UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Cheng, Liang-ChiehSubject: search.filters.subject.Business Administration, General

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    DRIVERS OF ORGANIZATIONAL MODULARITY IN SUPPLY CHAINS - A CROSS SECTIONAL STUDY OF U.S. MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES
    (2005-12-07) Cheng, Liang-Chieh; Grimm, Curtis M.; Dresner, Martin E.; Logistics, Business and Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation investigates the driving forces behind the emerging phenomenon of "organizational modularity", by which firms create "virtual" organizations through outsourcing functions, by using contract manufacturers, by forming alliances, and by using temporary employment contracts, as they organize their activities within supply chains. Using transaction cost analysis as the overarching theoretical framework for the analysis, a number of hypotheses that relate industry structure to modularity are developed. A large scale industry-level data set is used to test the hypotheses. Statistical results show that heterogeneity of supply sources, and scale economies in focal and downstream industries, are positively associated with greater use of modular forms, whereas other factors, such as the concentration of upstream and downstream industries, are associated with less modularity. In the current outsourcing environment, these findings provide crucial insights to capture the dynamics of the prevalent modular networks.