The paper puts in focus the general observation that traditional
supply chain management provides a limited view of supply
relationships rooted in a conventional industrial logic, focusing on
the physical product, chain relationships and sequential interdependencies.
The authors argue in the paper that the consequence of this
view is that it gives a restricted understanding of firm boundaries and
the scope of cooperative advantage. The ways in which, for example,
logistics service providers create value and interact with the strategies
and structures of their clients are, arguably, better understood if their
own strategies, structures and resource perceptions are acknowledged.
The paper contributes to the aim of extending the view of
supply chains – unchaining logistics from the conventional chain
structure view – by focusing on how such dominating idea structures
can in fact delimit our understanding of, in this case, logistics service
providers’ contribution to well working supply relationships. To this
mean, the idea of separate idea- and activated structures is
introduced, addressing the question if there are any basic differences
between the two, that is, the idea structures and the associated
activated structures. Building on theory and previous research, the
discussion takes its starting point in a matrix model with four
combinations of idea and activated structures.