Research On The Agricultural Supply Chain’s Organizational Evolution And Relationship Governance

In recent years, the co-production, contract sales, strategic alliances and other contractual vertical collaboration have increasingly become the new economy organization form in the field of agricultural product supply chain. Identifying the general rule of formation, organization and development of agricultural product supply chain and understanding the relationship among main members in the supply chain and the relationship between governance mechanisms and performance are of great significance, which can help to explore the formation of the agricultural product competitiveness from a new perspective, analyze the development direction of modern agriculture industry organization, and find new agricultural product quality safety guarantee mechanism.In this dissertation, research start form the characteristic of Inter-firm Organization of agricultural supply chain, We systematically explained the formation of the supply chain organizations using labor division theory, transaction cost theory and inter-organizational relations theory. The study concluded that the division of labor is the prerequisite to form a supply chain organization; and reducing the transaction costs, accessing to complementary resources and reaping excessive profits are the internal fundamental reasons to form the supply chain organization. Then, we showed that this conclusion can be applied to well explain the formation and development of the supply chain of agricultural products,we deeply explored the internal relationships among members of the agricultural supply chain organization by combining the commodity exchange relationships, social exchange relationships and knowledge exchange relationships. The governance structure of the agricultural supply chain organizations can be represented as relationships. Based on the degree of closeness of relationships, the agricultural supply chain can be characterized into five types:a more stable relationship with partners, the partner of choice of non-contractual stable relationship, formal contractual relations, strategic alliances based on relationship and strategic alliances based on property rights. In the dissertation, we established an indexing system to characterize different forms of organization of the agricultural product supply chain based on the commodity exchange relationships, social exchange relationships and exchange of knowledge. Our indexing system includes eleven dimensions:the level of relationship-specific investment in assets, the level of uncertainty of the transaction, the length of cooperation, partner selection is expected constraints, the degree of dependence, the degree of trust, the level of commitment, the frequency of information exchange, characteristics of knowledge transfer, and degree of knowledge integration. We analyzed the factors that affect governance structure of the agricultural supply chain organizations. We suggest that resource dependence, the level of development of agricultural producer organizations, collaboration beliefs, collaborative capabilities, product attributes and national characteristics that affect agricultural supply chain organization’s governance structure is the main factor.Based on the qualitative analysis of agricultural supply chain members’relationship governance, we constructed a structural equation model to represent the structural relationships, member activities, and the performance in the agricultural supply chain organizations. We applied our model to study the relationship between agricultural product wholesalers and suppliers. We observed that1) interdependence and satisfaction between bilateral’s mutual action and gain their relationship performance;2) Investment of one party on the other directly get the bilateral relationship performance;3) the satisfaction of pre-repeated transactions establishes the bilateral’s trust and indirectly enhances the level of commitment of the onep party to the other;4) the increasingly understanding of the importance of interdependence by one party directly improves of the level of commitment of the party to the other.Overall view, our research showed that pursuit of division of labor economy is fundamental cause of the formation of agricultural products supply chain organization; the member relationships of agricultural supply chain organization is the combination of commodity exchange relationship, social exchange relationship and knowledge exchange relationship; informal governance mechanisms plays a prominent role in the agricultural supply chain organization governance, it shows that relationship-specific asset investment and joint action are the main reason for improving performance of the agricultural product supply chain and satisfaction and trust between members of agricultural product supply chain promote close relationships. Our research is innovative in following areas:1) we provided innovative way to interpret agricultural product supply chain organization;2) we provided innovative explanation of the relationship among members of agricultural product supply chain;3) we estabalished a new indexing system to characterize different forms of organization of the agricultural product supply chain;4) our empirical analysis built a new "structure-action-performance" framework to study agricultural product supply chain.