I was talking to my mother the other day and I mentioned that a friend of mine was a procurement officer. She looked at me a little strange, and then asked me what a procurement officer did. I replied that they purchase office supplies and computers, whatever the company required in order to continue running. I then asked her she how it was that didn't know, as I thought that procurement officer's were a common thing in organisations and surely she had encountered the term before. She replied that in her experience, what I was describing was the role of a purchasing officer, and procurement was the term applied to people who arrange prostitutes for other people. I found this hilarious, as I had never heard the term used for that purpose.
I did a little Google search and I discovered that procuring or pandering is exactly what my mother described. However nowadays people who are procuring are generally referred to as pimps. I also looked into the term procurement, and it is only a relatively recent term applied to purchasing since the late 1980s. It was recognised that people who performed the role of purchasing in an organisation were doing a very functional task and as organisations wanted purchasing to form part of their overall strategic direction, many organisations decided to rename the purchasing function, procurement (perhaps unaware of the other use the term already held), in order to support this more strategic outlook. So in essence both uses of the term are correct, however the definition of procuring a prostitute is perhaps less used these days then the procurement as a purchasing function of an organisation.
Check out Wikipedia for more information on this topic.
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