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 helpfulness in understanding contemporary changes in inter-organizational relations in three important respects. First, owing to the concentration of research effort in particular industrial sectors and cases, it is hard to extrapolate the findings to industry in general. Second, an oversimplification of the structure and dynamics of buyer-supplier relations 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 structures and processes within supplier organizations insofar as they moderate 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 help develop a more complete framework for the analysis of buyer-supplier relations than exists in the literature to date.