Jens Roehrich

University of Bath | UB · Faculty of Management

Public-private collaborations, or hybrid organizational forms, are often difficult to organize because of disparate goals, incentives, and management practices. Some of this misalignment is addressed structurally or contractually, but not the management processes and practices. In this study, we examine how the coordination of these social and work...

This paper investigates the detail and dynamics of how contractual and relational governance mechanisms are deployed in managing complex, long-term public–private supply arrangements. Using empirical data from two UK Private Finance Initiative (PFI) cases, the paper analyses the interplay of governance mechanisms along a timeline of project phases....

Governments around the world, but especially in Europe, have increasingly used private sector involvement in developing, financing and providing public health infrastructure and service delivery through public-private partnerships (PPPs). Reasons for this uptake are manifold ranging from rising expenditures for refurbishing, maintaining and operati...

Prompted in part by constrained national budgets, European governments are increasingly partnering with the private sector to underwrite the costs of constructing and operating public hospitals and other health care facilities and delivering services. Through such public-private partnerships, governments hope to avoid up-front capital expenditure a...

Purpose – This paper applies self-determination theory (SDT) to green supply chain management (GSCM) and explores how green supplier selection (GSS) drives GSCM performance and how realisation of improved GSCM performance is contingent upon SDT mechanisms of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Design/methodology/approach – This study draws on 18...

Purpose Geopolitical disruptions significantly impact the management of temporary healthcare supply chains (HSCs). Common across geopolitical disruptions is the interruption to the flow of supplies, calling for organizations to reconfigure their existing supply chains or set up temporary ones. We theoretically and empirically investigate how tempor...

Conflict is common within global supply chains, especially where the buyer and supplier span different cultures. In such settings, formal contracts assume an important role in providing a common language that specifies each party's roles, responsibilities, and liabilities. However, the primacy, use, and interpretation of contracts is subject to the...

Multiparty alliances (MPAs) are increasingly used to deliver large utilities infrastructure projects on‐time, on‐budget, and to specified quality. In theory, MPAs should help buyers to coordinate suppliers, enable concurrent scheduling, and create process innovations. On the other hand, these governance structures are inherently less stable than dy...

Scale is commonly deployed as a descriptor in the extant project management literature without an associated discussion of what this means. Following a literature review and synthesis of 172 papers we identify three findings. First, most papers addressed the foundational concept of scale obliquely, suggesting a conceptual gap. Second, where scale i...

Purpose Drawing on paradox theory and the category of the “performing-organizing” paradox, the study investigates the tensions firms experience in the context of organizing the processes involved in managing their indirect GHG emissions. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop hypotheses to explain why the paradox elements of supply chain...

Multiple organizations working jointly on shared activities in inter‐organizational projects for a defined period of time are used increasingly to coordinate the supply of complex products, subsystems, and services across many industries. Despite the growth in inter‐organizational networks as an organizational form, scholars have only recently begu...

While trust and opportunism were traditionally considered as the opposite ends of a continuum, when considered through the lens of paradox theory, these two could not only coexist, but also have a complementary effect on the achievement of sustainability in buyer-supplier relationships. To examine the combined effects of trust and opportunism, we a...

Organizations face continual challenges in identifying, analyzing, controlling, and evaluating their performance. These challenges are frequently addressed through control systems or plans, but rarely through the behavioral changes needed to achieve project performance. We examine how the behavioral concept of nudges can be used in projects to addr...

Purpose Project-based supply networks are an emerging form of organizing used to meet a buying organization's operational and innovation goals. Knowledge sharing among suppliers in the network plays a key role in successful project delivery but is challenging to achieve in practice. The authors draw on self-determination theory (SDT) to examine the...

The management of public-private relationships to deliver vital public products and services is crucial to ensure high performance. While extant public management studies have started to position contracts as vital in managing information exchange, these studies paid limited attention to unpack the elements within a contract, and their role and cap...

This study investigates cross-national collaboration to realize benefits in strategic transport projects (STPs) characterized by complexity, ambiguity, and collaboration challenges between project organizations. With the increasing importance of STPs in realizing (developing) countries’ adequate transport needs and demands, we respond to calls for...

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the global economy, laying bare the coordination challenges and vulnerabilities of global value chains (GVCs) across sectors. Governments, consumers, and firms alike have called for greater GVC resilience to ensure critical products are delivered to the right place, at the right time, and in the right condition. This a...

Purpose Inter-organisational governance is an important enabler for information processing, particularly in relationships undergoing digital transformation (DT) where partners depend on each other for information in decision-making. Based on information processing theory (IPT), the authors theoretically and empirically investigate how governance me...

Crises test the resilience of public service organizations. Healthcare providers must respond and innovate within tight constraints to address challenges. Presenting COVID-19 as a knowable unknown (black swan event), we adopt information processing theory to investigate how healthcare providers and their suppliers address information asymmetry to s...

Purpose: This research bridges disparate research on servitization, namely Product-Service Systems (PSS) and Integrated Solutions (IS), to provide valuable insights for the progression of the field. It acts as a reconciliation of these research streams and offers a reconceptualised agenda incorporating recent research on platforms, ecosystems, modu...

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate governance in service triads, specifically studying significant steering and connecting coordination failures, to reveal typically hidden characteristics and consequences. Design/methodology/approach: This study focuses on coordination functions and activities between a buyer (a government department), a c...

Contracts are a formal mode of governing inter-organizational relationships. They specify the terms and conditions of the agreement between two parties, interpret and adapt the relevant legal and industrial norms, serve as framing devices and establish the rules and norms underpinning the relationship. The objective of this chapter is to synthesize...

Drawing on the problem-solving perspective of the knowledge-based view (KBV), we propose and assess how a business resolved the problem of how best to contract with suppliers as a business of a multinational corporation (MNC) entering a new country with a legal system different from their own. We posit such a business will search for knowledge from...

Research has highlighted implementing partners play an important role in increasing workers' involvement in social sustainability initiatives (SSIs) in global supply chains (GSCs)-an important effectiveness determinant. However, prior research offers limited insights on the micro-level conditions under which the implementing partners can increase w...

Organizational justice has made contributions to the inter-organizational literature by highlighting the effects of justice perceptions on behavioral, attitudinal, and organizational outcomes. However, research on justice perceptions remains scattered and falls short of addressing key elements of justice, and how these elements interact in an inter...

The Chapter places health sector Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in their wider historical context, and shows the market size over time; Europe has seen the majority of projects. We define the principal purpose of PPP as raising fresh capital on behalf of the state and introducing commercial project development capacities; all to create scalable...

Climate change poses significant new risks and challenges for businesses and their supply chains. Additionally, in many sectors, Scope 3 indirect greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the sourcing and distribution of goods and services are larger than firms' own carbon footprints. Here we study how firms engage their key stakeholders in their sup...

Our study explores how multinational corporations (MNCs) learn to contract in a new country. Through in-depth study of a French MNC and its boilerplates, we posit that MNCs use problem-solving approach to adapt their contracting capabilities to a new country and simultaneously continue to contract traditionally in their own country.

Although the concepts of relational and contractual governance in inter-organizational relationships have attracted academic and practitioner interest over the last decades, to date there have been limited comprehensive and systematic efforts to review, analyse and synthesise extant literature. We review and analyse 1,415 publications identified fr...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine combinations of contract clauses in order to ascertain which combinations correlate to high operational performance (OP). Design/methodology/approach Two hypotheses were formulated from contracting theory and tested on data collected from 45 projects. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was...

This paper examines the process of a management innovation in complex products and systems (CoPS). Prior literature offers limited theoretical and empirical insights into how an inter-organizational relationship delivers CoPS by moving towards ‘integrated project teams’ over time. The research is based on an in-depth, longitudinal case study, drawi...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are critical to the growth of UK economy. Therefore, organisations are increasingly under political pressure to contribute to development of SMEs. One way of achieving this is by integrating SMEs into supply networks orchestrated by big organisations. This presents a number of governance challenges for the...

This article applies organizational identity theory to explore how temporary multi-organizations (TMOs) construct their identities as learning organizations. The study draws on 33 in-depth interviews from TMOs in the UK construction, engineering, and infrastructure industries. Interviews were further triangulated with data from a series of industry...

Outsourcing of road maintenance activities to private contractors has become a typical practice across many National Road Agencies (NRA). Although the involvement of the private sector offers efficiency gains, the procurement of road maintenance requires from NRAs the development of a different set of skills and competences and may come with the ri...

This paper explores the dynamic interplay of formal/informal governance mechanisms, in terms of functional and dysfunctional consequences for both sides of the dyad, in long-term inter-organizational relationships. Using two longitudinal cases of UK defence sector procurement (warship commissioning) we move beyond notions of complementarity and sub...

Call for papers - conference track, Euroma, 2017

Purpose - This research examines the relationship between organizational ambidexterity, the ability of companies to explore new and to exploit existing processes simultaneously, and manufacturing performance as represented by the sand cone model. Moreover, the paper analyses the impact of stable and dynamic environments on this relationship. Desig...

The aim of this Special Issue is to advance the understanding of performance-based contracting (PBC) in business markets. PBC has the potential for aligning incentives among buyers and sellers and fostering innovation. This paper critically reflects on extant research developments in order to develop a systematic knowledge map of PBC research. On t...

The following is based on research projects conducted by the authors and findings from the 1 st International Workshop on Performance based Contracting (7 th-8 th July 2014; Munich/Germany) CIPS members can record one CPD hour for reading a CIPS Knowledge download that displays a CIPS CPD icon.

Processes of servitisation will lead providers to change their service delivery structures, but they also need to transform broader organisational attributes including contractual and relational capabilities. Based on case studies in the European healthcare sector, we investigate the influence of increasing levels of service complexity on this tran...

Public procurement refers to the acquisition of goods and services by government or public sector organizations. Public procurement represents a significant amount of a country's GDP and is a vital source for innovation policy. It can actively drive demand for innovative goods, while at the same time improving the level of public services by, for e...

Deploying institutional entrepreneurship theory, this longitudinal case study investigates the micro-institutional context and changes in field and organizational structures and processes of a public organization directed to overcome institutional voids of regulatory, normative and cultural-cognitive nature observed in emerging economies. The empir...

This paper examines how organizations coordinate the often conflicting demands for high performance delivered over long periods and involving complex environments. Using two longitudinal cases of defense contracts for supporting new warships we explore not only the roles of formal and informal governance mechanisms, but the dynamic interplay of fun...

Performance-based contracting emphasises outcomes and results when procuring products, aligning buyer and supplier incentives

The prominence of Performance Based Contracting in management practice is reflected in the eventually bur-geoning academic literature on the topic, which is however rather fragmented across disciplines and application contexts. Scholars working on the topic may profit by ex-changing their understanding, perspectives, and objectives on the topic of...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationships between management, measurement and performance of sustainability in supply chains. The authors develop a framework which explores these links through decoupling as articulated by the institutional theory. They draw on a conceptual continuum of reactive-proactive sustainable suppl...

Purpose ‐ This paper aims to apply the logic of bounded rationality to corporate reputation management and explores how constraints posed by bounded rationality impact on firms' implementation of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). Design/methodology/approach ‐ This study draws on primary and secondary data from 12 UK-based companies. The a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of connections between sustainability policy goals included in public procurement tenders and offers and their achievement through contract award. Design/methodology/approach – Two hypotheses based on extant literature and the inducement–contribution theory were tested by means of a survey...

Purpose – The paper analyses how public buyers transition from procuring single products and services to procuring complex performance (PCP). The aim is to examine the change in the interactions between buyer and supplier, the emergence of value co-creation and the capability development during the transition process. Design/methodology/approach –...

Purpose – While previous studies explored the argument that allies the notion of complexity to the complex product-service offerings being procured, this paper aims to explore whether there is a corollary with exchange governance complexity. More specifically, the paper analyzes the relationship between systemic complexity and complexity of contrac...

Responsible supply chain management (RSCM) can help protect a firm's corporate reputation by shielding it from negative media attention and consumer boycotts. RSCM can also enhance a firm's corporate reputation, which allows firms to secure business contracts and penetrate new market segments successfully. This study empirically examines: (i) the e...

This chapter reviews the European experience in delivering healthcare infrastructure and services through public-private partnerships (PPPs), a strategic alliance between public and private partners over extended time periods. We investigate the concepts of contracting and bundling public sector infrastructure and services and draw lessons learnt a...

Contract studies claim that we need complex contract structures to handle complex organizational settings; however they have not yet identified which rules are actually effective to deal with complexity. This study measures three types of contract rules in complex programs using analytic induction and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis in t...

Public and private organizations are transitioning from buying or selling products to procuring or selling complex, long-term integrated solutions consisting of bundles of interrelated products and services. In response to an increasing demand for innovative solutions and a shortage of public funding, governments around the world are increasingly t...

The global financial crisis has significantly impacted the automotive industry. The crisis has reduced the supply of credit to industry, exposed process inefficiencies, and reduced credit to consumers, which has reduced sales. Firms are restructuring, with some seeking government financial support, but the industry is not addressing the underlying...

The paper analyzes changes in suppliers' organizational structures to deliver integrated solutions by examining the bundling across different project phases with a focus on realizing risk transfer and through-life innovation. A multiple, longitudinal case study method is used to examine changes in integrated solution provision in Public Private Par...

The European automotive industry has developed a demand-driven production method called build to order (BTO) to build cars to customer demand, but its strategic vision has yet to be widely diffused.

Vehicle manufacturers build the majority of vehicles to a sales forecast and links between production and final customer orders are tenuous. A greater percentage of Build-To-Order (BTO) vehicle production may offer the European automotive industry a competitive edge. The EU and industry funded Intelligent Logistics for Innovative Product Technologi...

Traditional business models coped with the complexity inherent in buying complex capital assets that will be operated and maintained over many years by a division of labour based on subsets of the value chain. Recently, customers in a wide range of sectors are not buying subcontract production or construction capacity but procuring business ‘soluti...

Although there is a growing body of research exploring the transition to a more service-based orientation in complex product markets, the majority of this literature adopts what might be classified as a ‘manufacturer-active’ point of view; that is it explores the challenges faced by firms (e.g. aircraft & capital equipment manufacturers, building f...

If plans to modernise Europe’s healthcare infrastructure are to be sustained, new ways of financing it will have to be found. The PFI (Private Finance Initiative) model has been seriously derailed by the recession, but new forms of public-private partnership – already being tried out in other European countries – may well offer more innovative appr...

This paper takes as its starting point the fact that complex projects, interpreted as multiple dependent interactions between many stakeholders over time, challenge traditional procurement practices based on the serial purchase of discrete components. The paper examines how the procurement management of such projects – procuring complex performance...

Faced with shorter product life cycles and increased cost of capital, companies can no longer afford the capital outlay for new facilities, which may become underutilised as processes improve over the first few years of operation. Outsourcing the production capacity can remove this uncertainty. However, fast-moving automotive environment companies,...

Although there is a growing body of research exploring the transition to a more service-based orientation in complex product markets, the majority of this literature adopts what might be classified as a 'manufacturer-active' point of view that explores the challenges faced by firms (e.g., aircraft and capital equipment manufacturers, building firms...

With the continuing increase of competitive pressures in the automobile industry, the acceleration of cost and price pressures and the omnipresent need for improvement of engineering productivity managers have to constantly ensure the company's survival in the market. This perspective emphasises the need for managers to consider outsourcing in orde...

Successive UK governments have increasingly used Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public-Private Partnership (PPP) investment vehicles as the principal method for procuring public sector capital projects and delivering associated services. To date there has been limited in-depth empirical investigations into managerial processes associated with...