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The paper aims to examine the judicial approach to some aspects of contract damages in England and Wales, Australia and New Zealand.

The paper is an analysis of judgments of the three jurisdictions and academic commentary.

Generally, there is uniformity in the assessment of damages in the jurisdictions discussed as is illustrated with liquidated damages and the adherence to the judgment of the House of Lords. However, the same adherence is not evident in the case of lower court judgments in the controversial area of “consequential loss”. Although not a remedy, it is an integral part of the assessment of damages process when included in exception clauses.

The research highlights the need for knowledge of the legal issues to ensure that the contract covers what is intended so that a party is not without a remedy when the contract fails.

The enforcement of liquidated and ascertained damages (LADs) can be problematic when the amounts are poorly assessed and there are lapses in the administration of contracts. This paper seeks to investigate the relevance of LAD clauses in construction contracts in Ghana, as well as the methods employed in their assessment and enforcement.

A parallel survey method was adopted. Three sets of similar questionnaires (slightly modified) were administered to professionals in client, consultant and contractor organisations in contract administration roles, to explore their experiences in the assessment and enforcement of LADs.

LADs are not serving their purpose in construction contracts in Ghana. Clients have created situations that render LADs unenforceable. LAD amounts are also not genuine pre‐estimates of expected loss to be incurred, as assumptions and guesses rather than genuine calculations on a case‐by‐case basis are adopted in their assessment.

This research indicates that the enforcement of LADs can be enhanced if clients become more diligent in their contractual, mostly financial, obligations. Since a purposive sampling procedure was adopted, the findings and conclusions of this research are only tentative, but nevertheless raise serious issues regarding contract administration practices in Ghana.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and examine the role of accounting and accountants in customary land transactions between Indigenous peoples and foreign corporate entities. The paper uses the case of two accountants who utilised accounting technologies in lease agreements to alienate customary land from Indigenous landowners in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Employing a case study methodology, the paper draws on contemporary data sets of transcripts related to a Commission of Inquiry established in 2011 to investigate PNG’s Special Agricultural Business Lease system. Analysis of other publicly available data and semi-structured interviews with PNG landowners and other stakeholders supplement and triangulate data from the inquiry transcripts. A Bourdieusian lens was adopted to conceptualise how accounting was used in the struggles for customary land between foreign developers and Indigenous landowners within the wider capitalist field and the traditional Melanesian field.

This paper reveals how accountants exploited PNG’s customary land registration system, the Indigenous peoples’ lack of financial literacy and their desperation for development to alienate customary land from landowners. The accountants employed accounting technologies in the sublease agreements to reduce their royalty obligations to the landowners and to impose penalty clauses that made it financially impossible for the landowners to cancel the leases. The accountants used accounting to normalise, legitimise and rationalise these exploitative arrangements in formal lease contracts.

This paper responds to the call for research on accounting and Indigenous peoples that is contemporary rather than historic; examines the role of accountants in Indigenous relations, and examines the emancipatory potential of accounting.

The publication presents an analysis of the cost and schedule performance of incentive/disincentive projects and case studies toward developing a systematic disincentive valuation process, with Construction Analysis for Pavement Rehabilitation Strategies (CA4PRS) software integration that aids agencies in minimizing the likelihood of court challenges of disincentives.

From a California transportation database, the authors performed cost and schedule analyses of 43 incentive/disincentive (I/D) projects and case studies on four of those I/D projects. Interviewees included subject matter experts from transportation organizations to ensure applicability and maximum value-adding, and the process was implemented on ten California transportation projects and monitored for performance.

The presented process mitigates the contractor's ability to claim disincentives as penalties in a court of law through the following: (1) all calculations are performed using project-specific bases, backed by estimations of actual incurred costs; (2) the CA4PRS software allows for estimation transparency and (3) the clarity of cost inclusions reduces any chances of “double-dipping” between disincentives and liquidated damages.

Transportation agencies have historically faced legal challenges to their enforcements of disincentives. As agencies continue to apply disincentives on more megaprojects, contractors will likely attempt to pursue legal challenges more frequently. The presented process mitigates the likelihood of these challenges going to court and increases the accuracy and efficiency of disincentives.

While there have been publications that discuss the legal challenges of imposing disincentives, they mainly provide guidelines and lack applicable processes. Existing literature that does present incentive/disincentive valuation process focuses on incentive valuations and neglects the disincentives' legal challenges. The following publication fills this gap by presenting an applicable disincentive valuation process for transportation projects which incorporates the guidelines for legal mitigation.

At the commencement of this decade, leaving behind the “striking seventies”, we christened it the “anxious eighties”, for there was a profound disquiet and uncertainty among most of the population, a fear that things were going to get worse, but they could have hardly expected the catastrophic events of the year 1981. The criteria of quality of life are its richness, grace, elegance; by the promise it contains; inspiration and purpose, hope, determination (to survive, to make certain that the evildoer is not permitted to succeed), love of one's country — pro patria, of other days.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the implications of outsourcing at the operational planning level, i.e. how the operational planning function is complicated owing to the strategic outsourcing decisions that have been made in the past.

First, a literature review on outsourcing is conducted. Second, two case studies at three pharmaceutical companies are conducted to gather insights into the planning of outsourced operations.

The paper finds that nothing has been documented in the literature on outsourcing at the operational planning level. Moreover, a number of implications of outsourcing at the operational planning level are discussed. One of the main insights is that in an outsourcing relationship, the order process consists of different, hierarchically connected, decisions in time, hence requiring a richer and more developed communication and ordering pattern than is commonly assumed.

The results seem to be generalizable to the pharmaceutical industry. However, future research should determine whether these results replicate in other industries.

The literature on outsourcing has mainly focused on the strategic outsourcing decision. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the implications of outsourcing at the operational planning function, which has not been studied before.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a case of collective sensemaking about the project success of the multifunctional amphitheater of Quebec (Canada).

For this explorative and qualitative research, the authors started from the post-mortem document and complemented their comprehension with six semi-structured interviews with the main project actors and other public documents regarding this project.

According to the respondents, the main success factors of this project can be attributed to: a clear governance structure; proven project management and construction methods; the use of emerging collaborative practices in construction (such as building information modeling (BIM) and lean construction); an adapted policy for procurement; as well as a code of values and ethics shared by all stakeholders.

The sensemaking perspective has been scarcely mobilized in project management studies, emerging from a constructivist view of reality and being sensitive about material-discursive practices. This exploratory study explores a case of collective sensemaking of a major project success and suggests avenues for major and megaprojects research. Lessons learned and implications for practice are also outlined. The conclusion allows a synthesis and an opening to consider how practitioners and researchers can build on this (and other successful) case(s) for future projects and research.

The literature examining the participation of developing countries in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and International Trade Organisation (ITO) negotiations generally sees their attitudes towards these projects as having been driven exclusively by a commitment to import substitution. This commitment, it is argued, led developing countries to oppose many aspects of the GATT/ITO project, particularly the requirement for reciprocal tariff cuts. The purpose of this paper is to focus on examining the critical period around the ultimately doomed negotiation of the Charter for an ITO and the process of creating the GATT.

This paper draws from GATT documents and from the literature on economic history to give a more comprehensive account of the motivating ideas underpinning developing countries attitudes to the post‐war negotiations.

This paper argues that this view misconstrues and caricatures the ideas and motivations underpinning developing countries' attitudes towards the GATT and ITO. Though import substitution and the related objective of industrialisation each played a part in shaping developing countries' attitudes, they are only aspects of a more complex set of aims and ideas. Developing countries were drawing from a range of key experiences and ideas beyond simply import substitution in forming their attitude towards the GATT/ITO project, in particular the volatility in commodity markets that preceded the negotiations, the legacy of colonialism and the lessons provided by the ninetieth and twentieth centuries on trade policy. Finally, this paper argues that the first round of GATT negotiations shows that developing countries were substantially less opposed to reciprocal tariff concessions than has previously been argued.

These findings are important for anyone who wants to understand the evolution of the GATT and the role developing countries played in it, and the difficulties between the rich and poor nations that continue to characterise negotiations in the World Trade Organisation.