Interorganisatorisk styrning av leverantörsrelationer inom lågprismodebranschen
-En fallstudie av lågprismodeföretaget BikBok
This thesis concerns the control of outsourced interorganizational buyer-supplier relationships in the low-price fashion industry. A qualitative case study has been performed on two supplier relationships of a low-price fashion company. By identifying specificities of the industry and relating them to control problems and their implications on control solutions, the thesis has established a relation between industry specific characteristics and the way companies in the industry control their supplier relationships. The analysis is based on a theoretical framework created by Dekker (2004). Amongst other factors, the difficulty to define, quantify and measure the design variables of a fashion good, the high heterogeneity between individual products and the difficulty to predict the trend based demand, create high coordination requirements as well as appropriation concerns solved through extensive formal control. The issues are closely related to the nature of the product and the market in which it is sold and are therefore difficult to eliminate. The issues moreover render outcome control more applicable than behavior control. Social control has been shown to have a more limited reducing effect on the use of formal control than found in many other industries. The supplier relationships are of great importance in the low-price fashion industry, but few studies concerning the control of such relations in the specific industry have been carried out which leaves the relation between the industry specific variables and control unexplored hitherto.