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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the consequences of two strategies of coordinating the online procurement capability and the online channel management capability on competitive performance.Design/methodology/approachA research model is presented to examine the performance impacts of these two coordination strategies, namely the balancing strategy (achieving a close match relationship) and the complementing strategy (maintaining the synergy effect), and tested using firm-level data collected from 196 manufacturing firms in China. Garen's two-stage econometric technique was used to identify the impacts of two coordination strategies on competitive performance.FindingsOur study discusses and compares two different coordination strategies of mitigating the operational tensions across processes and deploying resource configurations for improving competitive performance. Our results show that while the balancing strategy can mitigate the risks resulted, the complementing strategy does not create synergistic effects on the focal firms' competitive performance.Originality/valueThe results extend our understanding of the nature of B2B digital process coordination both in IS management and supply chain operations.

AbstractInternational trade has been increasingly organized in the form of global value chains (GVCs). In this paper, we provide a new method for comparing GVCs across countries and over time. First, we use the World Input–Output Database (WIOD) to construct both the upstream and the downstream global value networks. Second, we introduce a network-based measure of node similarity to compare the GVCs between any pair of countries for each sector and each year available in the WIOD. Our network-based similarity is a better measure for node comparison than the existing ones because it takes into account all the direct and indirect relationships between the country–sector pairs, is applicable to both directed and weighted networks with self-loops, and takes into account externally defined node attributes. As a result, our measure of similarity reveals the most intensive interactions among the GVCs across countries and over time. From 1995 to 2011, the average similarity between sectors and countries have clear increasing trends, which are temporarily interrupted by the recent economic crisis. This measure of the similarity of GVCs provides quantitative answers to important questions about dependency, sustainability, risk, and competition in the global production system.

This study empirically tests the "Culture of Spending" hypothesis (Payne, 199la). According to this hypothesis, the longer congressmen stay in office, the more likely they are to support federal spending. Spending behavior in this study is measured by the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) Congressional Spending Score. Samples are drawn from annual spending scores for all U.S. representatives and senators who served in office between 1975 and 1993. This study finds no statistical support for the hypothesis that congressmen have an increasing propensity to support federal spending the longer they stay in office. Furthermore, we are able to explain why other studies obtain results different from ours.