Defence and trial lecture: Ganesh Prasad Neupane

On Friday 30 October, Ganesh Prasad Neupane will and hold a trial lecture and defend his thesis "Emergence of Supply Chain Risk Management Capability as an Aid to Value Creation: An Empirical Study of Handicrafts Manufacturers of Nepal".

20.10.2015 - Ed.

To address the growing interest in exploring the strategic aspects in contracting and to continue with the trend of studying a resource-adjusted governance framework, this study explores the role of supply chain risk management (SCRM) capability within the standard transaction cost economics (TCE) framework.

This study is performed in two steps; first by explaining the SCRM capability as a firm-specific resource and then examining the influence of this capability on the TCE-governed value creation process. Building on TCE, supply chain management (SCM), and resource-based view considerations this study provides theoretical argumentation for the interactions between SCRM capability and transaction attributes.

After conducting a careful evaluation of the possible alternative industrial settings, the manufacturing and supplier firms of the handicrafts industry (consisting of handmade carpets, Pashmina products, and garments) in Nepal were chosen as the empirical setting of the study. This setting demonstrated sufficient variations in the degree of the chosen variables. A sample of 303 key informants representing supplier side of the supplier-buyer relationships dyads was analyzed using structural equation modelling in Mplus 7.2.

The result demonstrates that the interaction between SCRM capability and supplier-specific investment poses significant positive effects on formal contracting. This clearly indicates that the inclusion of SCRM capability within TCE's discriminant alignment hypotheses is viable. Future empirical researches are needed to further explore this understanding. The study result in relation with suppliers' asset specificity and formal contracting is found consistent with the existing findings. Thus, this study provides a valuable extension of the currently often very western-centric empirical research in operations management and SCM in the context of Nepal.

Time and venue

Friday 30 October in Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Centre, NHH. The trial lecture is at 11:15 and the defence at 13:15.

Prescribed topic for the trial lecture

"Integrating the resource-based view into transaction cost theory: Opportunities and challenges for theory development and empirical studies"

Members of the evaluation committee
Chair: Professor Aksel Rokkan, NHH
Assistant Professor Katri Kaupi, Aalto University
Professor Arnt Buvik, Molde University College

Supervising committee
Professor Sven Arne Haugland, principal supervisor, NHH
Assistant Professor Jon Bingen Sande, BI Norwegian Business School