ABSTRACT

In Operations and Supply Management and in Marketing, services have been treated as diffi cult to manage because of their supposed intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability-the so-called IHIP characteristics (Bowen and Ford, 2002; Lovelock and Gummesson, 2004). This chapter is in part about the diffi culties involved in procuring complex services, but it argues that the diffi culties arise for a very different set of reasons. When organisations choose to outsource aspects of a complex activity, they must in some senses reduce that complexity in order to make it possible to buy those aspects from another fi rm. Whereas Chapter 4 of this volume sets out the broader picture of these phenomena, this chapter examines a specifi c case in more detail.