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Introduction
Supply chain collaboration has been increasingly used as a contemporary and generic expression of mutually supportive business-to-business relationships such as partnerships, alliances, supplier–manufacturer/buyer relationships, integration, joint ventures and networks (Holweg et al., 2005; de Leeuw and Fransoo, 2009; Scholten and Schilder, 2015; Soosay and Hyland, 2015; Zhang and Cao, 2018). These relationships share a common feature of companies working together to create some benefits that one cannot achieve (or achieve as much) on their own, unifying collaborations in varying forms, scales, and context. Much of the literature has been devoted to the question of how to develop long-term, close collaboration, which is commonly recognized as an effective business strategy that helps organizations and their supply chains achieve sustainable competitive advantage and superior performance by sharing goals, information, resources and risks (Barratt, 2004; de Leeuw and Fransoo, 2009; Johnston and Staughton, 2009; Cao and Zhang, 2011; Blome et al., 2014). Supply chain integration extends the scale of collaboration from dyad to the entire value chain, including multiple interrelated, dyadic relationships. All supply chain members – such as suppliers, manufacturers, and customers – aim to function as one integrated entity (Flynn et al., 2010; Prajogo and Olhager, 2012). Supply chain networks describe the most complicated supply chain configuration and contain inter-connected supply chains (Wever et al., 2012; Lockamy, 2008), where collaborations involve webs of relationships that all have their own history (Johnston and Staughton, 2009). The complexity of collaborations in a network context, particularly the interactions between relationships, does not seem to have been sufficiently revealed in the literature.
While long-term relationships are widely embraced for enhancing supply chain performance owing to improved communication, cooperation, and coordination between organizations over time (Dyer, 1997; Evans and Berman, 2001; Sleuwaegen et al., 2003; Johnston et al., 2004), the balance can easily be lost as the structure of the supply chain alters. For instance, joint ventures (JVs) are one form of collaborations that trigger “ripples” along their supply chains horizontally and vertically. JVs may involve organizations paying to create new and independent affiliates that they own together (Gill and Butler, 2003). As two or more organizations combine their resources to exploit new opportunities through a contract (Doz and Hamel, 1998), the supply chain...