EXPRESS: From Institutional Expansion to Exposure-Driven Co-Evolution: Reinterpreting “Operations and Supply Chain Management in China”

This paper builds on and reinterprets Wu (2026a,b), which offers a comprehensive account of the rapid institutional, educational, and research development of Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) in China. While the Institutional–Dynamic–Organizational (IDO) framework effectively captures domestic structural transformation, it under-theorizes a critical external driver of this evolution: international knowledge exposure and collaboration. To address this gap, we complement Wu’s analysis with a bibliometric study of published articles in Production and Operations Management from 1992 to 2026. The evidence shows that China’s growing presence in OSCM research is overwhelmingly collaboration-mediated, with China–U.S. co-authorship constituting the dominant channel of integration. The rise of China in top-tier OSCM journals is therefore not primarily an autonomous national trajectory, but a structurally embedded phenomenon within global co-authorship networks. Our findings suggest that China’s OSCM evolution cannot be fully explained by domestic institutional expansion, policy support, or educational scaling alone. Instead, it reflects a broader process of exposure-driven co-evolution within a globally integrated knowledge system. In this system, international collaboration is not merely a byproduct of scientific development but a central mechanism shaping the structure and trajectory of global OSCM knowledge production.