Social Network Analysis (SNA) has garnered significant attention within Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Operations Management. Nevertheless, despite the extensive body of research on SNA, the existing literature emphasizes the importance of exploring new indicators and novel application areas. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the latest recent trends in applying SNA within the domain of SCM.

The present study comprises two main goals: first, to find recent literature addressing the application of SNA in the field of SCM; and second, to scrutinize the utilization of new and specific metrics in the field of SCM. A comprehensive review of recent literature in this domain is conducted to achieve these goals. The review results reveal a consistently relevant number of publications that apply SNA to SCM. Moreover, in addition to the traditionally recognized sectors like manufacturing, automotive industry, and construction, new application domains are emerging, specifically in fashion and humanitarian relief. Across the reviewed studies, transverse SNA metrics are applied. The metrics identified in the review are network-related and node-related. In addition to new applications and metric calculations, adopting SNA in the SCM field has given rise to new concepts. One such concept is semi-directedness, which supports the analysis of the entire network while providing a new set of semi-directed metrics. This study contributes to the literature by identifying new applications and metrics considered preferable for evaluating supply chain performance, such as semi-directness.

Ana Bento

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Recent Developments from the Use of Social Network Analysis in Supply Chain Management