Creating a Sustainable UK Farming and Food Industry: An Analysis of Partnership Thinking as a Solution to the Problems in the UK Farming and Food Industry

摘要

This thesis focuses on UK Government policy-making as it pertains to the UK farming and food industry. This sector faces many serious economic problems. In response, the UK Government has developed policies and strategies to create profitable, sustainable and internationally-competitive farming and food chains. One policy has been to promote ‘partnerships’. Considerable time and money has been spent on implementing this policy. However, the many initiatives launched have only been partially successful. A key reason for this is that many of those trying to implement ‘partnering’ have not recognised that, whilst there are many tangible and intangible advantages to be derived from ‘partnerships’, they are not always appropriate or possible. A key factor in determining when a ‘partnership’ is either appropriate or possible and whether an attempted ‘partnership’ was successful is buyer-supplier power. Unfortunately, the concept of power never featured in UK Government policy documents. The thesis also aims to improve our understanding of buyer-supplier power. While the cases showed that power was an important factor in affecting relationship success, they also showed that current power-related methodologies (Cox et al., 1999; Cox et al., 2000; Cox et al., 2003) may be too crude and require further development.