However, most of the studies focused on the buyer-supplier relationship in the context
of the manufacturing industry and studies in the construction industry are few. Research
within construction has so far focused on relationships between contractor and client and
ignored the relationship between contractor and supplier (Saad et al., 2002). Supply chain
management within construction has even been argued to be synonymous with relations
on the client-contractor level (Fernie and Thorpe, 2007) and a reason for this ignorance of
suppliers might be the fact that the industry is majorly client driven (Akintoye and Main,
2007). Besides this lack of focus on contractor-supplier relationships, the Swedish
government has criticised the construction industry for its low quality and productivity
(Byggkommissionen, 2002) and pointed at the need to further develop the
inter-organisational relationships in order to deal with the underlying fragmentation
of the industry (Statskontoret, 2009).