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1. Introduction
In the digital age, blockchain (BC) as an emerging and cutting-edge technology has the potential to disrupt most traditional industries and business models (Tandon et al., 2021). BC originated from bitcoin as a peer-to-peer payment system (Nakamoto, 2008), diffused in the cryptocurrency market (Prybila et al., 2020) and reached an authoritative level in the financial sector (Chen et al., 2021). However, BC's potential goes beyond cryptocurrency (Tapscott and Tapscott, 2016), and thus it has recently expanded to other traditional areas and will enable them to be emerging markets, such as digital-enabled operations management and supply chain management (Queiroz et al., 2021). For example, BC is viewed as a solution for traceability problems in supply chain management (Lu and Xu, 2017) and for generating closer and more trusting relationships in operations management (Aste et al., 2017). Currently, BC is forcing every link in the supply chain to rethink its opportunities, challenges and strategies (Schatsky and Muraskin, 2015).
Extant studies and most selected cases about BC in operations management involve the fields of supply and demand management, e.g. BC-enabled flexibility for demand management (Shukor et al., 2020), BC-enabled traceability for supply management (Toyoda et al., 2017) or BC enablement of both demand and supply management (Kshetri, 2018). The third field of operations management is the coordination of supply chain members that is used to achieve the best operations performance (Wang et al., 2015), and the distributed nature of BC allows the participation and coordination of all users and suppliers (Karakas et al., 2021), such as business models (Ioannou and Demirel, 2022) or trade and payments in global supply chains (Pournader et al., 2020). Nevertheless, few BC cases and little research at present have focused on the operational coordination processes or mechanisms that are essential to the operations management (Toufaily et al., 2021). Due to digital enablement, the coordinators and their information systems, often in the form of centralized conventional systems (CS), play an important intermediary role coordinating the very traditional context of the supply chain (Wang et al., 2015). However, some scholars suggest that BC brings about new disintermediary information systems that enable transactions and coordination without the need for a central intermediary...