Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT. Public procurement activities have long been treated as a minor subset of industrial or business-to-business buying. Consequently, the literature reports sparse research on the nature of government buying or how commercial firms can successfully market to the government. While this lack of research may not have been critical with respect to traditional public buying, recent procurement reforms and new contracting arrangements suggest our knowledge of business-to-business buying is inadequate with respect to the new environment of public buying and government/business relationships. One important and unique issue is how to handle the relationship with business suppliers during the contract implementation process. This paper proposes a taxonomy of government/business relationships as an organizing framework for understanding the complexities of buyer-seller relationships in government contract implementation. Archival case studies provide illustrations and justification for the taxonomy.
INTRODUCTION
A recent, comprehensive review of the business-to-business marketing literature found very little research on marketing to the government. In fact, over the past twenty years, only eleven out of 1000-plus articles concerned issues related to government buying or marketing to the government (Reid & Plank, 2000). This paucity of research is reflected in both purchasing management and business-to-business marketing textbooks. While some textbooks (e.g., Dobler, & Burt, 1996) have one chapter dealing with the complexities of government buying, most textbooks have no explicit discussion of public buying.
The government market, however, represents a large volume of purchases - reaching $1.6 trillion in 1999 or about twenty percent of GDP in the United States since the 1960s (Thai & Grimm, 2000). Considering the size of the market and the unique aspects of public procurement, it is no wonder that both government agencies and business-to-business marketers are sorely in need of additional academic research efforts. In response, there is growing interest in research on government purchasing and government/business relationships. For example, in 1999, the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing, Inc. (NIGP) established a partnership with Florida Atlantic University to promote academic research on public procurement (Thai & Grimm, 2000) and a new research outlet - The Journal of Public Procurement made its debut.
This paper contributes to the literature by focusing on relationships between government buyers and business sellers (hereafter referred to as government/business relationships) during the contract implementation process. First,...