Why PREBEM?

The 11th PREBEM conference has a theme which is highly relevant to the practical realities of today’s world. I will shed light on its relevance by drawing upon my own observations from the field research which is still in process. I have observed a blurring of boundaries within and between organizations in the field of facility management services. Facility management services are all supporting services such as real estate management, cleaning, catering, security, maintenance, event management, etc.

So far as blurriness is concerned within the organizations, the relationships between different departments within an organization are changing rapidly into customer-supplier relationships, especially in the public sector in the Netherlands. The organizations have an internal market mechanism in place where the some internal departments become customers of one department for a particular service, for example, facility management services. They agree on service levels, pricing and performance measurement systems. In other words it is like bringing the market within the relationship in order to improve efficiency, enhance quality, etc. In some cases there could be captive buying-selling of services which means that the internal customers don’t have a choice of buying services from the suppliers outside of their own company. Similarly the service providing department does not sell services to the outside customers.

However, there could be free buying and selling of services where internal customers have an option of buying services from an outside supplier and the internal supplier department can sell services to external customers. In other words traditional boundaries between departments are blurring and changing the governance of relationships. Similar blurriness has also been observed between organizations. In this case it is between a supplier of facility management and their customer companies. The suppliers of facility management services have been taking over most of the employees of their client organizations.

As a result the employees transferred to the supplier company become the service provider for their parent organization. So the colleagues become suppliers. It is interesting to observe how the all the abovementioned relationships develop and change the organizational realities now and in the future. The development of these kinds of relationships in the market is blurring the customary organizational boundaries. They pose new challenges to study and discuss how and why these developments are taking place and how and why we can manage and learn to live successfully in this blurring reality of economic life.

11th PREBEM Conference in Nyenrode Castle, the Netherlnads on 19th March 2010 provides an excellent opportunity to participate in the discussions and issues related to blurring boundaries within and between organization and institutions with budding scholars as well as renowned researchers in the field such as Professor Michael Hitt, Professor Charles Weinberg and Professor John Cantwell. I am really looking forward to this event.

What about you? You can register till 5th March 2010 for this conference so hurry up and join the exciting interaction.