Public procurement is the commercial arm of governments, contracting for goods, and services to feed public sector service provision. However, mainstream operations and supply chain management journals have published little on supply chains to governments, public procurement, and the significance of engaging small businesses in government supply chains. Policy feedback theory and thirteen coproduced international case studies of public procurement and small business agency dyadic relationships are used to explore this space. The research highlights the importance of both public procurement and small business as areas of policy and supply chain management research. Policy feedback theory is introduced as a means to understand relationships and is applied to a coproduction study to understand how supply chain management research can both explore and change policy.

A B S T R AC TThe present study is a Labovian sociolinguistic analysis of forms used to express the future tense in the spoken French of adolescents residing in Ontario, Canada. Two primary variants are examined: a) the periphrastic future (e.g. elle va partir); and b) the inflected future (e.g. elle partira). The general trend that emerges is that distribution rates of the periphrastic future are markedly higher than previous accounts of the variable and that many speakers are in fact categorical users of the periphrastic form in certain contexts. Note, too, that negation is not a strong predictor for all speakers with respect to the choice of the inflected future, a finding that is in strong contrast to previous analyses of the variable in Laurentian varieties of spoken French in Canada. After presenting the general results, we provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic and social factors that condition variant use.

Government procurement has been a neglected area of study in higher education and research. This symposium is one of the first efforts in examining government procurement. This article will provide a brief overview of government procurement developments and summarize major themes of manuscripts included in the symposium.

No abstract