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Compliance enforcement is central in issues involving cooperation and delegation of authority. In fact, many proposed mechanisms seek to enhance adherence to the contracted agreements. Generally, monitoring and sanction arrangements constitute one of the widely applied tools to ensure compliance. Notwithstanding the prevailing mixed opinions on the usefulness of such coercive measures, in public procurement, such seemingly drastic measures are also commonly applied to enhance the purchasersʼ adherence to the established procurement frameworks. This study investigated the effectiveness of the monitoring and sanction arrangements in enhancing procurement rule compliance in the Tanzania context. Using data generated from a cross-sectional survey conducted between December 2006 and May 2007, this study established that the effectiveness of such enforcement means in the public sector is situational contingent and has to take into account other context-specific factors, which tend to influence the outcome.

Industrial purchasing is a growing discipline with a broad scope of research issues. Research contributions vary greatly with respect to problem issues, the level of analysis, research methods and the application of theoretical frameworks. Literature reviews in the purchasing research field give the reader some tracks back to current theoretical frameworks, for instance industrial buying behavior or economics of organization. Notwithstanding, explicit and precise references to these frameworks are usually rare compared to the marketing science tradition which has built its research tradition and theoretical framework on established sciences, e.g. micro economics, organization science, sociology and psychology. This article presents and compares some contributions from micro economic theory, industrial buying behavior and inter‐organizational theory that make appropriate theoretical approaches to industrial purchasing research.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the prior relationship length and employments of supplier specific investments on buyers' control, and compare this effect across international and domestic business-to-business relationships.

The sampling frame consisted of members of a National Association Purchasing and Logistics, and the respondents were asked to select one major supplier that would serve as a referent in answering the questions. In total, 156 purchasing firms responded to the questionnaire, and multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

Under condition with substantial supplier specific investments, buyers' control relaxes significantly as the length of the relationship increases in international supplier-buyer relationships, while such change in governance pattern is completely absent in domestic relationships.

This study is based on a cross-sectional design and does not fully capture the dynamics of business-to-business relationships. Future research should use different methodologies such as longitudinal studies to examine dynamic relationships among the constructs in the study.

When strong inter-firm dependency is present, the level of buyer control in relationships with foreign suppliers is typically high in the early stage of the relationships in order to handle the problems of information asymmetry and prospective opportunistic behavior, and decline as the buyer's experiential knowledge with the foreign supplier increases with successive lower performance ambiguity. This governance pattern is less evident in domestic business-to-business relationships due to the potential effect of stronger reputation effects and stronger familiarity with current standards of trade.

The paper contributes to the understanding that the changes in governance form over time will be highly contingent on the level of information asymmetry and inter-firm dependency in the early stage of the exchange relationship.