Search results

Today, sustainability is considered a high priority; and it is on the agenda for major corporations. It has experienced an increase due to the demands of the customers, thereby pressuring corporations to act in more sustainable ways to stay relevant and competitive. One industry that is experiencing an increased request to act sustainably is the construction industry. The construction industry differs quite a lot from other industries since it is project-based and built on temporary relationships. Subcontractors are temporarily engaged in the projects, often by a main contractor, to perform tasks in which they are specialised. The subcontractors additionally engage their respective subcontractors. This makes it harder to control and ensure that all involved actors are acting sustainably due to the multiple tiers of contractors and the complex nature of the projects. A technology that recently has had the attention of construction professionals is blockchain technology, which is built on smart contracts. It can be described as a shared, distributed ledger technology, which was created as an enabler for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The technology has, in recent years, been widely discussed as a potential business enhancer. It can, for example, provide immutable record-keeping, enables the usage of smart contracts and enhance transparency within the network, which is deemed valuable to the construction industry's push towards sustainability. The smart contracts technology has the potential to disrupt current business practices and decrease the required amounts of trust needed in business relationships.

Like other academic fields, educational policy is being reviewed for the affective component. Analysis is occurring in two forms: (a) the affects of education policy on education, school leaders, teachers and student learning outcomes and (b) text analysis of specific education policies. This chapter explores the representation of emotions in education policy texts, drawing on a theory of social contracts (Rawolle & Vadeboncoeur, 2003; Yeatman, 1996) as a way to explore what is being conveyed to administrators and teachers. This chapter considers the way in which emotions are represented in education policy, through social contract analysis. Social contracts are underpinned by three underlying conditions: consent to be a part of a contract, points of renegotiation through the duration of the contract and mutual accountability to those involved.

This chapter provides a general introduction to the companion, to FIDIC as an organisation and to the FIDIC contractual framework. It also includes a general guide to drafting international contracts as well as a more specific guide to drafting FIDIC based contracts. It includes a comparison of main features of the FIDIC conditions, a guide on selecting the right FIDIC form, and a general introduction on structuring a FIDIC based contract. Finally, it includes a list of suggested further reading.

In this chapter muamalah contracts are developed through the derivation of the respective rules from the requirement of shari'ah, not only avoiding the prohibited items in commercial transaction but at the same time enforcing the rights of parties to the contract in accordance with the contractual needs. Thus, these contracts safeguard the parties from being victim of the other in pursuing their commercial gains. The study examines the requirement of mudarabah and musyarakah contracts in the context of the relationship between shareholders and corporation as a foundation of a sound corporate governance mechanism. It is derived that the muamalah contracts if applied in its true nature are capable of defining and protecting the rights of all parties ridding crucial corporate governance concern which are mostly incited by the distrust of the parties in the running of the corporation and generation of benefits.

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and the privatisation of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). The introduction of SEZs is found to be uncorrelated with the prevalence of CEO incentive contracts. However, firms are more likely to use such contracts in areas that saw rapid SOE privatisation, irrespective of the firm’s own current ownership status and irrespective of the size of the SOE sector in the late 1970s. The positive effect of privatisation is robust to various estimation techniques and model specifications. These findings suggest that domestic privatisation policies have been more influential than FDI in driving the expansion of incentive contracts in China.

The legal devices crafted within large organizations are a key component of legal endogeneity theory (LET). While symbolically complying with legislation, legal devices allow organizations to infuse managerial logics into the legal field, which eventually diverts law from its initial political goals. Although the LET has considered legal devices such as anti-discrimination guidelines and grievance procedures, this chapter argues that contracts also constitute a locus of symbolic compliance and contribute to the eventual endogenization of regulation. Supplementing LET with a focus on legal intermediation, this chapter explores how contracts are crafted and used by large organizations to respond to regulatory pressure. While other legal instruments are unambiguously managerialized from the outset, contracts are highly versatile legal objects that perform the seemingly opposite functions of symbolically complying with regulation and serving substantive commercial purposes. This discussion of the role of contracts as compliance mechanisms is based on an in-depth empirical study of the French retail industry and its response to a set of regulations that aimed at making their business practices fairer.

It is well known that a player in a non-cooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that is contingent on the game’s outcome. We explore what happens when external parties – who we call “game miners” – discover this fact and seek to profit from it by entering an outcome-contingent contract with the players. We analyze various structured bargaining games among such miner(s) and players that determine such an outcome-contingent contract before the start of the original game. These bargaining games include playing the players against one another as in the original game, as well as allowing the players to pay the miner(s) for exclusivity and first-mover advantage. We establish restrictions on the strategic settings in which a game miner can profit and bounds on the game miner’s profit. We also find that game miners can lead to both efficient and inefficient equilibria.

Usually, a construction contract ends because the Parties have performed all their obligations thereunder but sometimes the need to terminate the contract arises before this. This need may have various reasons, e.g. one of the Parties goes into bankruptcy without the funds available for continuing the project, a substantial risk materialises to the detriment of the continuation of the project (e.g. substantial sub-surface issues, pollution etc.), other risks materialise, substantially increasing the cost of the project, or the Employer simply no longer has a need for the Works. The GC include provisions for the termination of the Contract before the Parties have fully performed all their obligations under the Contract; termination by the Employer is provided for in Clause 15 [Termination by Employer] and termination by the Contractor in Clause 16 [Suspension and Termination by Contractor]. Termination is an extreme remedy, regardless of who terminates the Contract. In all but a very few projects, a termination will cause both Parties to suffer substantial loss; not all such losses are recoverable from the defaulting Party. Thus, termination is a remedy that should be reserved for extreme cases. In addition, the right to terminate depends on an interpretation of the Contract provisions and the application of these provisions to the situation at hand, including whether a specific default is sufficiently severe to entitle the other Party to terminate. Because the consequences of a termination are serious, the applicable Laws usually require a serious (substantial) default before a Contract may be terminated. Furthermore, the procedures prescribed in the GC must be followed because a failure to comply with the relevant procedure may render a termination ineffective or invalid.