A Taxonomy for Supply Chain Management Literature

Abstract

This paper presents a scheme for classifying the Supply Chain Management (SCM) literature. SCM is broadly defined to include all classical business functions and theoretic management disciplines which impacted this emerging field. Consequently, its literature is very disjoint and disparate. It transcends several academic disciplines and professions. This paper presents a way to define the field in its entirety and delineate all of its facets in a manner that is parsimonious yet discriminating. Sample articles are classified to illustrate the descriptive power and parsimony of this taxonomy and a number of previously published SCM taxonomies are shown to be special cases thereof.

Keywords: Supply chain management, SCM, taxonomy, classification