Catastrophic Transitions of Construction Contracting Behavior
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 134, Issue 12
Abstract
The ways to manage a construction project very much depend on the attitude of the people involved. Collectively this is identified as construction contracting behavior (CCB). The CCB of the construction industry is adversarial as pinpointed in many industry-wide reviews. A more cooperative project delivery approach has therefore been advocated. In fact, drive for efficiency provides the incentive for cooperation. Nevertheless, members of a project team, in representing their respective organizations, are often in conflict. The dichotomous pair of cooperation and aggression forces therefore coexist. It is not uncommon to note that CCB turns aggressive as the construction activities of a project intensify. This change is often sudden and thus matches well with the phenomenon of hysteresis described by the catastrophe theory (CT). It is hypothesized that the dynamics of CCB can be modeled by CT. The three-variable CT models include CCB (as dependent variable), cooperation forces (as normal factor) and aggression forces (as splitting factor). With data collected from a survey fitted by the Cuspfit program, it was found that trust intensity is an effective normal factor. Contract incompleteness and competitive inertia are splitting factors that trigger aggression.
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Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CityU 111905).
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 134 • Issue 12 • December 2008
Pages: 942 - 952
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Feb 20, 2007
Accepted: Jun 20, 2008
Published online: Dec 1, 2008
Published in print: Dec 2008
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