Abstract
Projects are nowadays considered as one of the dominating modes of international business. While there is an increasing number of publications and research done in the field of project marketing and systems selling since the late 1990s, the field of project purchasing has received little interest and has not been properly researched. In terms of purchasing, the dominant approach applied to project procurement is the competitive bid. In the field of realestate, this transactional approach is however subject to an increasing number of criticisms since the mid 1990s. These criticisms point out the increasing high levels of customer dissatisfaction in terms of service delivery, time and quality and call for a revised approach to both project purchasing and project marketing. In particular, there has been increasing pressure to promote more integrated and cooperative approaches over the last ten years and to implement partnering in the construction industry. This shift from a dominantly transactional approach to more relational practices questions the role of the purchasing function and the purchasing manager. It requires both a structural and a cultural evolution of the purchasing function.<br /><br /> This paper aims at analyzing the attitude of real estate purchasers towards partnering in France and the determinants of that attitude. In particular, the paper investigates the impact of the firm’s structure, the firm’s culture and of the project stakes on that attitude. The results reveal that the customers’ attitude towards is inversely related to the size of the structure and to its level of integration in the company. It also show that partnering in real-estate business is still at its introductory stage in France due to the resistance of the biggest “market makers” which often feel threatened by the structural changes it implies from their purchasing habits. The more innovative partnering companies are industrial companies for which real-estate is now clearly considered as a non-core activity due the globalization of markets. These companies thus often evolved from partnership practices to partnering practices without any transition.