مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله مدیریت خرید و تامین – Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management

The UK public sector spent d109billion on the procurement of goods and services in 2013 (HM Treasury, 2013b). Major external events such as the global financial crisis and subsequent shifts in institutional configurations have caused significant effects on the environment for public procurement, including austerity, changes to financial governance and the need to generate large scale effi- ciency savings (Prowle and Harradine, 2014). The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review saw the UK government embark on a reduction of public sector spend and the implementation of a period of austerity that underlined the centrality of financial resources in the public sector (Kioko et al., 2011). Public sector collaboration is seen as an imperative to deliver value for money (HM Treasury, 2013a) but gaps exist in understanding its origins, prevalence and impact on organisational performance (Dunleavy et al., 2006; Wright and Pandey, 2010). Collaborative procurement is increasingly on the public policy agenda (Walker et al., 2013) as it can deliver savings, promote financial transparency, rationalise specifications and simplify evaluation processes (Gobbi and Hsuan, 2015). Despite the government rhetoric of the benefits and importance of collaborative procurement, uptake across the public sector is low, exacerbated by a lack of quality, consistent spend data (HM Treasury, 2009a). A number of studies have explored collaboration with public service providers (c.f, Kioko et al., 2011; Hefetz and Warner, 2012; Lamothe and Lamothe, 2012) but there remains a paucity of research on the barriers and enablers of collaborative public procurement within member organisations (Walker et al., 2013).

The paper presents an exploration of how public procurement organisations respond to institutional pressures (Oliver, 1991; Pache and Santos, 2010). Institutional theory explains how the institutional environment influences and establishes an organisation’s structures, norms and rules, and how these become resilient, legitimatised guidelines for social behaviour (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Zucker, 1987). Institutional theory is a useful lens to explore the challenges of implementing collaborative procurement in practice because it highlights the tensions between achieving legitimacy and achieving efficiency (Ashworth et al., 2009). Collaborative procurement policies create tensions between cost, compliance and quality considerations across intra-organisational stakeholder groups, and between interorganisational collaborating authorities, where different social values, rules and rationalities may exist. For example, collaborative regional procurement may provide scale economy benefits (Gobbi and Hsuan, 2015) but reduce devolved decision-making control or compromise the delivery of locally-appropriate solutions (CLGC, 2014). Institutional theory provides a deeper understanding of why, and how, internal decision makers can resist external pressures to implement collaborative public procurement.

There have been calls for public procurement research to focus on behavioural aspects of collaboration (Hefetz and Warner, 2012; Lamothe and Lamothe, 2012; Walker et al., 2013). Research centred on behaviours and resistance is relevant given the apparent low uptake of collaborative public procurement strategies (HM Treasury, 2009a), despite potential commercial benefits that these can deliver (Schotanus et al., 2011). Using a longitudinal (2 year) action research study of five public authorities in the UK’s emergency services sector we build on work that suggests that full compliance with institutional demands is neither realistic nor possible and in some cases pressure is ignored by decision-makers (Pache and Santos, 2010). Action research provides a method for deep understanding of the actors, interactions and behaviours over time (Woodside and Wilson, 2003), and reveals issues on which action can be taken (Coughlan and Coghlan, 2002). The iterative nature of the action research study developed two core research questions: 1) What are the barriers preventing collaborative procurement in the emergency services of the UK public sector? 2) How is resistance to collaborative procurement legitimised in the emergency services of the UK public sector?