Search results

In consultant–client relationships, relationship longevity can create significant cost advantages and operational efficiencies for both client and consultant. At the same time, each party may also be motivated to look for new perspectives and opportunities by switching to new relationships. However, the benefits of replacing one consulting relationship with another are mitigated by switching costs: the costs associated with the act of changing the relationship itself.

This chapter explores the concept of switching costs by examining various types of costs, the ways these costs have been conceptualized in the literature, and how these costs may impact the nature and continuity of consultant–client relationships. The chapter will end with a series of hypotheses and suggestions for a research agenda to further develop our understanding of this important phenomenon.

The process of managing the design and construction of a project on behalf of a client may be analysed using project management theory based on a contingency approach. The analysis provided by this approach, whilst useful for understanding the interaction of the parts of the system, the functions of project management and the effectiveness of the organization structure, may be limited by not incorporating an economic explanation of how a project organization structure is chosen. The transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization may provide a theoretical basis for such an explanation. This approach holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the study of organizations as it determines whether functions are provided by the market or by hierarchy. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between these two powerful approaches in explaining the structuring and management of project organizations on behalf of clients and to explain the benefits of combining these approaches in furthering construction project management theory.

This paper aims to study the direct and indirect influence of three important intangible resources: export knowledge, negotiation skills and specialisation and trustworthiness on export intermediary performance via the competence to reduce clients’ transaction costs.

The study has been provided with the official database of export intermediary firms by the Department of Export Promotion, Ministry of Commerce, Thailand. The samples of 400 export intermediary firms were identified from the 1,486 population firms. The postal questionnaires were sent to sample firms. Ordinary least square regression analysis has been adopted to test the hypotheses of the study.

The results indicate that valuable resources of export knowledge, negotiation skills and specialisation and trustworthiness significantly and positively affect both export intermediary performance and the competence to reduce clients’ transaction costs. The competence to reduce clients’ transaction costs partially mediates the relationship between resources and export intermediary performance.

A “cost-based” perspective needs to be supplemented in future research with a more behavioural approach.

Export intermediaries must be able to deliver “true added value” to remain a viable organisational form, hence, the intermediaries need ceaselessly to acquire, utilise and develop resources and capabilities in reducing clients’ export-related transaction costs.

From a public policy perspective, gaining more knowledge about the role of export intermediaries can greatly facilitate the export promotion efforts in which most nations’ governments are involved.

This study is a first attempt to study the mediating effect of the competence to reduce transaction costs, which mediates the relationship between resources and performance of export intermediary.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, illustrate and provide a deeper understanding of team composition and labor allocation in audit teams by quantifying the exact value of resources at different levels of the audit production. Audit teams have been considered as a black box in audit research. Therefore, this paper reports descriptive statistics on (levels and proportions of) hours and costs allocated to auditor ranks (and the number and value, i.e. billing rates, of auditors for different ranks and the entire team) to shed new light on audit teams.

This study uses a proprietary data set containing disaggregated information on hours, costs and billing rates for each team member in each of 908 audit engagements. The data are provided by a Swedish Big 4 audit firm. The study uses a purely descriptive approach and categorizes auditors into seven ranks. As size and the publicly listed status are crucial determinants of audit production, the paper splits engagements in public and private companies and reports statistics for size quartiles of both public and private clients.

The paper provides descriptive statistics for (1) client size, (2) audit team members, (3) audit hours, (4) audit costs, (5) proportion of audit hours, (6) proportion of audit costs, (7) billing rates and (8) variation of billing rates. Results show that compared to private clients, the audit firm allocates higher effort from auditors in higher ranks and lower effort from auditors in lower ranks to public clients. Another finding is that allocation varies with client size for private clients, but less so for public clients.

In an area with sparse literature, this descriptive study serves as a first step to improve our understanding and guide future research. It provides concrete support for previously known theory.

This paper aims to explore how the introduction of new accounting information influences the understandings of cost-consciousness. Furthermore, the paper explores how managers use accounting information to shape organizational members’ understanding of changes, and how focusing on cost-consciousness influence professional culture within social services.

The paper is based on a case study, drawing on sensemaking as a theoretical lens. Top management, middle management and staff specialists at a medium-sized Danish municipality are interviewed.

The paper demonstrates how accounting metaphors can be effective in linking cost information and cost-consciousness to operational decisions in daily work practices. Further, the study elucidates how professionalism may be strengthened based on the use of accounting information.

The study is context specific, and the role of accounting in professional work varies on the basis of the specific techniques involved.

The paper shows how managers influence how professionals interpret and use accounting information. It shows how cost-consciousness can be integrated with social work practices to improve service quality.

The paper contributes to the literature on how accounting information influences social work. To date, only a few papers have focused on how cost-consciousness can be understood in practice and how it influences professional culture. Further, the study expands the limited accounting metaphor research.

Advances in information technology coupled with the need to build resilience against disruptions by pandemics like COVID-19 continue to emphasize offshoring services in the software industry. Service-level agreements (SLAs) have served as a key mechanism for safeguarding against risk in offshore service arrangements. Yet, variations in service cost and quality persist. This study aims to open up the blackbox linking SLAs to offshore project outcomes by examining (1) how the provisions in these contracts affect the ability of project teams – the work unit primarily in charge of producing the offshored service – to achieve their objectives and fulfill client requirements and (2) how differences in contextual factors shape the effects of these provisions.

The authors incorporate the role of organizational work practice differences to understand the challenges that 270 offshore project teams faced in coordinating and integrating technical and business domain knowledge across organizational boundaries in offshore arrangements. The examined offshore IT projects were managed by a leading software vendor in India and several of its US-based clients over a three-year period.

The authors demonstrate that organizational work practice differences represent a barrier to offshore project success, and that project team transition processes are an important mechanism for overcoming these barriers. Moreover, the authors find that transition processes represent key mediating mechanisms through which SLA provisions affect offshore project outcomes.

The study findings shed light on how SLAs shape software project teams' balance between activities aimed at meeting client needs and those aimed at containing costs.

There is a paucity of recent literature on the influence of project strategic, site related and design related variables on the cost of construction. This paper seeks to redress this omission by presenting the results of an investigation into the influence of 41 independent variables on both construction cost and client cost. Data were collected from 286 construction projects in the United Kingdom and correlation and test for differences were used to determine the relationships that exist between the dependent and independent variables. The analysis both confirms the strong relationship between construction cost and client cost and between those two measures of cost and GIFA, and establishes other relationships which exist within the data, confirming many of the relationships that had been anticipated from the literature. It also established the ordinal sequence of several nominal variables. These data, therefore, can be confidently used to develop models of the total cost of construction.

To date, empirical and conceptual models of relationship marketing have focused almost exclusively on a range of direct antecedents and mediator variables to explain variations in a dependent variable – usually relationship commitment. No attempt has been made to examine under what conditions these various antecedents have a stronger/weaker impact on relationship commitment. This paper extends the relationship marketing literature by testing a contingency model to assess the impact of trust and service satisfaction on relationship commitment under conditions of varying switching costs, alternative attractiveness and experience‐based norms, in the context of a professional consumer service. Employing a sample of 201 clients of financial planning services, we test 11 hypotheses formulated on the basis of a review of the services and relationship marketing literature, and a series of qualitative interviews with clients. The results clearly indicate that the impact of trust and satisfaction vary according to contingency conditions of switching costs, attractiveness of alternatives and client experience.

Project duration and cost play a significant role in fulfilling the objectives of both the contractor and the client. This paper builds upon the assumption that, for a given project quality, there exists a relationship between the project duration and the project cost. The behaviour of this relationship is very much influenced by the nature of the project. The paper proposes a general set of potential mathematical expressions for the above relationship and facilitates the identification of the project duration which yields lowest project cost. These are then applied to ‘Harmony’ type housing projects in Hong Kong. Moreover, while demonstrating the difference between the contractor's optimum cost‐time curve and that of the client, the paper suggests that the parties can select one of three options to reach a compromise. To this end, the paper introduces a set of mathematical expressions to represent these compromise‐solutions.