Niklas Lars Hallberg

Senior lecturer

Learning to contract in public procurement : an empirical exploration of the role of organizational design in the public procurement process

Author

Niklas Lars Hallberg

Summary, in English

How do organizations learn to contract in public procurement? Previous research on learning to contract highlights the importance of contracting capabilities for successfully managing buyer-supplier relationships. According to this research, the design of supplier contracts should be aligned with the attributes of the transaction, which require specialized knowledge that is typically dispersed across different internal units and categories of employees. This gives rise to an organizational design problem of how to facilitate specialization, coordination, and integration across different parts of the procuring organization. Based on two case-studies, we examine the nature of learning processes in public procurement and how organizational design impact contractual learning. Our results show that public procurement contracts change as a result of experiential learning and that the nature of this learning is affected by organizational design. More specifically, we find that the aggregation of economic, technical and legal tasks in specific functional units can strengthen contractual learning through specialization and the standardization of processes, and that the level of structural integration between these units may affect what type of contractual learning that occur.

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