A Review of Public Administration Research: Where Does Public Procurement Fit In?

Control and accountability in supply chain management: Evidence from a South African metropolitan municipality

“…Supply chain management (SCM) is an administrative function, in which public financial resources are used to obtain goods, works and services to meet the needs of citizens (Manzini et al, 2019, p. 118;Rasheli, 2016). It is a core realm of public administration practice, used by public officials to address public problems of the administrative state (Trammell et al, 2019). Theoretically, SCM is based on the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm (Rhodes, 1997, p. 180).…”

“…Supply Chain Management (SCM) is critical for obtaining and delivering goods, services and infrastructural works to meet the needs of citizens and is a core realm of public administration practice (Rasheli, 2016;Trammell et al, 2019). South African municipalities use supply chains to procure goods, services and works for the public good.…”

Recent research on public procurement: Should it become a subfield of public administration?

“…We also conjecture that we have now entered, with the publication of this review article as well as Trammell et al's (2020), into a third phase which involves legitimizing PP research as a specific subfield of public administration research. This third phase is happening simultaneously to a practical legitimization effort, through which practitioners are looking for recognition and during which a differentiated set of skills is being identified in the hope of making PP a recognized profession (McCue et al 2020).…”

“…Contrary to Trammell et al (2020), who looked only at public administration journals, one of our objectives was to see in which fields PP research was published. Therefore, we did not limit our search to specific journals, but instead used a longer list of more specific keywords to capture articles in many different journals.…”

Establishing the foundational elements of a public procurement body of knowledge

“…Because public procurement operates in the public domain, delimiting a PPBOK includes numerous political issues that raise both procedural and operational questions (Johnson et al, 2003; Roman, 2014). After recently conducting a literature review, Trammell et al (2020: 665) concluded that in “order to further establish the legitimacy of public procurement as a subfield of public management, the field of public procurement needs to work on its disciplinary credibility.” Furthermore, there are additional questions surrounding the extent to which this subfield of public administration is specialized enough to be considered autonomous (Prier et al, 2013; Roman, 2014). In other words, it is still debated whether public procurement itself is sufficiently distinctive from other subfields of public administration to justify a unique BOK.…”