A Study Of Contractual Violation Management Between General Contractor And Subcontractor In Construction Project

Contract plays an important role in both social and economic system.It promotes the occurances of transactions and collaborations,and thus draws attentions from researchers in the inter-organizational transaction research field.However,most of the current studies focus on research questions related to contractual governance and contract structure,and implicitly assume that the contract will be fulfilled in the way it is designed.The existence of contractual violation and enforcement afterwords,however,has been ignored.This study focuses on contractual violation and the enforcement issues afterwords to enrich the current contracting theory.Base on the logics from transaction cost and attribution theories and the conclusions from the current researches related to contract,a theoretical framework containing prior tie,the level of trust between transaction parties before contractual violation,perceived intentionality,contract enforcement and social enforcement is developed.The antecedents of enforcement decisions after contractual violation have also been identified.Based on the empirical data collected from interviews and questionnaires,this study proves the subjectivity of judgement of contractual violation and the imcompletementness of contract,generalizes the subjective reasons for why contract are imcomplete and factors for making contractual violation judgement,and also visualizes the abstract concept of social enforcement.The empirical data in this study shows that prior tie would influence the level of trust between transaction parties before contractual violation,and thus affect the severity of enforcement.What's more,different dimensions of trust have virous influence on severity of enforcement.Specifically,goodwill-based trust would decrease the perceived intentionality of the violated party,and thus lower the severity of both contract and social enforcement.However,competence-based trust would increase the perceived intentionality of the violated party,and thus increase the severity of both contract and social enforcement.This study also shows that contractual governance and relational governance complement each other in the stage of enforcement after contractual violations.This study contributes the current studies in the following three ways.Firstly,this study deepens and expands the understanding of contract by exploring the research questions related to enforcement decisions after contractual violation,proves the subjectivity of judgement of contractual violation,explains the imcompleteness of contract from a new perspective,analyzes contract enforcement from different contract structures,and offers a new way to explore the relationship between contractual governance and relational governance.Secondly,as the first study to explore research questions related to social enforcement in Chinese construction industry,this study visualizes the abstract concept of social enforcement into an exercisable behavior.This not only offers a measurement foundation for researches afterwords relate to social enforcement,but also helps to depict a whole picture of enforcement decision-making process.Thirdly,trust is differentiated into goodwill-based trust and competence-based trust in this study.Based on the empirical data gathering by questionaires,this study enhances the necessity of doing nuanced studies related to trust.What's more,this study complements the studies about how trust influences the positive sides in a transaction with how trust influences the negative sides in a transaction.