Search results

This study provides a comprehensive framework of adaptation in triadic business relationship settings in the service sector. The framework is based on the industrial network approach (see, e.g., Axelsson & Easton, 1992; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995a). The study describes how adaptations initiate, how they progress, and what the outcomes of these adaptations are. Furthermore, the framework takes into account how adaptations spread in triadic relationship settings. The empirical context is corporate travel management, which is a chain of activities where an industrial enterprise, and its preferred travel agency and service supplier partners combine their resources. The scientific philosophy, on which the knowledge creation is based, is realist ontology. Epistemologically, the study relies on constructionist processes and interpretation. Case studies with in-depth interviews are the main source of data.

An international management movement known as New Public Management (NPM) emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. It relies on the normative use of economic market models, transaction cost theory, and public choice theories to deliver public services. While the manifestations of this new approach have taken many different avenues across the world, in the United States the primary manifestations have been found in the “Reinventing Government” movement (Gore, 1993), and the “Competitive Sourcing” plan of the Bush Administration (Office Management and Budget, 2002, 2003). A central component of NPM practices in the United States is the use of “outsourcing” of government service delivery to private or non-profit organizations.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

Launched in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) induced radical changes in both the public-private boundaries and the production of state-provided services. Such ‘budgetary revolution’ impacted the biggest state spender in capital expenditures, that is, the Ministry of Defence. Today many MoDs are expected to leverage on the British experience and develop their own approach of PPPs to overcome both the ineffectiveness of their defence spending and today’s stalemate in public budgets. This chapter leverages on British experiences over the past two decades to analyse the benefits and limits of PPPs in the realm of defence. Does such contractual arrangement fit defence-related investment? This chapter explores the on-going redefinition of public and private realms in military matters and it puts into relief the key dimensions of PPPs in terms of contractual arrangement.

At the beginning of the nineties, the Danish construction market was in the midst of a severe slump (Eurostat, 1995). At the same time, the German market was beginning to boom, due to the process of unifying the two German states (European Construction Research, 1995). Because of the poor home market circumstances, many Danish construction industry actors, including individual architects and architectural firms, attempted to find work in Germany (Halskov, 1995). However, the aspirations of most of these actors were dashed. By 1996, many of the largest Danish civil engineering and contracting firms had lost billions of Danish kroner, and a great number of small firms, typically architectural firms or subcontractors in the construction process, had also experienced severe losses, some of which had jeopardized the very existence of these firms (ibid.). This turn of events surprised both insiders in the Danish construction industry and the general Danish population as both groups believed that Denmark has high construction standards and that the most of the firms that had attempted operations in Germany were technically competent and had sound domestic business policies.