AN ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON CHANGING BUYER-SUPPLIER RELATIONS - A CRITICAL-REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE

This paper takes a critical look at current research on buyer-supplier relations and argues that the research to date is limited in its help fulness in understanding contemporary changes in infer-organizational relations in three important respects. First, owing to She concentrati on of research effort in particular industrial sectors and cases, it i s hard to extrapolate the findings to industry in general. Second, an oversimplification of the structure and dynamics of buyer-supplier rel ations tends to underplay the roles of perceptions, choice and action on the part of supplier organizations. And, third, there is an absence of any real consideration of the impact of intra-organizational struc tures and processes within supplier organizations insofar as they mode rate or otherwise affect supplier dependency. The aim of the paper is to incorporate key elements of organizational and inter-organizational theory into the analysis of buyer-supplier relations, in order to hel p develop a more complete framework for the analysis of buyer-supplier relations than exists in She literature to date.