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The purpose of this empirical study is to identify the job tasks where decisions regarding social responsibility are likely to occur and assess the potential connections between social responsibility and professionalism.

A job study conducted by the Universal Public Procurement Certification Council (UPPCC) of 2,593 practitioners is used for data collection. Factor analysis is applied to a set of 75 procurement job tasks to determine the relationship between practitioners’ performance and management of job tasks and social responsibility variables.

The results suggest that there are specific job tasks performed and managed in both public and private sector procurement that share a unique relationship with social responsibility variables.

The manuscript advances the research on professionalism in procurement and administration through empirically testing job tasks performed and managed by practitioners and identifying relationships between job tasks according to a professional orientation toward social responsibility.

The study shows that specific job tasks are performed and managed in procurement and administration with a social responsibility consideration.

The technical nature of job tasks found to be related to social responsibility suggests a paradoxical view of the politics-administration dichotomy, and the notion that neutral tasks of both the public and private sectors are not void of a social function.

One attribute of professionalism in the literature, social responsibility, is operationalized through actual performance and management of job tasks by practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the knowledge public procurement professionals perceive as important for performing their duties.

Using secondary data generated from a job analysis study commissioned by the Universal Public Procurement Certification Council [UPPCC], this paper examined the knowledge sets that procurement officials recognize as necessary and sufficient for daily operations and professional development.

Principal Component Analysis is used to validate the six domains of knowledge covered on the survey. This paper identifies sets of core knowledge domains that are essential for procurement administration, including sourcing, negotiation process, contract administration, supply management and strategic procurement planning.

Furthermore, the authors incorporated anecdotal commentary information from the same survey to determine what additional professional development and continuing education opportunities procurement officials are seeking to improve performance in their current and future work roles.

This study aims to empirically assess the standardization of using voluntary ex ante transparency notices to announce the awards of noncompetitive large-value contracts.

Based on open data published in the Official Journal of the European Union, a pooled cross-sectional research design is used to determine the level of standardized use of noncompetitive contracting by member states.

Findings suggest little evidence of standardization when publicizing direct contract awards, which might warrant remedial measures for promoting standardization by the EU. Moreover, France was found to be a major outlier in the prevalence of using non-competitive direct contract awards procedures.

Maintenance of the European Union is predicated on free, transparent and open competition among member states, and this can only be maintained if each member state transposes EU standards into their national laws.

Findings suggest little evidence of standardization when publicizing direct contract awards, which might warrant additional remedial measures promoting consistency across the EU. Moreover, France was found to be a major outlier in the prevalence of using non-competitive direct contract awards procedures.

The purpose of this study is to analyze year-end spending practices in the European Economic Area (EEA) to baseline the pervasiveness of year-end spending spikes across countries in Europe.

The Tenders Electronic Daily dataset is used to descriptively analyze above-threshold procurement contracts by country, year and contract type from 2009 to 2018. Proportional distributions are employed to compare percentages of spend across quarters. Analyses are run within each country on the number of years displaying a fourth quarter spike, as well as within each country and contract type.

The results show that while spending spikes for above-threshold contracts in the final fiscal quarter are not consistent across all countries, patterns emerge when the data are disaggregated by country. The most populous nations in the EEA are more likely to have years with the highest proportion of fiscal spend occurring in the fourth quarter. Further, the type of contract makes a difference – services and supplies contracts are more likely to display fourth quarter spikes than works contracts.

This article provides the first analysis of the year-end spending spike across countries in Europe using procurement data, as well as the first to disaggregate by year and contract type. Findings support the literature on the presence of year-end spikes; such spikes exist even for above-threshold public procurement contracts.

Procurement systems in democratic governments across the globe face competing demands, conflated values and goals, and are being called upon to address societies "wicked" problems under the rubric of government "reform." As a result, government purchasing professionals are being challenged to develop new flexible structures and processes that devolve purchasing responsibility, yet maintain accountability and control; limit the opportunity for fraud/mismanagement while reducing operational constraints; increase economic efficiency while satisfying political demands for minority/local/small and women owned business participation; increase open and transparent competition while achieving best value; and applying best practices while confronting legal limitations. Essentially these dilemmas have placed public procurement at the forefront of government reform efforts. The current study delineates the nature of five dilemmas that purchasing practitioners face, and the implications of these dilemmas for purchasing in the public sphere are explored. Given the complexity of these dilemmas, procurement professionals will be continually called upon to balance these inherent tensions with little guidance from policymakers or elected officials.

At all levels of government, inconsistencies exist regarding the terminology and the body of knowledge used to understand public procurement. Perspectives on what public procurement is, or should be, ranges from routine ordering to sophisticated analysis of government spending. Definitional ambiguities have hampered attempts to define the field and unify its focus. This exploratory article examines the implications of the muddled nature of public procurement that has led to debate and uncertainty about the proper role of public procurement practitioners. To address these limitations, three dimensions of all public procurement systems are identified, and a general definition is proposed for describing the field and its institutionalized practices.

The purpose of the article is to examine the factors that either foster or impede adoption of supply-chain management processes by public sector organizations, as well as to identify the potential benefits that can be achieved by local governments through the use of the supply chain framework. Case study findings suggest that in order for supply chain management innovation to occur in the public sector a number of factors must be addressed, including the willingness to invest in information technology; identifying opportunities for procurement to transition from a control to a support function; seeking to partner organizational expertise with vendor expertise; the ability to identify crucial supplies and strategic issues that add value to the organization; and to innovate incrementally. Results suggest that the adoption of a supply chain perspective can yield innovative procurement techniques.

In general, there are many disincentives standing in the way of promoting change in public procurement practices by government agencies. Because engaging in sustainable purchasing requires some level of entrepreneurialism and risk-taking, a sorting framework is adopted to gauge whether some organizations are systematically more likely to pursue sustainable public purchasing (SPP) efforts than others. One-way analysis of variance and other methods are applied to a survey of public procurement practitioners across over 300 governments in the U.S. Results strongly suggest that agencies of various scope and reach tend to abstain from aggressively pursuing SPP efforts. However, when they do employ SPP, these efforts tend to be quite variable across and within levels of government and organizational size. In an effort to bridge theory with empirical data, a strong case can be made that the current state of SPP in the United States is the result of random and very cautious experimentation with little systematic pattern to SPP adoption.

Governments across the globe appear to identify and tout technology as a way to transform how they govern. Public procurement is at the forefront of most reform efforts given that it plays a significant role in promoting accountability and transparency. This study relies on survey data of procurement professionals to delineate the current status of eprocurement implementation in United States and Canada. Findings suggest that digitalized public procurement has not yet led to significant transformative changes. Unsuitability of software platforms, organizational resistance, lack of strategic systemsʼ integration and failure to involve public procurement professionals in the design of e-procurement systems were identified as the primary obstacles of effectively implementing digital procurement. These findings suggest that in order to capitalize on the potentially transformative nature of ICT in procurement, policymakers, system designers, and procurement professionals must take an active role in both the design of the software and its adoption across political, institutional and behavioral domains.

Over the last several decades, lean thinking has been credited with several advancements in the practices of private sector organizations. Only recently have researchers begun to report on lean thinking as it applies to the public sector. For public procurement research, the concept remains largely unexamined. This research used the extant literature to identify preconditions that are required to successfully deploy lean thinking principles, tools, and techniques. Salient preconditions were organized into key categories. These categories provided the basis for a framework designed to assess public procurementʼs ability to adopt lean thinking, and aid in its implementation within this public sector environment. Questions suggested to guide future research, along with an approach intended to facilitate this work, are also presented.