The Significance of Customer Base in the New Economy: Satisfaction and Perceptions of Success among Small Suppliers and Small Nonsuppliers1

Abstract

Outsourcing of operations from large businesses to small business suppliers has become a prominent feature of the new global economy. This paper compares the perceived success and work satisfaction of small businesses that supply goods and services to other businesses compared with other small businesses. Small business suppliers and their customers may be engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship, or small suppliers may be disadvantaged as a result of the relationship. Using data from interviews with 715 small business operators, partial support was provided for the disadvantaged position. Suppliers had lower perceived business success compared with other small businesses when other variables were controlled. However, there was no difference in job satisfaction.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.