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Procuring and managing complex performance
Edited by Dr Mickey Howard and Dr Nigel Caldwell
1 Introduction
Insights regarding the procurement of complex performance (PCP) have only just begun to emerge ([9] Caldwell and Howard, 2010, [42] Lewis and Roehrich, 2009). To date the majority of studies have focused on arguments about the inter-organizational governance "ingredients" associated with coordinating the combined effects of product-service bundles necessitating high levels of provider knowledge and/or customer interaction and "bespoke or highly customized" infrastructure ([5] Brady et al. , 2005). In the PCP sub-field, complexity has typically been defined by taking into consideration a number of factors including the extent to which infrastructural components of the whole system are "bespoke or highly customized", the number of project stakeholders and the length of planning/contracting negotiation and construction phases ([42] Lewis and Roehrich (2009). These initial studies are limited in two important dimensions. First, they adopt a relatively narrow conceptualization of complexity[1] ; where the size of a system and its number of component parts is the principal correlate with complexity. However, with reference to the broader organizational complexity literature ([1] Anderson, 1999; [45] McKelvey, 1999; [40] Levinthal and Warglien, 1999; [11] Cunha and Rego, 2010; [22] Geraldi et al. , 2011), it is the "dynamic interactions" between these components that give rise to complexity - an emergent property that cannot be deduced from the properties of the components alone. Second, few studies have extended the complexity lens to also incorporate the governance "regulator". Following [2] Ashby's (1956) "law of requisite variety" for example, a system is only stable if the number of states of its control mechanism is greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled. In other words this suggests that, when confronted with a complex situation (such as a PCP arrangement) there are two choices - increase the variety in the regulator (i.e. "more" contractual and relational governance with more complete and hence larger contracts, requiring more lawyers, more contract managers, more KPIs, more meetings, etc.) or reduce the variety in the system being regulated.
It is these under-developed areas that shape the main focus and contribution of this paper. In addition to additive conceptual insights, the research analyzed rich (e.g. addressing both...