Tendering Campaigns for Strategic Defence Equipment

Abstract

While gambling on the future, an industrial marketing campaign for the supply of high-cost politicly-sensitive Defence equipment occurs within an information management framework. The ongoing campaign receives periodic requests to tender (bid) for the supply of equipment. In the absence of substantive tendering theory, or an existing performance metric for monitoring such tendering projects, I conducted retrospective contrasting case studies comprising two three-year multi-billion dollar tendering efforts. One tender project is conclusive in that it delivers a contract agreement; the other is problematic and requires the intervention of the defence minister. Given the presence of a meagre corpus and an open systems context, the sociology of tendering is considered within a constructivist theoretical perspective enjoining the epistemology of social constructionism and ontological realism. At best, such an endeavour leads to suggestive middle-range theory. Three key insights evolved. First, I show that these campaigns and projects present as politicly and socially complex, where cultural diversity amongst the stakeholders ensures generally that different enduring myths take precedence: a mess. The resulting information distortions and ambiguities underlie the conflicts, problem definitions, and proposed solutions: a wicked mess. This is a world of desired political ‘ends’ moulded by political reasoning rather than ‘means’. Decision-making is not problem solving. Second, this research identifies specifically collaborating properties amenable to description in terms of the legitimacy of organisational engagements. Such legitimacy is a state of mutualism negotiated by the coalition of organisations comprising the tender enterprise: a coalition that includes the defence minister’s political office. A problematic tendering project fails to evince progressively, vital classes of organisational legitimacy. Additionally, with respect to the conclusive tender project, a client bid management team receives more classes of organisational legitimacy than does its bureaucratic parent organisation. Third, from an organisational coordinating process perspective, the conclusive tender project displays progressive patterns of: (1) value propositions and positioning, (2) co-evolution, (3) enforced disruption, (4) orienting to absence, (5) issuing mutual legitimacy, (6) enacting negotiating games, and (7) stabilising negotiating patterns. In contrast, the problematic tender displays ostensive “fits and starts” of belated and politicly infused coordinating and negotiating efforts. Against this background, the study develops middle-range explanatory theory that infers value generation through connectivity and awareness (phenomenological intentionality). Patterns of collaborating and coordinating provide complementing paths of reasoning about the contingent (political) arrangements shaping the progressive efficacy of major Defence equipment supply competitions.