Relational Embeddedness, Opportunism Risk, and Long-Term Value Creation in Nigerian Agro-Industrial Supply Chain Partnerships

This dissertation investigates relational embeddedness, opportunism risk, and long-term value creation in Nigerian agro-industrial supply chain partnerships, generating original theory and empirical evidence from the palm oil, groundnut processing, and soybean sectors across Ondo, Kogi, Benue, and Kano States. Relational embeddedness, defined as the degree to which supply chain partner dyads are connected through deep social ties, shared history, and mutual dependence, has been proposed as both a governance mechanism against opportunism and a value co-creation enabler in long-term partnerships. However, the conditions under which embeddedness protects against or amplifies opportunism risk, particularly in weak institutional contexts, remain theoretically contested and empirically underexplored in African agro-industrial supply chains. Drawing on embeddedness theory, transaction cost economics, and relational exchange theory, the dissertation constructs an original Embedded Governance Value Model, proposing that structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness operate through distinct governance mechanisms with different value creation implications. A mixed-methods dyadic design is employed, collecting matched pair data from 150 buyer-supplier dyads across the three agricultural value chains and supplementing with 35 in-depth relational history interviews. Dyadic structural equation modelling and qualitative relational case analysis are applied. The dissertation makes original theoretical contributions including the Embedded Governance Value Model, the Opportunism Boundary Condition construct, and original empirical evidence on embeddedness-opportunism-value relationships in Nigerian agro-industrial supply chains. Keywords: relational embeddedness, opportunism, value creation, agro-industrial supply chain, Nigeria.