Supplier-customer collaboration in commercial and military aerospace projects: A comparative case study

The dissertation focused on the customer-collaborative experiences of three small to medium-sized aerospace component suppliers selected for their contrasting patterns of technological competency in product design, flexible manufacturing, and statistical process control, and for their varying degrees of sales dependence upon a dominant customer.;A comparative case study design was employed utilizing interviews (N = 45) of component supplier top management and project management personnel and company documents (N = 2,000) as the primary data sources. At each field site, a longitudinal case history for a military and a commercial aerospace development project was retrospectively constructed from both data sources.;The dissertation compared the three component suppliers in terms of the contextual antecedents, governance structures, interaction processes and performance outcomes for six product development projects with major U.S. and European aerospace manufacturer customers. Resource dependence, transaction cost and institutional theory perspectives were employed for organizing construct measurement, case sampling and data collection efforts, and for formulating research propositions with which to compare predicted to observed patterns of case study findings.;Study findings most strongly supported institutional theory predictions of differences in military and commercial project governance safeguards and performance outcomes. Findings marginally supported transaction cost predictions of associations between task uncertainty, bureaucratic governance, and customer commitments. Findings did not support resource dependence predictions that customer dependence reduced a supplier's control over project resources. However, customer dependence was associated with supplier technical competencies that were narrowly specialized to customer requirements.;Findings also supported resource-based strategy theory predictions that technical competency in product design was associated with greater use of proprietary information safeguards. Also, exceptional technical competency in either product design or flexible manufacturing was associated with more positive evaluations of customer relations than evaluations by suppliers "stuck in the middle".;An unexpected finding was that technical agenda supplier-customer interactions and resource commitments preceded and were loosely coupled to commercial agenda interactions and explicit contract commitments.