Purpose – The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent buying companies use quality management (QM) practices for their externally sourced business services (BS) and if differences between manufacturing and service as well as between large and small companies exist regarding their...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of regional‐sectoral agglomerations – clusters – for the strategic management of firms. Concentration of firms along a single value chain is a common phenomenon in modern economies, but has seldom been reflected in the...

Purpose – Research results concerning the cost‐saving potential of international sourcing have been ambiguous and the topic has been covered in isolation without accounting for influences of alternative cost‐saving approaches. This paper aims to analyze the expected financial impact of...

Purpose This paper examines the competition between buying firms for the supplier’s competitive resources. The purpose of this paper is to examine how indirect capabilities – the ability to access external resources – can help in obtaining preferential resource allocation from suppliers....

Purpose – This paper aims to understand the factors that influence a supplier’s choice to treat selected customers more preferentially than others. Suppliers often lack the resources to treat all their customers equally, instead having to make choices to treat some customers as preferred....