The hollow corporation revisited: Can governance mechanisms substitute for technical expertise in managing buyer‐supplier relationships?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article considers how a firm's system of exchange skills including internal technical expertise and supplier governance mechanisms influence supplier performance, both independently and jointly. The core question is whether inter‐firm governance mechanisms, including both relational and contractual mechanisms, can substitute for a firm's internal technical skills in maintaining supplier performance or, alternatively, whether a firm risks hollowing itself out by de‐emphasizing internal expertise when it outsources. The arguments build on the capabilities, inter‐organizational governance, and supply management literatures. We find that internal technical expertise influences multiple dimensions of supplier performance, including cooperation, price, quality, delivery, and communication, while relational governance also affects supplier performance though in a more focused way. In turn, combinations of technical expertise, relational governance, and contractual agreements jointly affect supplier performance. Thus, firms generate superior supplier performance if they retain internal technical skills as well as increase their use of external governance mechanisms to manage buyer‐supplier relationships.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it