How to Demonstrate Rigor when Presenting Grounded Theory Research in the Supply Chain Management Literature‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Compared with the general and strategic management literature, the supply chain management (SCM) domain exhibits substantial leeway in theory development (Carter and Dresner 2001; Carter 2011). The resulting need for farther theory building in our domain leads to an increasing importance of interpretivism. "Interpretive methods of research start from the position that our knowledge of reality including the domain of human action, is a social construction by human actors and that this applies equally to researchers. Thus, there is no objective reality which can be discovered by researchers and replicated by others, in contrast to the assumptions of positivist science [which assumes objective reality]" (Walsham 1993, p. 5). Recent SCM literature often examines phenomena with complex social behavior, such as trust building in project alliances (Laan, Noorderha-ven, Voordijk and Dewulf 2011), the role of outcome fairness and trust in buyer-supplier relationships (Wagner, Coley and Lindemann 2011), learning processes within supply chain relationships (Knoppen, Christia-anse and Iluysman 2010), and innovation generation in buyer-seller relationships (Roy 2010). As a necessary consequence, there is a pressing need for flexible and customizable research designs (such as interpretive approaches) to support SCM researchers to collect and analyze data across several stages of supply networks (Kent and Flint 1997; Frankel, Naslund and Bolumole 2005) and to gain a holistic and deep understanding of investigated phenomena (Ghauri and Gronhaug 2005; Wright and Heaton 2006; Amis and Silk 2008; Keegan 2009). Such understanding might encourage researchers in our field to further contribute to the development of our own discipline-/supply chain-specific theories which, in turn, expand the knowledge and research scope of our domain and stress the importance of SCM in the business literature (Mello and Flint 2009; Carter 2011). Moreover, as theory-building approaches are the foundation of theory testing (a field of scientific methods in which SCM researchers evidence significant skill), the rigorous and trustworthy emergence of new theory from interpretive studies is important for both interpretive and positivist SCM researchers.