Supply chains (SCs) often entail suppliers beyond the focal firm's visible horizon and thus outside its awareness and management. This article conceptualizes how standards can complement the management of complex SCs to identify and manage previously unknown suppliers.

Combining institutional theory and multi-tier SC management (SCM), standards and SCs are conceptualized as meta-institutional fields that can complement each other to enlarge the reach of the focal firm, reduce SC uncertainty, and ensure legitimate SC operations. This conceptualization is empirically supported with 1) a pre-study of eight interviews with large firms in the automotive industry and 2) a structured content-analysis based document analysis of twenty sustainability standards for mineral resources.

The findings identify a standard's ownership, its supplier coverage, and the overlap of its requirements with institutionalized SC values, structures, and practices as critical enablers for establishing supplier compliance in complex and previously unmanaged settings, such as the upstream parts of international and multi-tiered mineral SCs. Based on these findings, focal firms can use standards to enhance the reach and power towards distant suppliers. The reviewed standards could extend their supplier coverage and focus sustainability at large to create synergies for their downstream customers.

The study thus contributes a novel conceptualization of the complementing role of standards in SCs and especially beyond the visible horizon of the focal firm, refines the constructs for a standard's characterization in SCM, and provides first industry-specific empirical support for the relevance of the complementing role and how standards currently fill it.

供应链 (SC) 通常需要供应商超出焦点公司的可见范围，从而超出其意识和管理范围。本文概念化了标准如何补充复杂 SC 的管理，以识别和管理以前未知的供应商。

结合制度理论和多层 SC 管理 (SCM)，标准和 SC 被概念化为元制度领域，可以相互补充以扩大焦点公司的影响范围，减少 SC 的不确定性，并确保合法的 SC 运营。这种概念化得到了实证支持：1) 对汽车行业大公司的 8 次访谈的预研究和 2) 对 20 项矿产资源可持续性标准的基于结构化内容分析的文件分析。

调查结果确定了标准的所有权、其供应商覆盖范围以及其要求与制度化的 SC 价值观、结构和实践的重叠是在复杂和以前未管理的环境中建立供应商合规性的关键推动因素，例如国际和多方面的上游部分分层矿物 SC。基于这些发现，重点公司可以使用标准来增强对遥远供应商的影响力和影响力。审查后的标准可以扩大其供应商的覆盖范围并关注整体可持续性，从而为其下游客户创造协同效应。

因此，该研究为标准在供应链中的补充作用提供了一种新的概念化，尤其是在焦点公司的可见范围之外，完善了标准在供应链管理中的特征结构，并为补充的相关性提供了第一个行业特定的实证支持角色以及标准目前如何填补它。