Representation of sourcing alternatives and negotiation strategies in the textile and clothing supply chain

The buyer-supplier relationship has one of its greatest expressions in negotiating activities, which contribute to giving content to the history of the interaction and endowing its fundamental characters with meaning. Negotiation is a naturally significant component of this interaction, as is known from case analyses of buyer-supplier relations that have long been available in business-to-business marketing. The theme of negotiation can be examined from various different perspectives, among which two are of special importance, namely the question of management of information and that of the negotiation styles the buyer and the supplier each adopt. In the literature stemming from the Harvard Negotiation Project, the “position” negotiator (whether “soft” or “hard”) has been contrasted with the “principles” negotiator (Fisher and Ury 1981). In a different but apparently converging literature, negotiating styles have been subdivided by other authors into, on the one hand, competitive or distributive negotiation, and, on the other, problem-solving or integrative negotiation. In this paper, it is worth keeping the concept of integrative negotiation separate from that of principles-based or interest-based negotiation, just as distributive negotiation needs to be kept separate from positions negotiation. More specifically, we assume that the negotiating style, which is generally linked to the individual’s evaluation of the most appropriate manner of approaching the interlocutor and the attitude to be adopted during negotiation, should be distinguished from the strategy which is brought into action and emerges from the concrete negotiating process, inasmuch as this latter aspect specifically concerns the results achieved through the negotiating activity (Guercini and Runfola 2005). According to the market-as-network approach (Håkansson and Snehota 1995) one of the most interesting aspects is that negotiation comes to be seen as a way of acting that influences the buyer-supplier relationship but at the same time is an operational lever that sheds light on relational practices per se. Within this framework, to represent the buyer’s alternatives, in the paper we introduce the concepts of the no-purchase indifference function (indifference to the failure to make a purchase), which is to be compared and contrasted with the function/s of the best supply alternatives