Abstract
The province of Quebec, Canada, seeks to implement relational alternate project delivery methods to achieve sustainability and energy efficiency in public construction. However, the relational differences between the formal written parts of different delivery methods have yet to be analyzed and understood, as is the case with the relational aspects of contracts and the achievement of sustainable and energy-efficient infrastructure. Using a hermeneutic interpretation of Macneil’s relational contract norms and grounded theory, 26 contracts involving Quebec’s largest public client of vertical infrastructure and representing three different types of project delivery methods (design–bid–build (DBB), design–Build (DB), and construction manager–general contractor/integrated project delivery (CMGC/IPD)) were analyzed using NVivo. It was found that CMGC/IPD is the most relational project delivery method available to Quebec’s public clients, namely because of the public client’s active involvement in the realization process, the increasing complexity of roles, the multitude of common management structures, and the internalization of sustainability measures and conflict resolution. Furthermore, Quebec’s CMGC/IPD was found to be an IPD-ish delivery method, lacking the early involvement of the construction manager and the risk/reward sharing mechanisms necessary to achieve pure IPD status. The findings and theoretical considerations discussed here will help policymakers, contract drafters, and public clients interested in implementing relational contracting practices in public construction projects.
Highlights
Transactional contracts put emphasis on legal rules, formal documents, and self-liquidating transactions (Williamson 1979)
It was found that construction manager/general contractor (CMGC)/integrated project delivery (IPD) contracts are more relational because of (1) the active role of the public client in the design and realization process, (2) the multiplicity and timely involvement of key stakeholders, and (3) the increasing complexity of roles using building information modeling (BIM)
This paper builds on the literature regarding the transactional and relational features of different public construction project delivery methods, namely design–bid–build, design–build, and construction manager/general contractor coupled with an integrated design process
Summary
Transactional contracts put emphasis on legal rules, formal documents, and self-liquidating transactions (Williamson 1979). These contracts, traditionally used in public construction procurement, have created problems for practitioners, in part, because of the impossibility of predicting every possible outcome that may, and will, arise during a long-term relationship (MacNeil 1974a, 1980a). Rather than focusing on project goals, transactional contracts are segmented, sequential, and create a silo effect, leading to a focus on individual goals (Ghassemi and Becerik-Gerber 2011). The construction industry has suffered from the repeated use of formal and transactional contracts, leading to adversarial relationships, low productivity rates, poor overall quality, and the use of inefficient methods, causing job recommencement. Multiple contracts between different firms not always having a precedent knowledge of one another, the absence of risk/reward sharing mechanisms, and the existence of a procurement regulatory framework considered by researchers to be an exogenous uncertainty create ex-ante transactional and infrastructural complexity (Roehrich and Lewis 2014; Zheng et al 2008)
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