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Introduction
The project management professional has different lenses through which to view procurement methods. The term remains broadly defined and is used to describe a variety of entities such as functions, organisations, resources, systems, processes and strategies (McDermott, 1999; Rowlinson and McDermott, 1999; Palaneeswaran et al., 2003; Nissen, 2009; Love et al., 2012). The definition of procurement has also been evolving throughout the time as the activities incorporated with procurement have become significantly important to enterprise success (Nissen, 2009). Interestingly, the definition is changed and developed from time to time even by same authors, for instance, Mohsini and Davidson (1991) defined procurement as “the acquisition of new buildings, or space within buildings, either by directly buying, renting, or leasing from the open market, or by designing and building the facility to meet a specific need” (p. 86), while an updated definition was introduced almost one decade later describing procurement as “a strategy to satisfy the client’s development and/or operational needs with respect to the provision of constructed facilities or a discrete life cycle” (Lenard and Moshini, 1998, p. 79). This evolution is explained by Nissen (2009) that “procurement was once descriptive of the simple clerical activities associated with purchasing well-specified items, but it has evolved in some organisations to describe instead strategic partnering efforts made by senior executives” (p. 247). Procurement is further referred to other features such as culture, management, economics, environment and political issues (Rowlinson and McDermott, 1999). As Rowlinson and McDermott (1999) describe, procurement is the acquisition of project resources to realise a constructed facility. This acquisition of resources is a part of the procurement system and can be referred to a process of combining these necessary resources together.
Even though a plethora of studies have endeavoured to investigate different aspects of procurement such as selection process (Gordon, 1994; Alhazmi and McCaffer, 2000; Al Khalil, 2002; Luu et al., 2005; Love et al., 2010), influence of procurement choice on the project performance (Mohsini and Davidson, 1991; Naoum and Mustapha, 1994, 1995; Naoum, 1994; Eriksson and Westerberg, 2011) and contractual mechanism of procurement alternatives (Nahapiet and Nahapiet, 1985; Eriksson, 2006; Hoezen et al., 2012); however, there is a dearth of study focusing on modern, purely relationship-based delivery systems...