The Analysis On The Status Of Construction Contracts In China’s Construction Industry

In China’s construction industry, contracts are legal documents for two parties toimplement a deal, and their legal status is undisputed. However, in practice,practitioners in the construction industry have different opinions psychologicallywhen it comes to the importance of contracts. Therefore, the thesis aims to study thestatus of construction contracts in the mind of practitioners in the constructionindustry and the influence of different degrees of psychological attention people payto construction contracts on the formulating and implementation of constructioncontracts, hoping to enrich theoretical and practical basis in this aspect.By document analysis and interviewing experts in the construction industry, thethesis nails down the indexes to measure the importance of construction contracts’psychological position in people’s heart, based on which the thesis designs thequestionnaire, collects relevant data and carry out a principal component analysis anda factor analysis of those data so as to obtain the general view of practitioners in theconstruction industry towards contract management. Then, the thesis combines threedifferent real-life cases to verify the results obtained by the questionnaire analysis.As the questionnaire results indicate, practitioners in the construction industryuniversally attach importance to the application of contract management inconstruction projects, they will set the contract terms in a detailed way, and they layemphasis on negotiation rather than arbitration when there’s a disagreement. However,real-life cases reveal that contract participants tend to make compromise to someextent due to some subjective or objective factors, and as a result, relationalgovernance becomes more important than contract management. Meanwhile, thecases also show that disagreements are usually caused by ambiguous contract terms,detailed contract terms and prudent contract execution are the premises of successfulprojects.By combining the questionnaire and the case analysis, it can be concluded thatpractitioners in China’s construction industry universally think that importance shouldbe attached to contract management in the construction field. At the present stage, dueto various subjective or objective factors, practitioners in China’s construction industry have got to formulate comparatively ambiguous contract terms, whichremarkably reduce contracts’ operability, thereby there’s a universal phenomenon thatcontract management seems weaker than relational governance.