Research On The Public Construction Projects Contract Strategy In The Chinese Context

It has been confirmed that setting up good governance mechanism can help improve project management performance in the study of project governance research.The implementation of relational governance in the public construction projects is hindered by laws and regulations,administrative supervision,suspected of corruption and so on in the Chinese context.Even so,relationship elements such as communication and coordination in the project is still widely used in practice,relationship behaviors like communication and coordination meeting is common.As the main means of project management,the focus of public construction project owner is how to inject relationship elements into contract to influence the use of subsequent relationship behaviors.In this paper,we define contract strategy as the balance between strictly normative contract governance and relationship governance that emphasizes the role of relationship to guide the solution set of contract drafting.In the Chinese context,the core content of public construction project contract strategy is unclear,the ways of relationship behavior injection is also unknown.Grounded theory and correlation analysis is used in this research.Firstly,three-level coding for the 22 interview reports of the research is made to get the core content of contract strategy.Tender documents of the typical cases is choosed to verify the result of grounded theory.Take the core content of the contract strategy for portfolio selection to acquire eight types of possible strategies.Questionnaire is designed to make a return visit.Collecting data and analysis to acquire public construction project contract strategy types in Chinese context.Three types are identified:1.On the premise of protect the interests of the organization for bidding,using strict qualification standard select the winning bidder,but considering relationship means to prevent the problems in the subsequent;2.Driven by the win-win ideological,the owner tend to adopt a flexible manner to prevent problems,but need to strictly abide by the relevant laws and regulations in the bidding stage,choosing qualified winning bidder rely on strict prequalification criteria.3.To a certain extent to consider win-win situation,considering past cooperation effect factors when choosing a winning bidder,the manner to prevent problems is more flexible,not only limited to the contract,the restriction to the opportunistic also taken into account.Secondly,designed questionnaire includes the contract strategy and relationship behavior,get the correspond matrix about contract strategy and relationship behavior through correlation analysis.Getting the relationship behaviors injected into the contract under the different contract strategies.Building the contract strategy selection process as “Relationship behavior recognition-Relationship behavior match-contract strategy selection”.Acquiring the ways of relationship behavior injection.This research provides the basis to choose contract strategy for public construction project owner,also provide the way to inject the elements of the relationship.The results make the relationship governance into practice,it has important theoretical significance and practical significance...