Abstract
Research on service purchasing commonly acknowledges that different types of services require different purchasing approaches. This has generated a plethora of service classifications that focus on different characteristics inherent to the service. Recently, the use to which a service is put in an organization and the organizational context have been argued to influence the way in which the service is purchased, thereby shifting attention away from inherent service characteristics. The current paper extends this line of research by focusing on the buyer's understanding of the service and its impact on the supplier selection process. Based on an interpretive, phenomenographic analysis of 32 interviews with buyers of pension and insurance advice services (PIAS) in Sweden, the current study identifies four fundamentally different ways of understanding these services and shows how different conceptions of a service give rise to different approaches to selecting suppliers and different criteria for evaluating them.