Developing organizational buying theory: A small sample perspective

Abstract

The unfolding of our understanding of organizational buying behavior seems to lurch from one dissertation to the next. Many of the interesting in-depth studies in organizational buying behavior have been generated by students interested in organizational buying and fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have a chairman who shared this interest [3, 5, 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 231. The enormous commitment of time and energy by the person doing the dissertation and his or her committee results in carefully conceived and executed studies. Also, students may be more willing or easily coerced into developing studies with complex and time-consuming data collection tasks. The enormous costs in time and resources to do major work in organizational buying behavior seems to limit studies to dissertation research as tenure track needs channel efforts into faster payoff research. Although dissertation research and work by other scholars have added to our general understanding of organizational buying behavior, there is still a lack of solid theory in this area. A major constraint on theory development has been the difficulty of doing largescale buyer studies. Dissertation studies have dealt in part with this problem, but since we cannot rely on dissertations to provide our major advances, we need a methodology for theory exploration and development that does not require major data collection. Data collection problems in buying centers have inhibited the scope and type of research that has been done. This paper suggests an approach to theory development that uses small-sample studies to generate propositions for testing in larger-sample studies. A perspective on theory is presented before several small sample methods of proposition development are reviewed. The paper concludes by illustrating the technique using recent studies.