PSM as an institutionalized field of management. However, from a research perspective, supply management can hardly be considered an established discipline in its full maturity. “Supply management: is it a discipline?” is the evocative title of an article by Harland et al. published by IJOPM in 2006. At that time, and based on a relatively small sample of 41 papers, the authors concluded that although the internal coherence of the field was high, there was not enough evidence of a theoretical debate to support the identification of supply management as a fully established discipline. Instead, PSM was identified as an emerging discipline in an early stage of its evolutionary cycle. Before and following Harland et al. (2006), others have proposed systematic literature reviews (LR) not primarily to answer the crucial question about the disciplinary status of PSM but with the purpose of identifying emerging issues, trends and gaps – for example, Giunipero, Hooker, Matthews, Yoon, and Brudvig (2008) – or to analyze and summarize the history of specific distinguished journals – for example, Wynstra (2010), who focuses on the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and Carter and Ellram (2003), who focus on the thirty-five-year history of the Journal of Supply Chain Management. Other recent reviews show a narrow scope as they focus on specific issues. For example, Johnsen (2009) reviews 30 key papers on suppliers' involvement in new product development, and Miemczyk, Johnsen, and Macquet (2012) address sustainable purchasing and supply management analyzing a sample of 73 contributions. A careful analysis of all major LRs on PSM left us with the opinion that previous reviews are not extensive enough either in source coverage or in their breadth of topics to provide a fresh and comprehensive picture of the entire domain of PSM or to determine whether it should be considered an established discipline or one still fighting to emerge. In addition, for the most part, LRs of the past have been mainly descriptive – offering statistics for topics addressed – or normative – suggesting in which direction research should be developed. Finally, some of the most valuable reviews concern Supply Chain Management (SCM) at large, including PSM as well as other issues, such as demand management and distribution networks. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we are going to extend previous analyses by providing a refreshed and comprehensive review of PSM academic literature that is broader and deeper than previous reviews. Therefore, we examine a large number of papers – over one thousand – covering a wide set of highly qualified academic journals over a large time span. We examine how overall research production has evolved over time, considering units of analysis, research methods, and topics under investigation. Along with this goal, we aim to focus on Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM), omitting other SCM-related topics. Second, we intend to assess the theoretical foundations of the PSM literature and how they have changed and possibly strengthened over time. We also aim to position PSM research in its evolutionary cycle, as it appears at the beginning of the current decade. We intend to outline the nature of the contributions, as they are exploratory, theory-building, or theory-testing. In general, we aim to offer an analytical perspective regarding the discipline's origins and trajectory. We hope that by meeting the above two goals, we will enable scholars already active in the field and new researchers to potentially i) gain a clearer understanding of where PSM currently stands and ii) find some support in designing cutting-edge research that allows PSM to advance and consolidate as a discipline. The article is structured as follows: the next section investigates past LRs about PSM to assess the need for further research in this direction and establish our objectives. We then describe the methodology followed to deliver a systematic LR, which comprises four stages: source identification, source selection, source evaluation, and data analysis. Next, we analyze the database obtained and provide key statistics. Finally, we critically discuss the results in light of our objectives and provide main conclusions.

Having the chance to classify 1055 papers from 20 journals enabled us to meet the objectives of this study, i.e., expanding previous LRs about PSM and discussing the research state of the art. Given the breath and the scope of our analysis, we believe that this effort will certainly benefit the research community. We defined a framework to scout PSM-related studies and provided a longitudinal analysis of the research production according to several perspectives, including the overall amount of PSM studies, the unit of analysis, the research method adopted, the theory used, and the main content of the articles. The PSM field has grown dramatically in the last decade and has recently matured in terms of its theoretical background as well as its breath of research methods applied. Such a review had been lacking; now, both within and outside the PSM community, it is possible to obtain a comprehensive understanding of how the field has evolved, which topics have been explored most and least frequently, and how mature research has become thus far. PSM scholars will be able to position their work in the literature and easily grasp the relevance and complexity of a given topic. Despite the overall growing trend, PSM research remains under development: few theories account for the majority of studies, and few methodologies prevail. We believe that PSM has expanded its boundaries through the exploitation of new theories and new methods that have proven to be effective in other disciplines, such as collaborative research or experimentation. Although such a contribution is oriented primarily toward an academic audience, we believe that it may also be interesting and useful for practitioners, who will be able to obtain an understanding of what research is focusing on, identifying sources of valuable information as well as listing the relevant topics (and issues) for practice. This study is not meant to provide in-depth comments on specific PSM topics, even though this would certainly be useful to researchers. Future studies might ground on this snapshot and analyze peculiar characteristics of PSM research, such as dominant theoretical perspectives and most common methodologies that are suitable to address specific phenomena. In addition, it would be interesting to provide definitions and theoretical frameworks about consolidated (e.g. reverse marketing or partnership) as well as emerging topics (e.g. sustainability or global sourcing). A further limitation of the study is that we only deal with PSM academic peer-reviewed literature, leaving out a heterogeneous set of publications. For example, it would be interesting to compare scholars' and managers' perspectives by looking at professional magazines or by involving practitioners in the review and interpretation of the literature. Finally, a very large set of analyses is possible on the base of our database of papers, and only a limited subset has been presented in this paper, also due to space limitations. We hope that other scholars further expand and update this study, possibly grounding their efforts on a shared research protocol. Future updates of this paper will thus provide additional details and deeper analysis by enlarging the time-frame and the set of journals/papers as well as by validating/updating the research framework.