مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

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

Research focusing on the performance effects of contractual governance (e.g., Anderson and Dekker, 2005; Schepker et al., 2014) has in common that contracts are predominantly viewed as causing or driving performance: increasing the level of contractual governance is sufficient to obtain a certain increase in performance (X produces Y). Sufficient conditions can be considered one distinct logical part of the notion of causality (Dul, 2016b).

The other distinct logical part concerns necessary conditions: performance will not be attained when contractual governance is absent (no Y without X). Thus, while a sufficient cause produces the outcome, a necessary cause allows the outcome to exist. Conversely, without the necessary cause, the outcome will not exist despite other factors being present. In the extant literature, necessary conditions are often implicit and more commonly referred to using alternative formulations, such as X being critical or a pre-condition for Y. In the governance literature For example, Lazzarini et al. (2004) point out that contracts are “crucial” for cooperation (under low probability of continued exchange). Such a claim can reasonably be interpreted as a necessary condition statement: a contract must be present to have cooperation; without a contract, there will be no cooperation.

Such examples of necessary condition statements are common in the organizational sciences in general (Dul, 2016b; Dul et al., 2010). To date however, necessary condition hypotheses could not appropriately be tested because traditional data analysis approaches (e.g., correlation or regression analysis) are based on the presumption that condition X is sufficient to increase outcome Y, but not necessary because Y can also be increased by other conditions. Recently however, an appropriate technique for analyzing necessary condition hypotheses has become available in the form of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) (Dul, 2016b). This article explores the applicability and usefulness of applying NCA to an existing dataset of service outsourcing relationships.