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Managerial “awareness” of supply chain management (SCM) principles is a key antecedent of SCM adoption. However, supply chain awareness (SCA) provides fertile ground for further development. The authors combine extant research with the attention-based view of the firm to further develop SCA and theorize about its effect in an understudied context.

The authors combine SCA with supply chain orientation, of which awareness is central. The authors combine qualitative and archival data for a 10-year period to test SCA in nonprofits. SCA was measured unobtrusively to avoid respondent bias; then, the authors explore how SCA relates to revenue generation from services provided.

SCA correlates positively with revenue generation. Drawing on a contingency perspective, the authors test two moderators relevant to nonprofits. The positive effect of SCA on revenue is stronger for nonprofits collocated in cities with corporate headquarters but weaker for those with larger boards.

The study further advances the notion of awareness for studying SCM phenomena and provides evidence of its relevance in the unexamined context of human services nonprofit organizations (NPOs). This work has implications for how attention to SCM principles shapes organizational outcomes, the factors that moderate these relationships and the importance of unobtrusively measuring awareness in SCM research. The authors used WayBack Machine to harvest websites. However, the quality and depth of text obtained prior to 2008 were lower than those of later years. Additionally, archival data for NPOs are limited.

Findings inform about the fit between nonprofit resources, type of board and fit with how to fund operations. This research provides an alternative way for policy makers to assess NPO capacity by focusing on the fundamental SCM concepts.

The authors contribute to the dialogue about NPOs developing financial independence through revenue generation from services sold to end customers.

NPOs are seldom studied in SCM. This is an attempt to study NPOs by combining qualitative and quantitative data.

Theorists and theory have lost their way, and Brown offers some guidelines for reviewing and finding new ways of writing. Brown seeks the social that which is left out and is implicit. My concern here is with the role of the tantalizing “actor” in theorizing: perhaps a puppet on a structural string, a bundle of emotions, a strategic actor employing tactics of assertion or a rational chooser. Brown correctly argues in my view that the actor is a momentary social creation. Thus, what is said about the actor implies what is not said and the dubious value of “words.” Although the body, first captured by Mauss (1968), remains a shadow figure in current thinking and not cited by Brown, I argue it acts without words. I cite studies of Manning and Fabrega summarized in Psathas (1973) to display the crosscultural relevance of the self-body connection as evidence of the situated nature of the actor and the meaning of the body in time and space.