Gilles Paché
email: gilles.pache@univ-amu.fr

Governance of Professional Sport Leagues: Towards a Convergence Between North America and Europe?

Keywords: collective action, competition, governance, professional sport leagues

The governance of professional sports clubs is an increasingly studied research subject. This can be attributed to the very high economic and financial stakes, which often overshadows the sporting stakes. Two governance models coexist: (1) the European model, based on the competition between clubs to individually increase the revenues of each club; (2) the North American model, based on a complex regulatory system to collectively increase the revenues of the whole franchise. This paper shows the founding principles of each model and underlines, by considering the case of European football (soccer), that a convergence of the two governance models is likely in the future. The North American model of collective governance of a franchise could become necessary in Europe, which would completely transform the competitive landscape of professional clubs. It would therefore demonstrate the superiority of collective governance with a view to creating value for clubs of a same franchise.

I. INTRODUCTION

When the FIFA's corruption scandal broke out in May 2015, after the revelations to American justice of a "repented person" (Chuck Blazer, a member of FIFA's executive committee until 2013), the general public was astonished to discover the huge financial stakes linked to professional football (soccer). The international media announced a turnover of approximately 1.5 billion US dollars, with 338 million US dollars of profits accumulated between 2011 and 2014. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil alone generated 70 million US dollars, whereas the 2010 World Cup in South Africa only generated 40 million US dollars. Thus, the FIFA has become a powerful multinational, negotiating TV rights and licensing rights toughly, and paying its employees generously, whose financial reports modestly call "key management personnel". Even though the salary of the former FIFA president, the very controversial Sepp Blatter, was kept secret, some reliable estimates evaluate it at 6 million US dollars per year, which may be compared to President Barak Obama's 400,000 US dollars! Those figures turn heads, and raise considerable criticism, including among the most tenacious football fans. It is, however, an indisputable reality: nowadays, professional football is a powerful show industry. As such, it is relevant to focus on its governance modes, in the same way as various academic works focus on private company governance [START_REF] Tricker | Corporate governance: principles, policies, and practices[END_REF].

For instance, Manchester United signed a 450-millioneuro sponsoring contract with Nike, which durably shelters it from any sport misfortune. As for TV rights, they have shot up within a few years to the extent that professional football and its stars attract an increasing number of viewers (that are also potential consumers). The famous Barcelona FC has granted its TV rights to the company Mediapro for seven successive seasons for one million euros, whereas the TV rights for the English Premier League, certainly the football championship with the highest level of game on the planet, have skyrocketed since 2001, in particular on foreign markets. The soaring is not close to stopping as the English Premier League TV rights have increased again by 71% for the 2013-2016 period compared to 2010-2013. But the European professional football is not a show industry like others. While takings from stadium attendance represent an increasingly smaller part of the major clubs' budgets, at the expense of TV rights sales and commercial/merchandising, the most fervent supporters have become essential for creating positive dynamics to reinforce the clubs' brand image and thus strongly increase the income resulting from the sales of TV rights. Prestigious clubs such as Real Madrid, Manchester United or the Olympique de Marseille rely on the keen interest of people during matches to benefit from considerable media and financial results.

One of the main questions focuses here on the capability of professional clubs to generate continuously increasing revenues by implementing the most lucrative mechanisms of competition organisation. The management of clubs also raised issues relative to the retention of fans, who attend stadiums for games, but, more generally, show an emotional attachment characterised by the purchasing of the club's products (jerseys, flags, posters, etc.) or a subscription to thematic TV channels to follow the performances of their club. Furthermore, the attachment can be based on quasimystical dimensions, as noted by Fulconis and Paché [START_REF] Fulconis | Football passion as a religion: the four dimensions of a sacred experience[END_REF]. For a long time, professional football cultivated the establishment of local rooting in clubs, which is due to privileged financing: match day revenues. Nowadays, this model is outmoded and has been replaced by the importance of revenues independent from stadium attendance. The issue is to know how to increase the revenues, including by implementing a collective governance of clubs, which are rivals regarding prestigious sports titles, both at national and international levels. The aim of the paper is to address a central subject relative to competitive conditions that structure an industry, in reference to a model that has proven itself in North America, and that many hope to transfer to the European professional football context.

II. EUROPEAN MODEL-THE INDIVIDUAL COMPETITION

Professional football as an economic activity has a strong uncertainty dimension to the extent that a club's success is linked to sporting parameters that are only partially controllable [START_REF] Paché | Les stratégies de création et d'appropriation de la valeur dans un contexte d'incertitude majeure: le cas du football professionnel[END_REF]. Despite the efforts to build a competitive team, the history is full of examples of major clubs that were demoted to lower divisions; on the contrary, the less prestigious, but driven by an inexplicable momentum, have often obtained surprising results, for example a qualification in an international competition. Yet, as a show industry, football is in search of stability in order for the agreed investments to be amortised thanks to a flow of constant revenues. Is the approach of leaving this flow at the mercy of mixed results on the field or of a risky recruitment of players, considering that the glorious uncertainty of sports must rule the life and death of a club as a business, still relevant today? No, says Sonntag [START_REF] Sonntag | Entre jeu universel et enjeu national: le football contemporain[END_REF], according to whom we have entered a hypermodernity of football, characterised by "a dissolution of a territorial link, a multinational mix and a shifting of clubs into brands". This hypermodernity campaigns for the construction of powerful clubs as brands guaranteeing their durability independently of any sporting uncertainty. From this perspective, the defence of the brand's territory leads each club to maintain a fierce competition with its rivals; such as the struggles between Real Madrid and Barcelona FC in Spain, Olympique de Marseille and Paris-Saint-Germain in France.

Opting for an accounting-based approach, Meyssonnier and Mincheneau [START_REF] Meyssonnier | Le contrôle de gestion des clubs de football professionnel[END_REF] particularly insist on the necessity to control uncertainties in order to transform football into a highly profitable activity basing it on management principles that are identical to those of business organisations. According to them, the predominance of fixed costs, linked in particular to the often exorbitant salaries of players, and volatile revenues, linked to sporting performances, risk worsening the accounting result, occasionally or durably. To avoid such a situation that threatens the durability of a club, it is necessary to isolate unpredictability factors depending on the level of perceived uncertainties. The ideal scenario is for sporting-based uncertainties to lose their importance, by evaluating business activities that are independent from the players' performance on the pitch. In other words, to do this in such a way that the club products, with the exception of games strictly speaking, be entirely controllable. With this logic a professional club is in rivalry with all other competitors, without a planned collective action approach, as these rivals are by definition at the root of sporting uncertainties that may lead to be demoted to a lower division and to disastrous effects in terms of loss of TV rights and licensing rights.

The control of uncertainties by owners of professional football clubs, including attempts to "set up" games at the end of the season, responds to an economic rationality that purists, including Michel Platini who is one of its most famous representatives, strongly decry, but whose importance is undeniable when it comes to making an organisation durable and to growing an invested capital. Indeed, shortly after being elected to the head of the UEFA in June 2007, the same Michel Platini raised the alarm: "There is a serious threat to the development of European football, the omnipresence of money. Our goal is not to take refuge in an outmoded and elitist romanticism, but money has never been football's ultimate goal, winning trophies remains the main objective. Does Europe really wish to shrink sport to a sad and simple business operation?" (cited in [START_REF] Schotté | La structuration du football professionnel européen: les fondements sociaux de la prévalence de la 'spécificité sportive[END_REF]). Obviously, the glorious uncertainty of sports, with David's surprising victory over Goliath, has its virtues to excite the crowds. But the vision is shared with difficulty by club owners, usually businessmen [START_REF] Schotté | La structuration du football professionnel européen: les fondements sociaux de la prévalence de la 'spécificité sportive[END_REF], seeking a durable and efficient business model, subject to no or little uncertainty regarding revenues. For these people, trophies should be won, provided that they generate substantial revenues. As noted by Dessus and Raballand [START_REF] Dessus | L'Etat peut-il rendre compétitif les clubs de football français?[END_REF], club owners eventually seek to "maximise, rationally, the sporting performance under budgetary constraint", the latter resulting from the market size, stadium capacity and reputation.

Yet, it is important to be precise on what is understood by "control of uncertainties" in such a particular context, given that, in the end, we can observe a strong correlation between sporting and economic performances in Europe [START_REF] Montchaud | De l'intérêt de l'approche de l'économie industrielle pour le management stratégique: une application originale aux clubs européens de football de l'élite[END_REF]. According to us, three uncertainty reduction strategies are identifiable: (1) uncertainty reduction through the stabilisation of the competitive world, by campaigning for the implementation of leagues (franchises) based on the North American model; [START_REF] Bastien | L'influence des crises économiques et financières sur le football européen, Laboratoire Regards[END_REF] uncertainty reduction at the level of financial inflows, by promoting TV rights and licensing rights rather than match day revenues;

(3) uncertainty reduction regarding the number of players, by trying to extend the duration of contracts, most likely in order to maximise some of the revenues linked to an anticipated transfer during the course of the contract. If the two latter strategies have been largely used for years, this is not the case for the first one. This strategy implies the implementation of a collective governance between professional clubs that consider they severally and jointly belong to a single industry whose performance will be even more efficient if the strict rules of income sharing have been retained. This is even more true in a situation of strong vulnerability of clubs to exogenous economic shocks, whether direct or indirect [START_REF] Bastien | L'influence des crises économiques et financières sur le football européen, Laboratoire Regards[END_REF].

III. NORTH AMERICAN MODEL-THE COLLECTIVE ACTION

The reduction of environmental uncertainty, and in particular that of sports, through the implementation of a franchise at a European level (called Super League), whose access seems to be reserved for a few prestigious and mediatised clubs, has been regularly brought up over the past fifteen years in the professional football world. As it is organised in Europe, professional football is based on the principle of sporting merit with a chance given to less renowned clubs to participate in national and international competitions if their sporting performances grants them access to the elite division. On the contrary, a prestigious club may be demoted to a lower division in the event of defaulting sporting performances during a season. Consequently, it is the sports world that claims autonomy from economic world based on financial investments that absolutely need to be made profitable [START_REF] Schotté | La structuration du football professionnel européen: les fondements sociaux de la prévalence de la 'spécificité sportive[END_REF]. The logic is totally different in professional sports in North America. Indeed, the main principle is that of the franchise in which a club, whatever its sporting performances, keeps its position in the capacity of a franchisee. The issue is no longer the successful ranking of a club compared to another to capture revenues, but rather the successful ranking of a league compared to another to maximise the amount of TV rights which, for that matter, explains the failure of the North American soccer league in the 1980s (and its emblematic New York Cosmos team).

The franchise constituted an economic unit of reference based on cartelisation and deliberate collective governance. Franchise members pursue a coordinated strategy to develop and sell an attractive product [START_REF] Hoehn | The americanization of European football[END_REF][START_REF] Kuper | Soccernomics[END_REF]. The potential reorganisations are planned by the franchise itself that additionally defines modes of sophisticated regulations concerning the transfer of the most talented players in order to balance the operating forces and avoid the outrageous and durable domination of a club. This is the well-known draft synthesised, regarding its mechanisms, by Bourg and Gouguet [START_REF] Bourg | Economie du sport[END_REF]: "The draft grants clubs exclusive rights on new players taking part in the franchise and coming from university championships, minor leagues or foreign leagues.

The plan aims at sportingly balancing the competition as well as limiting the rivalry between clubs. The choice is done in the reverse order of the last season's ranking". In other words, the clubs with the worst ranking at the end of the season, but that are not threatened by demotion, have a sort of pre-emptive right enabling them to recruit the best talents, or at least the most promising, in order to attempt to shine during the next season and surprise spectators with unexpected performances. This would arouse interest of TV networks and lead to exceptional audiences during each Super Bowl.

Here, we unquestionably are in a situation of collective governance, but that does not exclude competition on a sporting level. In other words, it is a mutual interdependence that creates the franchise governance [START_REF] Sloane | The economics of professional football revisited[END_REF]. The fact that clubs of a franchise cannot survive without one another is reinforced by the salary cap rule, which is the imposed capping of the global total payroll of players on the league. It implies a collective negotiation, often harsh, between players and club owners with diverging objectives. Unlike European professional football, there is no way in which rich clubs dry out the market of its talents and create a durable distortion of sporting competition conditions. This "control" strategy over players is the object of numerous debates, in particular from a legal standpoint [START_REF] Graves | Controlling athletes with the draft and the salary cap: are both necessary?[END_REF], and it shows a will to mutualise revenues for the benefit of all the industries' stakeholders (the franchise), that is followed by a collective sale of TV rights, which is vital for the survival of any franchise. To understand the issues at stake, the Table I suggests a comparative synthesis of the two structures: the North American franchise and the European professional football.

IV. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

There is considerable discussion in Europe to convince or, on the contrary, fight the implementation of a European franchise, with the major risk of some clubs not playing in their national championship any more, or having a second team play composed of players coming from the secondary market. On a political level, the European Union seeks to protect the traditional European sporting structures, by resisting the attempts to implement systems only based on the maximisation of financial benefits for elite clubs alone [START_REF] Pijetlovic | EU sports law and breakaway leagues in football[END_REF], in particular in the framework of a franchise system. The question is of the likelihood of a European franchise raising economic and political questions [START_REF] Solberg | Would European soccer clubs benefit from playing in a Super League?[END_REF]. Indeed, professional football questions the governance where contradictory interests oppose concerning national teams, sports equipment manufacturers, television channels and clubs, to speak only of those four stakeholders. Furthermore, each club sets particular expectations in terms of results, and any deviation from the expectations are more or less rapidly corrected to avoid jeopardising its future performances [START_REF] Lassalle | L'écart entre performance et aspirations affecte-t-il la performance future d'une organisation? Le cas de la Ligue des Champions UEFA (1994-2008)[END_REF]; yet, those expectations largely depend on the desires of the owner of the professional club, in particular on a political level.

It would be interesting to analyse professional football from a business networks power regimes model. This model identifies the different stakeholders and evaluates which are capable of capturing the most value, given their privileged position in the network [START_REF] Lonsdale | Player power: capturing value in the English football supply network[END_REF]. The discussion about the adoption of a North American model by Europe seems pointless for two reasons. The first reason is of institutional nature, and the second reason if of sporting nature:

1. On an institutional level, in order to avoid intolerable financial drift, leading over half of European clubs of Premier League to show net losses at the beginning of the years 2010, the UEFA instituted a referendum on financial fair-play aiming at regulating the sector (with an ad hoc authority and tools), and therefore bring back healthy rivalry in a coherent collective space [START_REF] Peeters | Financial fair play in European football[END_REF]. In brief, a relatively complex and specific licensing system was implemented, granting a club access to a European competition only if "each plays with the means it is capable of managing" [START_REF] Dermit-Richard | Football professionnel en Europe: un modèle original de régulation financière sectorielle[END_REF]. The target is to avoid financial overbidding outside of any profitability criteria, whose origin resides largely in the increasing importance of TV rights [START_REF] Andreff | Equilibre compétitif et contrainte budgétaire dans une ligue de sport professionnel[END_REF], by enabling the restoration of an improved sporting fairness. If we must praise this approach, we must admit that it only reinforces the sector's segmentation for the benefit of more powerful clubs, those that historically benefit from a market size, a stadium capacity and which are very famous. Indeed, a pseudo European franchise exists, invisible, however, very real in the annual UEFA ranking.

2. On a sporting level, even if "small" clubs have implemented safeguard mechanisms to maintain some suspense in the competition, to rephrase Meyssonnier and Mincheneau [START_REF] Meyssonnier | Le contrôle de gestion des clubs de football professionnel[END_REF], the reality is that a few large clubs are the only ones capable of equipping themselves with a global information system favouring managerial durability and recurring sporting performances. In other words, it is easy to identify the small group of clubs that regularly monopolise the best places and win the most prestigious trophies. This is particularly true at the level of the Champions League where, as indicated in Table II, the supremacy of Barcelona FC, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Bayern Munich does not seem questionable. It would be easy to establish the list of the fifteen clubs that are systematically on the forefront of the football scene, and which, for that reason, could compose the architecture of a European franchise. Notwithstanding, by firmly negotiating the amounts of TV rights for the Champions League and, more largely, by keeping the control of competitions and a total control of their marketing [START_REF] Schotté | La structuration du football professionnel européen: les fondements sociaux de la prévalence de la 'spécificité sportive[END_REF], isn't the UEFA already thinking in a North American franchise perspective? One of the major problems linked to the institution of a European franchise, and the adoption of its two key mechanisms, the draft and the salary cap, is without a doubt the diversity of the stakeholders involved, and the conflicts that appear around it. This is how Sonntag [START_REF] Sonntag | Entre jeu universel et enjeu national: le football contemporain[END_REF] and Boniface [START_REF] Boniface | Football et mondialisation[END_REF] describe the recurring confrontations between head coaches of national teams and club owners when selecting talented players for useless friendly games, between two championship games, with the risk of injuring those players, or simply prematurely wearing them out, and, consequently, losing an important part of their marketable value. As for the perverse game that is often played by sports equipment manufacturers, the participation of a weakened Ronaldo, who had suffered a potential epileptic episode, during the 1998 World Cup in Paris, under Nike's insisting pressure, has already caused sufficient ink to flow for us not to go back over it. This, in addition to the pre-eminence of national federations, clearly highlighted by Dietl, Franck, Lang and Rathke [START_REF] Dietl | Organizational differences between U.S. major leagues and European leagues: implications for salary caps[END_REF], that disturb the game and block any attempt of collective governance that may hamper their individual interests. The advocates of a future European franchise bet on the increase of the created value in terms of additional revenues, but to the extent that no thorough reflection was led regarding its distribution (conflicting or coordinated) between the abovementioned stakeholders, the statu quo remains a lesser of two evils.

TABLE I .

 I DIFFERENCES OF STRUCTURES IN NORTH AMERICAN FRANCHISES AND EUROPEAN PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

		North American leagues	European football
	Competition rules	-Franchise system -One league participation	-Open competition -Many league participation
	TV rights	-Collective selling of TV rights	-Collective selling of TV rights
		-Draft	-Free player market
	Player market	-Salary cap	-Free salary negotiation
		-Collective bargaining	-Individual bargaining
	Revenue sharing	-Balanced sharing of TV rights -Charge (admission) in franchise system	-Negotiated sharing of TV rights -Institutional sharing of match day revenues

TABLE II .

 II CHAMPIONS LEAGUE SEMI-FINALISTS (2005 TO 2015)

	Season	Clubs

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Huu Tuyen Duong

Gilles Paché
email: gilles.pache@univ-amu.fr

Relational integration between supply chain members: Proposal of a measurement scale applicable to Asian emerging countries

The organisation and functioning of supply chains constitutes a major issue in contemporary management research. It is true that the way in which various companies will coordinate to supply consumption markets in the best possible way constitutes a key question. Even though the sources of competitive advantage usually refer to successful industrial, commercial and financial strategies, the efforts made by a company to conquer a market can be ruined by recurrent logistical failures. This paper particularly focuses on the relational integration process between supply chain members, whose objective is to improve the level of service quality and reduce the costs. It wishes to propose a measurement scale of relational integration applicable to the specific context of emerging countries, and therefore avoid the rashly use of measurement scales created in the context of Western countries. A research lead with 139 Vietnamese companies in the food industry enables to test and confirm the robustness of the retained measurement scale. Its use may be considered in other emerging countries of South East Asia, for cross-cultural research.

Key concepts linked to supply chain integration

, the synchronisation of logistical activities between supply chain members creates value for end customers by reducing the costs of availability thanks to the removal of recurrences in transportation modes, storing, handling, etc. The integration of

Introduction

For the past thirty years, increasing attention has been paid to supply chain operations. Simply enter the words supply chain management on Google Scholar's search engine to see over twomillion results appear. The question of the efficient supply of markets, in ideal conditions of costs, quality, service and responsiveness, becomes highly relevant. Nowadays, who would dare to state that a company that is indifferent to logistics performance could sustainably maintain its competitive status faced with fierce competition? As indicated by Li et al. (2006:107), "effective supply chain management has become a potentially valuable way of securing competitive advantage and improving organizational performance". In other words, logistics performance must not be a goal in itself; it is at the service of strategic choices otherwise made, for example regarding marketing, production or finance. Yet, ignoring the importance of logistics performance risks to lead to corporate collapses, as shown by certain website failures which were unable to offer a sufficient level of logistical service to their clients, in contrast with other websites, very efficient on that level [START_REF] Chen | Ensuring the quality of e-shopping specialty foods through efficient logistics service[END_REF].

To understand the issues linked to supply chain operations, the priority is to abandon a reasoning focused on a unique company, for example the manufacturer. Talking about L'Oréal's logistics performance would be meaningful only if we explore how this company is capable of establishing good relationships with its partners within one or several supply chains. In other words, L'Oréal's logistics performance will depend on that of its suppliers, upstream, and of its retailers, downstream, including potential logistics service providers involved in the management of transport and storage operations. Value creation in the framework of supply chains is, by nature, a collective process [START_REF] Christopher | Logistics and supply chain management[END_REF][START_REF] Ren | An empirical analysis of inter-organisational value cocreation in a supply chain: a process perspective[END_REF], and the absence of coordination between supply chain members can lead to entropic effects that will harm everyone's profitability. That is why, in the years 2000, a major research stream underlined the centrality of an integrated approach of supply chains, each of the supply chain members having to act by taking into account its own individual interests, for example, the optimal remuneration of its shareholders, as well as the collective interests, such as to supply in the best possible manner to consumer markets.

Globalisation constitutes one of the reasons having led companies to integrate their supply chains more and more systematically. One advantage of this integration is its capacity to design products more rapidly, with equivalent qualities and inferior costs [START_REF] Näslund | Supply chain management integration: a critical analysis[END_REF]. The importance of supply chain integration has been theoretically and empirically shown through the literature [START_REF] Frohlich | Arcs of integration: an international study of supply chain strategies[END_REF][START_REF] Flynn | The impact of supply chain integration on performance: a contingency and configuration approach[END_REF][START_REF] Yu | The effects of supply chain integration on customer satisfaction and financial performance: an organizational learning perspective[END_REF]. The benefits of integration between supply chain members have been acknowledged in several industries [START_REF] Flynn | The impact of supply chain integration on performance: a contingency and configuration approach[END_REF]; it is now considered as an essential performance improvement factor. In order to assess the maturity with which the supply chain members have assimilated the urgency of a supply chain integration, in particular a relational integration based on the implementation of joint processes in order to achieve a common goal, numerous North American and European authors have proposed different measurement scales. The robustness of these scales are not questionable, however, they are characterised by a strong cultural dimension. Thus, referring to the trust between supply chain members within a North American context may take on a different meaning in the context of an emerging country. Indeed, trust is based on a certain number of attributes that may vary from one country to another. When a supplier guarantees the delivery of components on a given date, but does not make any particular effort to achieve this result, this may be seen as a betrayal of trust for its partner in a country A, while one would consider it as being usual business hazards in a country B.

In other words, any measurement scale must be contextualised, which implies leading a robustness test with the decision makers of the countries where one intends to apply it. This is what this paper is focused on. The challenge is to formalise a measurement scale of relational integration between supply chain members that may be applied to Asian emerging countries as part of future research on the basis of logistics performance. According to us, the topic is extremely relevant as the new circumstances of globalised economies lead numerous companies of emerging countries to increasingly integrate into the flows of products at a global scale. It is therefore important to have the clearest perception possible on how top managers lead (or do not lead) relational integration policies. If a constant effort is done regarding relational integration, this will send a positive signal to other supply chain members, who will more easily accept to invest in the relationship-specific equipment, without unreasonably fearing the display of opportunistic behaviours. The paper is structured as follows. In section 1, the key concepts linked to the integration of the supply chain will be clarified, before specifying in section 2 the process and dimensions involved. Section 3 will more specifically focus on the relational integration by proposing a measurement scale tested through a field research carried out in Vietnam. skills and logistical resources brought by each one is thus an important condition to improve the global performance of the supply chain. However, it should be noted that integration is not a new concept in the field of management, in particular in the framework of supply chain management [START_REF] Shang | Integration and organisational learning capabilities in third-party logistics providers[END_REF][START_REF] Gimenez | Supply chain integration and performance: the moderating effect of supply complexity[END_REF][START_REF] Danese | The impact of supply chain integration on responsiveness: the moderating effect of using an international supplier network[END_REF][START_REF] Huo | The impact of supply chain integration on firm performance: the moderating role of competitive strategy[END_REF]Dufy et al., 2015). According to Paché and Spalanzani (2007), this concept, very widely used by practitioners as well as researchers, nevertheless requires to be clarified. The supply chain integration refers to the configuration of company structures, mainly in the framework of inter-organisational relationships, in such a way for a sufficient alignment to emerge between the strategic targets of partners regarding the transporting of products. Indeed, the integration is supposed to facilitate the rapid flow of materials and goods thanks to an efficient management [START_REF] Natour | Supply chain integration and collaboration for performance improvement: an agency theory approach[END_REF].

The concept of integration was formalised by Fayol (1916Fayol ( /2013)), who identified the coordination as one of the five critical functions of management. Thereafter, [START_REF] Lawrence | Differentiation and integration in complex organizations[END_REF] indicated that differentiation and integration were basic principles to understand organisational structures. This explains that integration is often mentioned as one of the key characteristics of supply chain management. Even so, most definitions regarding supply chain management explicitly refer to integration. The research led by [START_REF] Mentzer | Defining supply chain management[END_REF] thus shows that it constitutes one of the essential actions in order to efficiently manage logistical processes. [START_REF] Lambert | Supply chain management: implementation issues and research opportunities[END_REF] indicate that the aim of integration is to improve the efficiency of the processes linking supply chain members, by allowing the emergence of a rationale for collective action between them. Therefore, it is necessary to apprehend it on two levels: at a strategic level and at an operational level [START_REF] Mentzer | Defining supply chain management[END_REF][START_REF] Frohlich | Arcs of integration: an international study of supply chain strategies[END_REF]. This is confirmed by [START_REF] Bagchi | Supply chain integration: a European survey[END_REF] for whom supply chain integration is described as a global collaboration regarding strategy, tactics and operational decision making.

Supply chain integration can be defined as a formal process that associates both the process of an activity with those of companies of another field of activity and the company process with those of one or several other companies. This perspective raises, subsequent to [START_REF] Zhao | The impact of internal integration and relationship commitment on external integration[END_REF], the following question: how do supply chain members integrate their unique and inimitable abilities, their expertise and their key skills? [START_REF] Pagell | Understanding the factors that enable and inhibit the integration of operations, purchasing and logistics[END_REF] considers supply chain integration as a collaboration and interaction process where companies work together to obtain the best common results. [START_REF] Cao | Supply chain collaboration: impact on collaborative advantage and firm performance[END_REF] underline that the transaction cost theory can explain why a company collaborates with other companies, and how integration activities reduce transaction costs by leading to better performances. They indicate that supply chain integration represents a particularly efficient mechanism of resource and knowledge exchange. This mechanism is described as a standardised routine activity implemented in order to share information throughout departments, services or organisations.

According to [START_REF] Lee | Measuring supply chain integration: a social network approach[END_REF], the concept of supply chain integration finds its justification in the fact that the amplitude of interactions in the seller-buyer dyad varies greatly at the mercy of environmental circumstances surrounding the relationship. The integration has to go beyond a simple mutual adjustment between logistical activities; it should also include other functions of the company, such as product design. For [START_REF] Cagliano | The linkage between supply chain integration and manufacturing improvement programmes[END_REF], supply chain integration is strictly linked to coordination mechanisms and it implies in particular that the business processes be rationalised and interconnected, both within and beyond the limits of the company [START_REF] Alfalla-Luque | Supply chain integration framework using literature review[END_REF]. In a nutshell, literature is wordy regarding this subject, most likely because the manner of approaching supply chain integration strongly depends on the approaches retained by the researcher. Indeed, the questions relate to the integration process itself as well as the dimensions concerned.

Process and dimensions of supply chain integration

Supply chain members most often achieve supply chain integration after a certain number of mutual efforts and learning. Indeed, the most natural approach for a company is to improve logistics performance, especially by improving intra-organisational interfaces (between production and marketing, between marketing and finance, etc.). Supply chain management seminal work thus underlines the difficulty and length of going from a compartmentalised vision, company by company, to a transversal vision, on a network's interconnected mode [START_REF] Christopher | Logistics and supply chain management[END_REF]. The dynamic vision of supply chain integration is also complicated by the fact that integration covers several possible dimensions, or several layers, to recall Fabbe-Costes and Jahre ( 2007). Consequently, it seems essential to clarify these various aspects to understand the stakes of a relational integration and, subsequently, propose a measurement scale of its intensity.

Process

Supply chain integration is discussed from various perspectives. [START_REF] Cagliano | The linkage between supply chain integration and manufacturing improvement programmes[END_REF], for example, make a clear distinction between customer integration, information integration, logistical and distribution integration, and supplier integration. Differences have also been brought to light based on process types. [START_REF] Simchi-Levi | Designing and managing the supply chain: concepts, strategies, and cases[END_REF] class integration mechanisms with reference to design and logistical links. [START_REF] Romano | Co-ordination and integration mechanisms to manage logistics processes across supply networks[END_REF] identifies four streams within the literature, with particular emphasis, respectively, on functional integration, logistical integration, informational integration and process-based integration. Finally, at the operational level, integration can be made by inter-functional teams reporting to the manufacturer and the distributor, as raised in the works of Ellram and Cooper (1990) and Cooper et al. (1997).

Academic literature strongly stresses the fact that supply chain integration should be developed in a stepwise fashion [START_REF] Halldórsson | Developing logistics competencies through third party logistics relationships[END_REF][START_REF] Forslund | Dyadic integration of the performance management process: a delivery service case study[END_REF][START_REF] Alfalla-Luque | Supply chain management: unheard of in the 1970s, core to today's company[END_REF]. In a reference article, widely quoted in numerous academic works, [START_REF] Stevens | Integrating the supply chain[END_REF] thus identifies a four-step process, that echoes the contribution of [START_REF] Halldórsson | Developing logistics competencies through third party logistics relationships[END_REF]. The four steps are as follows:

-The first step is based on the functional independence between supply chain members. This step is characterised by independent management systems, through the recurring incompatibility between functional systems and between management processes, through organisational limits linked to the absence of coordinated flow control, from raw material to end products, and by short-term corporate planning. -The second step sees a functional integration emerge mainly emphasising the incoming flow of products. This step is characterised by distinct business functions, a lack of visibility of the final demand, an inadequate planning and usually mediocre performances to the extent that we are focused on cost reduction rather than on the improvement of customer service. -The third step is favourable to activity integration concerning the control of the company's incoming and outgoing flows. The emphasis is put on the effectiveness rather than on the efficiency. This step is characterised, on the one hand, by the use of EDI to accelerate responsiveness, rather than to react in retrospect to the failures of the logistical system through a proactive customer management, and, on the other hand, by the formalisation of a medium-term planning focused on tactics rather than strategies. -Finally, the fourth step leads to the widening of the integration field towards suppliers and customers. Cooperation starts at an early stage of the design of a new product and then includes complex exchanges at all levels. This step is characterised by a sharing of information regarding products, processes and changes in specification, exchange of technology and assistance in design, with a focus on strategy rather than tactics.

Dimensions

Through an extensive literature review, Alfalla-Luque et al. (2012) finally indicate the presence of three essential dimensions to understand the stakes of supply chain integration. First of all, supply chain integration is based on the willingness demonstrated by all actors [START_REF] Simatupang | An integrative framework for supply chain collaboration[END_REF][START_REF] Cagliano | The linkage between supply chain integration and manufacturing improvement programmes[END_REF][START_REF] Childerhouse | Arcs of supply chain integration[END_REF][START_REF] Ralston | A structure-conduct-performance perspective of how strategic supply chain integration affects firm performance[END_REF]. Then, supply chain integration implies the implementation of collective processes [START_REF] Lambert | Supply chain management: implementation issues and research opportunities[END_REF][START_REF] Bagchi | Supply chain integration: a European survey[END_REF][START_REF] Stevens | Integrating the supply chain… 25 years on[END_REF]. Finally, supply chain integration cannot come true without a management data sharing, as well as human and material means. In order to clarify current reasoning, Fabbe-Costes and Jahre (2007) chose to refer to the notion of integration layers. The aim is to distinguish four levels for which integration is a major stake, that is to say the flows, the processes and activities, the systems and technologies, and the actors:

-The physical, informational and financial flows, taken on an individual basis, but also and mainly jointly: thus, information flows enable to manage physical flows, while financial flows bring the proof that supply chain creates value for the various stakeholders. -The processes and activities, whether they are operational processes (from product design to waste disposal, as well as production, distribution, after-sales service and recycling), management processes (target definition, forecasting, planning, monitoring and evaluation), as well as support processes supporting the others. -Systems and technologies, components of the supply chain both for its management of physical and information flows (separately and jointly), the interconnectivity and interoperability of technologies and systems implemented being considered as necessary, in particular to reduce the availability delays. -The actors, at the centre of multiple and varied interactions, with individuals and teams implied in the supply chain management, which implies to communicate, work together, develop shared structures, implement a certain strategic, organisational, structural and cultural compatibility.

According to [START_REF] Ireland | A multi-theoretic perspective on trust and power in strategic supply chains[END_REF], agreeing with Fabbe-Costes and Jahre (2007), the dimensions of supply chain integration include three levels, that implicitly refer to precipitated layers. The strategic level is that of the company's intention to integrate their actions and adjust their interactive behaviours; this includes both short-term, for example, the total visibility of flows, and long-term targets, for example, the increase of collective adaptation abilities. The operational level concerns product integration and processes between companies, for example, by enabling suppliers to take responsibility for activities of product design, by helping them understand the complexity and the impact of coordinated processes. Finally, the technological level is that of sharing knowledge and abilities within the supply chain, an important topic that is underlined by [START_REF] Leuschner | A meta-analysis of supply chain integration and firm performance[END_REF].

The input of [START_REF] Forslund | Dyadic integration of the performance management process: a delivery service case study[END_REF] distinguishes informational integration and organisational integration within the supply chain integration approach. Informational integration refers to the scope of information and knowledge exchange in the design, processes management, planning, monitoring, exchange of technology, and the optimal coordination of resources. Organisational integration refers to the sharing of ideas, institutional culture, decision-making and skills, all things encouraging the spread of a climate of trust strengthening inter-organisational links. Thereafter, [START_REF] Kim | Systems collaboration and strategic collaboration: their impacts on supply chain responsiveness and market performance[END_REF] propose to refer only to two dimensions: strategies and systems. Regarding strategy, it is the degree of common construction of a business plan regarding the demand to be served. Regarding systems, it is the common construction of compatible communication systems between them to facilitate the long-term planning of supply chain operations. Table 1 synthetises the main dimensions of supply chain integration.

Measurement scale of relational integration

The development of measurement scales is an important step of most research in management that have chosen an approach of deductive nature. A measurement scale is a tool enabling to measure the judgement, opinion or perception of the people interviewed on a given subject.

Even if the issue of bias in measurement scales remains important, the tool can be useful to approach the manner with which the respondents, in this case, top managers, will build their business reality and draw conclusions to take decisions. An important number of measurement scales have been developed and tested in the context of relationships between companies, in BtoB marketing, strategy, as well as in supply chain management. The aim is to propose a specific measurement scale of relational integration and then to test it from a research led in an emerging country: Vietnam.

Proposed scale

Collaboration between supply chain members is usually admitted to increase the efficiency of operations, improve customer service and insure a decrease of the cost of making products available. This applies in particular to the collaboration on sales forecast, where companies spend their precious resources to guarantee a satisfying answer to unexpected environment evolutions, for example, climatically [START_REF] Andraski | Leadership and the realization of supply chain collaboration[END_REF]. Collaborations in the logistical process refers to the joint actions taken by partners such as assortment planning, definition of joint promotion planning, stock management and automatic restocking from retail counter outputs [START_REF] Simchi-Levi | Designing and managing the supply chain: concepts, strategies, and cases[END_REF]. As such, we can refer to relational integration, in other words, an integration based on the building and maintenance over time of a close and durable relationship between supply chain members to improve the value creation process. Relational integration requires from supply chain members the will to create structures, frameworks and measurements that encourage a certain behaviour from organisations towards the achievement of a common goal. This includes the sharing of confidential information on strategies led and on operational information for the control of daily activities, as well as the creation of financial links that make companies dependent in fine on mutual performances [START_REF] Stank | Performance benefits of supply chain logistical integration[END_REF]. According to [START_REF] Rodrigues | Linking strategy, structure, process, and performance in integrated logistics[END_REF], suppliers, manufacturers and distributors are thus encouraged to identify and establish partnerships with companies that share a common vision and pursue converging targets relative to the interdependence and collaboration. This collaborative perspective is essential to the development of efficient structures within the supply chain, aligning functional operations of several companies as part of an integrated system [START_REF] Bowersox | How supply chain competency leads to business success[END_REF][START_REF] Puigjaner | Capturing dynamics in integrated supply chain management[END_REF].

In previous research, relational integration was operationalised in different manners according to the authors' targets. For example, [START_REF] Hsu | Information sharing, buyer-supplier relationships, and firm performance: a multi-region analysis[END_REF] adapt measures that have already been used by Svensson (2004), [START_REF] Corsten | Exploring the performance effects of key-supplier collaboration: an empirical investigation into Swiss buyer-supplier relationships[END_REF], [START_REF] Kannan | Buyer-supplier relationships: the impact of supplier selection and buyer-supplier engagement on relationship and firm performance[END_REF], and [START_REF] Golicic | An empirical examination of relationship magnitude[END_REF] for the operationalisation of the variable relative to the field of buyer-supplier relationships and their impact in terms of performance. Within the literature dedicated to the issue of relational integration between supply chain members, the variable is mainly seen as a unidimensional construct. The measurement scales developed by [START_REF] Hsu | Information sharing, buyer-supplier relationships, and firm performance: a multi-region analysis[END_REF] and by [START_REF] Jayaram | Supply chain integration with third-party logistics providers[END_REF] seem particularly relevant given their robustness; consequently, we retain them as part of our investigation (see Table 2). The general question asked to top mangers is: Indicate your extent of agreement with the following propositions characterising the relational integration between your company and your partner. The scale ranges from "I strongly disagree" to "I strongly agree".

Selected sample

The sector selected for this investigation is that of manufacturers in Vietnam's food industry. This choice is due to two reasons. On the one hand, the sector represents 20% of the country's GDP, and the growth of the domestic food demand is estimated to 10% per year. It has therefore achieved to maintain a positive growth despite the difficult context (diseases, bad weather, global economic crisis, etc.). In addition, in upstream, the sector still employs nearly 70% of the active Vietnamese population, and that it is affected by a rapid modernisation of production and logistical techniques. On the other hand, as showed by [START_REF] Colin | La logistique de distribution: l'avenir du marketing[END_REF], the food industries have developed innovative approaches in various Western countries regarding management flows to reduce the costs and improve customer service. This largely explains the low added value earned on the merchandising of food and agricultural products, and in particular, convenience products, that imposes on businesses a monitoring of logistical costs to improve profitability. The investigation was done in Vietnam in February and March 2014. In total, 139 questionnaires have been collected from managers of food companies involved in supply chain management. The size of this sample can be considered as fully acceptable on a methodological level. Indeed, the testing of the measurement scale of relational integration is based on the method of partial least squares (PLS). Two main estimation techniques of structural equation models are used in management sciences: techniques based on the co-variance and techniques based on the variance. Although the first approach remains the most popular in marketing [START_REF] Hair | Multivariate data analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Reinartz | An empirical comparison of the efficacy of covariance-based and variance-based SEM[END_REF], an increasing interest regarding the PLS regression method has appeared in the past few years, given the advantages it contains. On the one hand, it does not require the multivariate normality of data, unlike the method based on covariance. On the other hand, it is more appropriate for a small sample of less than 250 observations [START_REF] Hair | Multivariate data analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Reinartz | An empirical comparison of the efficacy of covariance-based and variance-based SEM[END_REF], which is the case here.

Testing of the measurement scale

We begin with an analysis in principal components with six items. The KMO is equal to 0.8 indicating a good match of data with the factorial solution. The Bartlett's test of sphericity indicates a strong significance (Sig. 0.000). The MPE is entirely satisfactory with the value of 0.213. In addition, the result of the test of component matrix shows that this variable has two dimensions. The first dimension has five items, which are RI_02, RI_03, RI_04, RI_05 and RI_06. However, the second dimension has only one item, which is the item RI_01. We should therefore delete it. We continue with the second analysis in principal components. The Table 3 shows the final results of the analysis in principal components without RI_01. A new extraction without the item RI_01 shows an improvement of the total explained variance (58.7%). The KMO of 0.809 shows a good match of data with the factorial solution. Bartlett's test of sphericity shows a strong significance (Sig. 0.000). The MPE by item is 0.75. Consequently, the data can be factorised. Regarding the issue linked to the identification of scale dimensionality, Kaiser's criterion suggests to retain only one dimension, explaining 58.7% of the total variance. The scree test indicates the presence of a dimension. The R 2 are all greater than 0.5. As planned, the items are, spread on a factor, the factorial contributions are greater than 0.716, which shows the good unidimensionality of the measures. Cronbach's alpha is equal to 0.822, which also shows the good reliability of the measures. Consequently, we selected this solution. It leads to a five-dimension measurement scale that can be used in an analysis of the level of relational integration between partners of a supply chain for emerging countries that are more or less similar to Vietnam, in particular in South-East Asia.

Conclusion

To what extent are supply chain members capable of collaborating with each other in order to improve the functioning of the supply chain in which they are involved? The question is important for both clients and suppliers. Indeed, if supply chain members perceive an atmosphere of distrust, where each one tries to profit from its position without caring about other players, it is very likely that the supply chain will be taken over by entropic forces. In other words, each supply chain member seeks to value its own individual interest, even if it means resorting to opportunistic behaviours such as the withholding of data or being dishonest about its real activities. It would obviously be unwise to deny the existence of a distrustful atmosphere in the operation of supply chains; furthermore, the works of [START_REF] Cox | Supply chains, markets and power: managing buyer and supplier power regimes[END_REF] on power regimes consider that the situation is common as soon as the sharing of the value created within the supply chain is perceived as unfair. It is important to admit that the absence of collaboration can, on the long run, have disastrous effects on the level of quality of service that is offered to clients, for example with an important number of stock-outs resulting in a loss in sales.

Consequently, having a robust measurement scale of relational integration between supply chain members is interesting, both for the researchers and the practitioners. For researchers, the measurement scale enables to assess the atmosphere within the supply chain and, therefore, offer crossed analysis. These analyses can compare supply chains linked to distinct products within the same country; they can also identify differences or similarities between countries in a cross-cultural perspective. For practitioners, a measurement scale enables to have a diagnostic and audit tool. Therefore, knowing if the current (or planned) partner leads activities in order to provide an answer to its client's complaints or accept to share confidential information with it will give a good idea of its will to commit to a collaboration strategy. A measurement scale can therefore constitute an excellent decision support tool regarding the choice and monitoring of partners. However, the retained measurement scale would need to be sufficiently relevant to adapt to the studied environment. Yet, we must admit that various works carelessly import measurement scales that are tested in a given context, for example, in Western countries, to a radically different context on the economic, social and cultural levels, for example, in emerging countries.

The goal of this paper was, very modestly, to propose a measurement scale of relational integration between supply chain members that could be correctly applied to emerging countries. To do so, we based our study on existing literature and then tested the measurement scale retained from a field study in Vietnam. This country was not randomly picked. Indeed, it has undergone radical transformation since 1986, with the Doi Moi [renovation] reform, to change its economic model, from a planned economy to a market economy. The result is the opening of borders to several foreign companies that actively participate in the modernisation of supply chains [START_REF] Duong | Capacité d'innovation du prestataire de services logistiques et performance logistique perçue par l'industriel: quelle relation dans le contexte vietnamien?[END_REF]. From this point of view, the case of Vietnam is a symbol of rapid change that should interest all researchers studying other emerging countries in South-East Asia. We can therefore hope that the measurement scale retained and tested in the paper will be used in future research on relationships between supply chain members. This would enable progress to be made on cumulative knowledge on logistical strategies that become emancipated from dominant Western models.

Table 1 :

 1 Dimensions of supply chain integration

	Authors	Dimensions	Description
		Informational	Sharing of information and knowledge between supply chain members
	Lee (2000)	Decisional	Changes in decision-making at the level of work and resources
		Organisational	Organisation of close relationships between supply chain members
		Strategic	Sharing routines, knowledge and new ideas to improve the functioning of the supply chain
	Saeed et al. (2005)	Operational	Frequent coordination at the level of processes and activities through a regular sharing of information
		Financial	Joint investment in supply chain members' common projects
		Strategic	Intention of supply chain members to integrate their actions and adjust their behaviours
	Ireland and Webb (2007)	Organisational	Product and process integration between supply chain members
		Technological	Knowledge and skill sharing through supply chain members
		Strategic	Tangible activities underlining the importance of collaboration between supply chain members
	Van der Vaart and Van der Donk (2008)	Organisational	Positive attitude regarding partners to make a long-term joint planning
		Operational	Frequent face-to-face visits, with a formal regular assessment of partners
	Kim and Lee (2010)	Strategic Informational	Joint forecasting of demand and planning of operations between supply chain members Compatible communication systems between supply chain members for the forecasting and the planning

Source: Adapted from

[START_REF] Leuschner | A meta-analysis of supply chain integration and firm performance[END_REF]

.

Table 2 :

 2 Indicators of the "relational integration" (RI) variable

	Code	Items	Type of scale	Authors
	RI_01	My partner shows flexibility to answer unexpected changes in demand	5-point Likert	Hsu et al.
	RI_02	My partner uses an assessment system to measure customer satisfaction	--	(2008)
	RI_03	My partner shares confidential information with my company	--
	RI_04	My company develops sincere and frequent communication with my partner	--	Jayaram and
	RI_05	My partner conducts actions for the purpose of bringing answers to my company's complaints	--	Tan (2010)
	RI_06	My partner shows flexibility to answer my company's changing needs	--

Table 3 :

 3 Analysis of the measurement scale of relational integration

	Items	Factorial contribution	R²
	RI_02	0.747	0.559
	RI_03	0.717	0.514
	RI_04	0.866	0.750
	RI_05	0.716	0.513
	RI_06	0.774	0.599
	Cronbach's alpha	0.822
	Unidimensionality	Yes
	Explained variance	58.7%
	Factorisation	KMO = 0.809; Bartlett's test p < 0.00; MPE > 0.75