Chang, C Y (2006) The determinants of the vertical boundaries of the construction firm: Comment. Construction Management and Economics, 24(3), pp. 229-232. ISSN 01446193
Abstract
In recent years, the study of organizational issues has made a tremendous progress owing to the development of two powerful analytical theories - transaction cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV). Both approaches have their strengths and limitations and thus researchers might think that synthesizing would be a way forward, Bridge and Tisdell (2004) being a case. In synthesizing TCE and RBV, several problems need to be overcome. First, there is a fundamental disparity in the basic assumption of rationality adopted by transaction cost economics (TCE) and. second, even after being operationalized for discovering the key determinants of the concept of competence, it still cannot escape the charge of tautology. Last, the inclusion of competence/ resource and TCE-related variables may increase predictive power, but the potentially high correlation between asset specificity and rarity, as well as costliness to imitate, are likely to cause the multicollinearity problem that may reduce the reliability of estimators and hence disguise the true effect of each variable on construction contracting. Even if the critiques of tautology and multicollinearity can be technically overcome, ontological tension will remain.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | competence-based approach; subcontracting; transaction cost |
| Index terms: | disparity, determinant, organizational issue, subcontracting, asset specificity, critique, escape, boundaries, competence, estimator, construction firm, transaction cost, resource-based view, rationality |
| Subjects: | social justice, emergency and crisis management, financial analysis, management, decision-making and reasoning, economic concepts, personnel development, property law, evaluation and assessment methods, risk assessment, profession, business, organization |
| Topics: | Cost Management, Business Strategy, Health and Safety, Research Practice, Roles and Professions, Risk Management, Legal Issues, Human Resources, Ethics, Supply Chain Management, Organizational Design |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here