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Reports from the Norwegian police indicate that actors in the architecture, engineering and construction industry face severe competition from criminal actors. Sub-contractors working within the law struggle to be competitive compared to dubious sub-contractors. This study aims to examine (1) what the sub-contractors’ perceptions of current contracting practices are, (2) what problems they face and (3) what countermeasures can be used to improve the situation.

The research was carried out on the basis of a qualitative approach. A literature review and a document study of reports from the sub-contractors, public agencies and other relevant organisations were conducted. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with the management of eight sub-contractors in the Norwegian architecture, engineering and construction industry.

There is a significant difference in the perception of the reality between contractors’ management and the blue-collar workers. Management among the contractors maintain that their control systems work; however, the result from this study shows that it is easy for the sub-contractors to take advantage of loopholes or avoid the countermeasures.

This paper is limited to Norway and use only the paint industry as a case study.

This study shows that sub-contractors constitute an important source of information in the effort to prevent dubious sub-contractors as they are the actors who experience the greatest pressure and competition from them. Therefore, contractors should include the sub-contractors in the process of developing measures to prevent this misconduct.

A very little research has been carried out within this field of study in Norway.

Worker classification continues to be a highly litigated area of taxation. That is, the status of a worker as an employee or independent contractor remains a topic closely scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. This study examines factors that the judiciary deems relevant in ruling whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor. A backward stepwise logistic regression model is implemented to categorize the factors that best predict the court’s decision on whether a worker is either an employee or independent contractor pursuant to the factors in Revenue Ruling 87-41 (1987-1 CB 296), judge gender, and political affiliation. The results indicate three factors (supervision/instructions, continuing relationship, and the right to discharge) are capable of accurately predicting 93 percent of the decisions made by the US Tax Court. Other findings support notable statistical differences between male and female judges rendering decisions and reaching conclusions. Also, there is a statistically significant difference based on the type of industry. Political affiliation appears to have no significant impact on judicial rulings.

This paper presents a model and evidence regarding the incidence of independent contractors and the self-employed. It focuses on the rights to control the work routine as an important issue distinguishing employee and non-employee workers. The conditions under which it is optimal for the buyer of labor services to control the work routine (and use employees) and when is it desirable for the seller to have control are considered. The model emphasizes the costs of measuring worker output vs. monitoring worker effort, worker expertise, and worker investment and is tested with Current Population Survey data merged with the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The empirical findings are broadly consistent with the approach. Independent contractors tend to be in jobs that are harder to monitor and having more worker expertise such as jobs involving more intellectual skills, having a greater variety of duties, and requiring more worker expertise and training. This is even more true of the other self-employed. We also review existing empirical research on self-employment, discussing how it fits into our baseline model and evaluating the arguments to explain independent contractors and self-employment. These include a desire to reduce fringe benefits, demand and staffing uncertainty, wanting to avoid lawsuits for wrongful termination, a desire to protect a reputation for not laying-off employees, credit constraints, and worker desire for flexibility. There is strong evidence that credit constraints have a substantial influence on self-employment status and likewise for worker desire for job flexibility. The literature suggests that the desire to avoid payment of fringe benefits, demand and staffing variability, and avoidance of potential wrongful dismissal lawsuits induces firms to use more temporary agency workers but does not seem to affect the use of independent contractors.

Logging industry fatalities recently became a focus for policy change in British Columbia. Through re-analysis of ethnographic data collected in 2001–2002 this chapter aims to investigate logging contractors’ attitudes toward workplace danger and to comment on the likelihood of success of the proposed policy changes. The contractors attributed workplace danger to the forest environment and to human error, which shaped their behavior and their attitudes toward taking risks. The contractors accepted the risk of physical harm rather than face almost certain economic loss. The proposed policy changes do not address the conditions that promoted this acceptance.

Claims and disputes are often unavoidable in the construction industry due to its unique and complex characteristics involving the massive investment of capital, lengthy project duration, and multiple project stakeholders. This chapter intends to identify the critical construction claims attributes, compare the perceptions of major stakeholders on different claim attributes, and investigate the contrast of the top five claim attributes between this study and previous ones. The literature review resulted in 48 claim attributes responsible for the construction project schedule delays. These attributes were then presented to Vietnam construction industry (VCI) practitioners in the form of a questionnaire survey. Data analysis was done based on the collected 113 qualified samples. Relative importance index (RII) was applied to determine the ranking of claim attributes. The results were that the top five causes of claims, that is, payment delays, mistakes by contractor during construction stage, delays in work progress by the contractor, financial failure of the contractor, and frequently changing requirements by the owner, lead to the schedule delays in VCI. These findings can assist the local industry practitioners and foreign companies seeking a share in the VCI market in understanding the causes of construction claims comprehensively and formulating the countermeasures to minimise their impacts and hence reduce the unnecessary losses and raise the likelihood of success as well as maintain sustainable relationships among stakeholders.

In Malaysia, there seems to be no mutual and general agreement among construction industry players and researchers on what the critical success factors (CSFs) of construction projects are since characteristics of construction projects vary across various projects complexity. This chapter thus examines the CSFs for affordable high-rise public housing projects in Malaysia through a thorough review of the literature on the CSFs, which were then contextually customised via a pilot study and presented in the form of Relative Importance Index (RII). Primary data were collected via administration of questionnaire surveys to 170 construction stakeholders of affordable high-rise public housing projects in Malaysia. The findings of this study revealed that the top 10 ranks are good management and supervision at site, good personal behaviour by all participants, good implementation in safety management and practice, high commitment in quality control by management, competent manager/supervisor, good communication and coordination, good and enough material and equipment, experience worker, clear objective and goals and good support by senior employee/management, whereby it is crucial in ensuring the project success of affordable high-rise public housing projects in Malaysia. This chapter provides clear guidelines for the contractors of affordable high-rise public housing projects to be more competitive in the construction industry by illustrating the important factors to be considered while delivering the projects to their respective clients.

The paper aims to investigate the prevailing institutional logics that underpin the organisational behaviours of Chinese contractors and the institutional complexity they face across several strategic areas when they undertake projects abroad.

The paper draws mainly on industry literature, reports and government websites to develop a typology of two ideal types of institutional logics that prevail among Chinese international contractors. The configurations of institutional complexity in different strategic areas are analysed through pattern-matching.

Two main logics are identified, namely, construction and investment logics. These logics in turn lead to patterns of volatile complexity in the strategic areas of business, technology, human resources and marketing; patterns of aligned complexity in operational and information technology strategic areas; and patterns of segregated complexity in financial strategic area.

The paper presents an ongoing doctoral research. It provides a preliminary understanding of the institutional logics affecting Chinese international contractors and sets out the first step to understand the relationship between complex institutional environments and organisational responses.

Chinese international contractors commonly face resistance, and at times resentment, from the local industries in the countries they operate. The findings of this paper are a first step towards a better understanding of why this is the case and what can be done to rectify the situation and improve long and short-term project performance.

This paper provides practical implications for Chinese contractors to understand their internal context of institutional complexity and provides the basis for further understanding of Chinese contractors’ strategic responses.

Classifying workers as either employees or independent contractors has significant financial consequences for the payer (usually a business) and the worker. The payer may be motivated more by the desire to avoid paying for employee benefits and employer payroll taxes than by doing the right thing and correctly classifying and paying the worker as an employee. Estimates are that the cost of such benefits and taxes may equal 20–30% of gross pay. When governmental regulations are unclear or enforcement is lax, many stakeholders suffer. This includes the workers, their families, their co-workers, and law-abiding employers as well as citizens (taxpayers) who must pay more than their fair share to provide adequate funding for related government programs and benefits. This is a global issue as evidenced by widely publicized lawsuits in many countries involving prominent defendants such as Microsoft, Uber, and Lyft. Software platforms used to distribute small jobs to temporary and part-time workers have resulted in the exponential growth of the gig economy. Such technology has also further enabled the misclassification of workers beyond what has occurred in years past. An ethical analysis to identify the many stakeholders and the impact of worker misclassification should be conducted to guide governments in developing and enhancing regulations for the pervasive issue of worker classification and to protect the rights of their workers and taxpayers.