Construct · 3 fields · 3 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningsupplycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to chain is supply.
Hold this as a prompt, not a verdict. Two constructs sitting close in meaning is a reason to read them side by side and decide for yourself whether they are one idea under two names. It is not proof that they are. Compare the meanings in the Collider.
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A sequence of atoms joined by covalent bonds, running as a backbone from one end of a large molecule to the other. Staudinger argued in 1920, in Über Polymerisation, that rubber and similar materials are single long molecules held together by ordinary covalent bonds, not loose clusters of small ones, and the word chain names that backbone of repeating units. The referent is one molecule, the link is a bond between two atoms, and the length is counted as a degree of polymerization. It shares only the picture of links in a row with the other meanings; nothing here is a firm, a process, or a store.[1]
The network of firms, people, and activities that moves a product and its materials from the original source to the final customer. Mentzer and colleagues, in their 2001 paper Defining Supply Chain Management, set the term against the many looser uses around it: a supply chain is the set of organizations linked upstream and downstream in the flows of product, service, finance, and information. The referent is a network of companies, not a molecule, and its links are business relationships rather than covalent bonds. The word chain here is close to a metaphor; the thing itself is nearer to a web than to a single line.[2]
A stochastic process that moves between states in steps, where the probability of the next state depends only on the current state and not on the path taken to reach it. Markov introduced the idea in 1906, studying sequences of dependent trials, and the memoryless property is what the name marks. The referent is a mathematical object, a set of states with transition probabilities, and it can be written as a matrix. Here chain means an ordered succession of random states, not atoms and not firms; the links are conditional probabilities, and the defining fact is that the past drops out once the present is known.[3]
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