Public procurement and small businesses: estranged or engaged?

How do ‘under-represented’ business owners engage with public procurement opportunities? Extant studies tend to offer prescriptions rather than theoretically-guided responses to this question despite the importance of public procurement as a tool for economic development. Drawing on Edwards et al’s (2006) institutionalist framework on small firm behaviour, this paper examined the complex, subtle, interplay of structural factors and internal resources in shaping small firms’ strategic choices and identified the existence of four discernible groups of under-represented businesses with differentiated levels of knowledge, attitude and capacity, from those unwilling and unable to seek supply opportunities to those aspiring and able to engage.