مدیریت عرضه در ادارات دولتی آمریکا: به سوی یک رشته دانشگاهی؟

This article examines the development of supply management in the U.S. to assess its progress towards academic disciplinary status. A comparison of the fields of business administration and public administration indicates that supply management is more developed in the former than in the latter, which inhibits its disciplinary status. Various reasons for this uneven development in the two fields are explored. The paper argues that a paradigm shift must occur for public supply management, which will re-orient it around the concept of the public interest. This will require public supply professionals to participate strategically in public policy-making in order to ascertain and promote the public interest. A policy framework is used to illustrate this re-orientation and to suggest directions for further research.

This paper addresses the theme of the 18th Annual IPSERA Conference, Supply Management—Towards an Academic Discipline? Posed thus as an interrogative, the theme suggests that supply management has not yet achieved academic disciplinary status. It further suggests inquiry along at least two lines. First, normative inquiry would investigate value-laden questions such as whether supply management ought to be moved in that direction. Second, empirical inquiry would investigate topics such as the extent to which and ways in which supply management is moving toward or away from disciplinary status, the forces that either impede or enable such movement, and the extent to which these forces are amenable to intervention. 1.1. Purpose and method In this paper, we focus on the latter line of inquiry. We assess the development of supply management in the United States in order to judge its progress towards and prospects for achieving academic disciplinary status. Specifically, we compare the disciplinary manifestations of supply management in the U.S. in two interdisciplinary academic fields—business administration (BA) and public administration (PA). Our analysis documents and compares the disciplinary evidence of supply management in BA and PA in four major areas: university curricula, textbooks, scholarly journals and other disciplinary activities (e.g., scholarly societies, research centers). The methodology here is very simple, consisting mainly of supply management content reviews in samples of each of these areas. This comparison of the evidence of academic disciplinary activities between the two fields indicates that supply management is far more developed in BA than in PA in the U.S. We then investigate potential reasons for this condition. Here we rely on scholars who have analyzed the development of supply management and of American PA. Their writings provide insights into those characteristics of supply management and PA which have made them less compatible, in a disciplinary sense, than supply management and BA. Finally, we turn our focus to developing prescriptions for enhancing the study of supply management in American PA. Relying on scholars from public procurement, PA, and the policy sciences, we synthesize their concepts and conclusions around (1) the idea of the public interest and (2) a policy framework. If adopted widely in PA, these may promote supply management’s advance toward academic disciplinary status. To summarize, our approach is exploratory, conceptual, and directed mainly toward developing hypotheses to guide further research on the disciplinary status and direction of supply management, particularly as they pertain to its problematic status in American PA. 1.2. Assumptions, limitations, and scope For the sake of convenience, we adopt several terminology conventions. We have already introduced the first convention, namely, using BA and PA to refer to the respective interdisciplinary academic fields. We use lower case words when referring to the operations, functions, and practice of business and public administration. Additionally, from this point forward, we use BA and PA to refer to those fields as they are evidenced in the U.S. Where discussion of those fields in an international or global context arises, we note that context specifically. The second convention involves the terms discipline and field for which scholars have not established agreed-upon definitions and distinctions. In this paper, we use discipline to mean a branch of knowledge with formal educational and research programs and faculties at the university level, as well as scholarly societies, and peer-reviewed journals. We use the term fields to refer to areas of study that are made up of disciplines. Third, we intentionally avoid bringing the notion of professional status in our analysis. The IPSERA conference theme emphasizes academic discipline rather than profession. While the two obviously share some features (e.g., the idea of specialized knowledge), they are different in significant ways (see for example Etzioni, 1969, Jackson, 1970 and Friedson, 1986). Addressing the question of supply management’s status as a profession would entail substantially different analysis than the question of its status as an academic discipline. Where appropriate, however, we do mention supply management professional activities (e.g., scholarly societies) in both BA and PA when those activities are relevant to disciplinary status. Finally, for the purpose of this article, we will use the term supply management as defined by the Institute for Supply Management, ISM): the “identification, acquisition, access, positioning, management of resources and related capabilities the organization needs or potentially needs to attain its strategic objectives” (Carter and Choi, 2008, p. 2). According to ISM, components of supply management include “disposition/investment recovery, distribution, inventory control, logistics, manufacturing supervision, materials management, packaging, product/service development, purchasing/procurement, quality, receiving, strategic sourcing, transportation/traffic/shipping and warehousing” (Carter and Choi, 2008, p. 2). Other terms used in reference to the management of supplies and services include procurement, contracting, acquisition, purchasing, outsourcing, and buying. Our purposes in this paper do not require that we enforce rigorous definitions for or distinctions for these terms; thus we refer simply to supply management throughout most of the paper.

Earlier we suggested that the type of re-orientation described above would not occur absent initiatives by public supply management leaders. While these initiatives could take several forms, we take it as axiomatic that a key component would be an aggressive and broad-based program of directed scholarly and practitioner-based research, perhaps under a consortium of associations and institutions such as ISM, NIGP, PPRC, and ASPA. (The International Research Study of Public Procurement (see Knight et al., 2003) may provide an exemplar for this type of effort.) The main thrust of such a research program, at least initially, would be to investigate and document public supply management’s contributions to the public interest, broadly defined, at various levels of governmental administration. Many research questions could be posed: What are the various problems presented by the environment which are most amenable to melioration through public supply? What consultative and collaborative means are most effective for negotiating consensus on various policy alternatives? What are the relationships between structural and allocative policies? Certainly, the methods by which public supply management professionals can promote supply management considerations in the early stages of the policy process is an area worthy of research. To the extent such promotion is possible, it would help to elevate supply management to a strategic level in PA. A particularly important area of research would seek to reduce ambiguity surrounding the idea of the public interest, thereby making public supply management’s contributions more tangible. Such research would focus on how to measure the achievement of various aspects of the public interest amid the multiple and amorphous goals that characterize the public sector. Desired policy impacts such as transparency, accountability, probity, and value for money are certainly indicators of achievements in support of public interest. How might these policy impacts be measured? For example, many public procurement organizations are required to keep statistics regarding awards given to small businesses and firms owned by historically disadvantaged groups. These metrics indicate the extent to which public organizations are promoting a particular aspect of the public interest. What other metrics might be developed for other aspects of the public interest? A follow-on research program might address the policy-analytical and managerial competencies required by “strategic” public supply managers. The results would provide a basis for educational and training materials for university and professional curricula in public supply management. Some of these required competencies may align very well with those reflected in MPA programs, and public supply management courses and concentrations may find homes in those programs. The specifics of how this re-orienting of public supply management from tactical to strategic perspectives by means of the public interest remain to be worked out. Clearly, it must begin with the resources at hand: existing professional societies, academic conferences, journals, and scholars. Again, of particular importance will be the work of scholars who must develop the intellectual underpinnings for public supply management and the public interest; these underpinnings will have a wide reach into textbooks, conferences, and programs of education and training. We anticipate that current promising streams of research will continue, perhaps in connection with our policy framework. For example, various related theories from economics (e.g., mechanism design (Hurwicz and Reiter, 2006); game theory (Myerson, 1997); principal–agent models (Laffont and Martimort, 2002)) may provide sound bases for policy-making, especially in the crafting of effective structural policies. If this transformation of public supply management takes place, an added benefit should be the “spill-over effect” as its research, best practices, and lessons learned carry over to BA as well as the business management sector. Only until this transformation occurs and the synergies take effect in supply management, can it attain disciplinary status. Given the current state of public supply management, we’re not optimistic that this reorientation to the strategic view will occur in the foreseeable future. However, such a move will be necessary if supply management is to become a discipline.