AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

In recent years, China has witnessed rapid development in urban transportation, especially in metro projects. However the safety records of metro projects is rather worrying and cannot help to make us think where actually is going wrong. Official reports have claimed that the causes for those metro accidents are mainly from technical and organizational aspects. But are the reports really telling the true story? Or are there deeper reasons that lead to accidents which are not so obvious? In previous studies, Martin de Jong and Yongchi Ma have asked the same question. They conduct their research on three Chinese cities of Beijing, Hangzhou and Dalian through Jens Rasmussen’s safety theory: drift to safety boundaries. In this theory, various incentives drive stakeholders to trade off quality and safety for other core values, resulting in safety boundaries to be crossed. All three cities represent a certain extent of profit driven, excessive subcontracting and loose monitoring which rightly match what is described in Rasmussen’s theory. In my study, I will take the city Shanghai as an example to do a replicative research following Martin de Jong and Ma Yongchi’s work. Based on the main research question of searching for the contractual and organizational arrangements in metro accidents, firstly Rasmussen’s theory will be discussed in Chapter 2 to lay a theoretical underpinning for latter research. Secondly the development of Shanghai metro system will be introduced to provide background information for latter case studies. Then in Chapter 4 and 5, I am going to thoroughly study two cases: Line 1 and Line 10, which are representative in terms of social impact, data availability and data freshness. The history of development, organizational structure, contractual arrangements and value tradeoffs in the design and construction process will all be mentioned in the analysis of Line 1 and Line 10. Institutional context and underlying behavior pattern of stakeholders will be described as well. Rasmussen’s theory will be checked to see whether it is applicable in my case. Comparison will be made among Shanghai cases and other three cases from value tradeoffs (time, scope, budget and quality) and subcontracting issues in Chapter 6. It is not surprising that many common characteristics exist in all cases, like profit driven, excessive and illegal subcontracting, immature safety regulations, low public participation and etc. These features exist for institutional and social reasons. I will discuss about it and find out the differences between the Shanghai cases and previous cases. Finally in the conclusion and recommendation part, empirical and theoretical conclusions are drawn respectively to shape the mechanism of metro accidents in terms of contractual and organizational arrangements. Whether Rasmussen’s theory is suitable will be answered. On four levels recommendations will be given for policy practice in order to improve current metro management level. I will lastly carefully reflect on my research method in the research,…