In 1983, the Henry W. Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta began a family planning-based outreach program for eighth graders in a local school system. The program is led by older teenagers and focuses on helping students resist peer and social pressures to initiate sexual activity. Evaluation of the program, based on telephone interviews with 536 students from the hospital's low-income population, revealed that among students who had not had sexual intercourse, those who participated in the program were significantly more likely to continue to postpone sexual activity through the end of the ninth grade than were similar students who did not participate in the program. Because of their lower rate of sexual activity, program students also experienced comparatively fewer pregnancies than no-program students.

Purpose -This paper aims to examine the role of product architecture in supply chain design. Specifically, it seeks to resolve confusion over the impact of modularisation on supplier relationship management. On the one hand, the introduction of modularisation suggests that buyer and supplier firms should move towards greater collaboration in order to co-develop products and reduce interface constraints. On the other hand, the standardisation of interfaces suggests that buyer firms could introduce a "black box" approach to component design, holding suppliers at arm's-length and reducing dependence. These conflicting views form the focus of the research: under what conditions does modularity lead to increasing collaboration? Design/methodology/approach -The data are drawn from UK manufacturing firms across eight industry sectors using a sample from the Conquest Business Media database. Three hypotheses are tested through a three-step hierarchical regression analysis. Findings -The findings provide support for the notion that product modularization will lead to greater levels of buyer-supplier collaboration, but that this relationship is mediated by relationshipspecific assets and information sharing. Originality/value -The paper supports the argument that modularised components require collaborative sourcing practices in order to co-develop products and reduce interface constraints. This suggests that outsourcing requires a high level of integration, creating dependencies between firms representing considerable investment in equipment and sharing through proprietary information systems. As interest in build-to-order supply chains and flexible product architecture grows; this emphasizes the importance of specifying the exact nature of relationship processes without stifling product innovation.

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