ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on field work materials collected from project meetings on construction sites. Far from minimizing or eliminating conflict, contracts cause them. Contracts need to be understood as the key to the institutional framework which constitutes the social relations on the site. The contract seeks to specify the key variables concerning construction. What it cannot specify is its own 'indexicality': that is, how it will be read, interpreted and used by occupationally and organizationally self-interested parties to the contractual relationship. Conflicts are inherent to any situation of complex organization in which are vested inter-organizational and inter-occupational interests, the reconciliation of which proceeds through the formal mechanism of a contract which always requires substantive understanding within a competitive profit-oriented context. Contracts cause conflicts because they are the rational occasions whereby indexicality can be exploited by self interested professionals in the design and construction process.
