The Determination of Purchasing Objectives and Strategies: Some Key Influences

Abstract

There is no great reservoir of literature available to the serious student of that part of management sciences known as purchasing. Although there are a number of textbooks prepared by academics in purchasing, much of the authorship of other purchasing‐related literature has been undertaken by practitioners and academics in the field of marketing. This is regrettable but quite logical, for it arises out of the fuller explanation of the subject. Here, marketers have perceived a legitimacy in researching inter alia such areas as buyer behaviour, buyer perceptions, the organisation of buying and the decision‐making process of the purchasing function. Although many of these pieces of work are helpful to those studying purchasing subjects, they are necessarily written from the marketing perspective and therefore not entirely adequate for the serious student of purchasing. As an example, such authors naturally see the buyer as part of the customer market and references to markets is within this context. The buyer himself has a perspective of his/her supply markets which recognise their wider scope and increased complexity more accurately than can be perceived by an author taking a marketing viewpoint.