THE IDEA OF A CONTRACTING SYSTEM

The idea of "the system" in British building as a distinctive form of industrial organisation was first espoused by Bowley (1966 p 350). She identified it as a highly structured set of relationships along lines of social class with architects at the top, followed in rank order by engineers, surveyors, and builders. Within this system she identified "the establishment" as the version of the system approved by architects. She then explores in some detail the evolution and malfunctions of the system. Alongside this system one can also identify the systems for civil engineering with the civil engineer in the dominant position, and speculative housing with the developer, or developer/builder in the dominant position. However, it is perhaps indicative of the force of Bowley's argument that when one thinks of the construction industry in Britain, it is the architect-dominated establishment to which one reflexively turns. Bowley's emphasis upon institutionalised sets of interests was a profound insight. The system allocated roles, defined responsibilities, and specified liabilities. Effectively it defined some actors as proactive, and others as reactive; dubbed some with the rank of profession, and tarred others with the brush of commerce. In this system, legitimacy was provided by the principal clients, which increasingly became dominated by the state. Crucially, it established the reward and penalty structure for the actors in the British construction industry in what Crozier and Friedberg (1977 p 286) have defined as a "système d'action concret" which is "un ensemble humain structuré qui coordonne les action de ses participants par des mécanismes de jeux relativement stables et qui maintient sa structure ....par des mécanismes de régulation qui constituent d'autres jeux". For Crozier and Friedberg, actors within such systems of action act rationally, but with a rationality that can only be understood within the logic of the system, as expressed in the rules of the game. In this perspective then, the contracting systems for building and civil engineering provide the structure of incentives for the actors in the system, encouraging each actor into particular types of behaviour, and tending to punish digressions from these rules of the game. The speculative housebuilding system, which will be outside the scope of this paper, similarly motivates its actors, but in rather different directions. Just as patterns of behaviour become institutionalised so that they act back upon the actors through the process of structuration (Giddens 1984), the rules of the game come to be seen as given, normal, the only way to do things. Careers and status become dependent upon certain rules; threats to those rules become personal attacks. The system has a powerful momentum, and planned change is difficult because no one actor can grasp the whole system. Yet such systems are also dynamic due to the inherent contradictions that they often contain - this point will feature again in the conclusions. All systems of action have outcomes, or their would be no reason for their existence. The outcome of the contracting system is the realisation of the desire of the client for a built product. In order to achieve this outcome, the process of production, consisting of a flow of information which generates and controls a flow of materials, must accomplish the three Cs (Winch & Campagnac 1995). The building must be conceived, it must be constructed, and these processes must be controlled back against the client's interests. The client capitalises the process of construction, while the actors within the system allocate the required resources to the construction process according to the rules of the game the system lays down. The major variations within and differences between contracting systems concern the rules which specify which actors do which tasks within the 3C's. It is to the historical evolution of these variances in task allocation to which the paper will now turn.