HOW COUNTIES BUY: A STUDY OF ORGANIZATIONAL ALTERNATIVES FOR THE PROCUREMENT FUNCTION IN MICHIGAN COUNTY GOVERNMENT

County governments play an important role in determining the quality of rural life. Policy and program decisions of a county board of commissioners are not final until translated into expenditures; purchasing operations are a part of the operationalization of allocation decisions. In a period of general fiscal difficulties and a need to control expenditures, counties have recognized procurement processes as an area where changes might be made.;The buying center concept is used; actors with conflicting interests participate in buying decision making. Control of decision making for important purchasing activities will determine final performance relative to the important actors' goals. The working hypothesis is that participation in decision making reflecting the board's priorities will increase as the position assigned purchasing authority obtains more trading materials. Case study counties are used within a comparative descriptive methodology to examine the factors determining patterns of participation in purchasing decision making. Results indicate that changes in procurement function organization do affect buying center participation in this way for purchases for departments with appointed heads. While the available organizational alternative provide the appearance of central control, however, the members of the "old courthouse gang," composed of the officials elected from a county-wide base, retain their abilities to exclude the board from procurement decision making.;The standard prescriptions for procurement function organization are based upon an implicit conceptual model of government as a command structure: it is assumed that if purchasing authority is centralized in a strong purchasing agent position, it can be exercised as explicitly granted, and the desired behaviors of important actors will be forthcoming. The spread of executive power throughout county government, however, makes it a system of shared powers, where desired behaviors cannot always be commanded: relationships among the important actors are characterized by bargaining and trading rather than command. An exchange approach to intraorganizational relations is used, with the alternatives for purchasing function organization analyzed on the basis of resources and trading materials available to actors for use in bargaining.