Abstract
Purpose - Traditional perspectives of manufacturing strategy tend to focus internal transforming activities, including how transformed resources are handled and the relations with other value-creating operations inside and outside the firm. Manufacturing management evolved as a discipline with little clear alignments with business strategy and firm positioning. Even manufacturing strategy is often delimited to the boundaries of the firm and its dyad relations to collaborating actors such as suppliers and distributors. This paper aims at exploring and demonstrating what a network perspective can add to the understanding of manufacturing management and strategy.
Design/methodology/approach - The research design is built on principal reasoning of future manufacturing strategy. Articles and conference papers together with over 25 years of field studies constitute the empirical base. An industry was chosen to demonstrate the application of the research framework of horizontal and vertical technologies.
Findings - The analysis indicates that manufacturing occurs within open-production systems here called extraprises as an extension to enterprises with their inside the firm focus. Taking a network perspective, it is suggested that a conceptual framework of horizontal and vertical technologies offers a fruitful conceptualization to identify the content and meaning of future manufacturing strategy.
Research implications/implications - The network theory conceptualization takes the view of manufacturing systems a further step beyond systems theory and contributes a richer framework for manufacturing strategy research.
Originality/value - It is argued that future directions of manufacturing strategy will gain from taking a network perspective using network theory with its foundations in actors, resources, and activities.
