**1. Introduction**

Sub-contracting is a contractual process where a firm or an individual adheres to its responsibilities and duties on behalf of another [1]. Nowadays, sub-contracting has gained worldwide prominence in the construction community [2,3]. According to Ulubeyli et al. [2], it has become an essential practice in any construction project to find that the project's general contractor is more focused on planning, organizing, and monitoring his/her project activities. Yet, the majority of the project's actual production works is implemented via the sub-contracting arrangement. In accordance with Hinze and Tracey [4], the volume of the works done by the sub-contractors in a project may represent, in many cases, 80–90% of the whole project's scope. This high percentage is owing to the technical and strategic functions that the sub-contractor can present to the general contractor. Technically, given the general contractor's lack of experience in executing the project's specialized trades and services such as painting, insulation, plumbing, etc., the necessity to hire the specialist sub-contractors for implementing these works is imperative [3,5]. This, indeed, does not only enable the general contractor to adequately finish his/her project's specialized trades and services, but further contribute to realizing them at lower costs more quickly [6]. Strategically, on the other hand, the general contractor's gains from the sub-contracting

**Citation:** Akal, A.Y. What Are the Readability Issues in Sub-Contracting's Tender Documents? *Buildings* **2022**, *12*, 839. https://doi.org/10.3390/ buildings12060839

Academic Editors: Srinath Perera, Albert P. C. Chan, Dilanthi Amaratunga, Makarand Hastak, Patrizia Lombardi, Sepani Senaratne, Xiaohua Jin and Anil Sawhney

Received: 12 April 2022 Accepted: 13 May 2022 Published: 16 June 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

practice are sharing the project risks with the sub-contractor, easing his/her cash flow and financing related problems, and reducing his/her overhead adherence, such as office staff, accommodations, etc. [3,7].

Emphatically, all of the aforementioned functions highlight that the general contractor's capability to deliver his/her project within quality, schedule, and cost objectives depends significantly on receiving the sub-contractors services [7]. This, in turn, indicates that the sub-contractors are key pillar in executing the construction industry's pertinent projects and realizing their success. Generally, the prime contractor can obtain the subcontractors services relying upon the tendering approach, including any one of the forms of negotiated tendering, open tendering, selective tendering, pre-registered tendering, and annual tendering [8]. Definitely, utilizing any of these forms by the general contractor to sublet a part of his/her project is associated with providing the sub-contractor(s) with the tender documents. The tender documents are a package of documentation, encompassing: an invitation letter to the tender, instructions for the bidders, tender form and appendices, contract conditions, specifications, design drawings, and bill of quantities and schedule of rates [9]. Building on the clarity and consistency of these documents, the tenderer can be equipped with sufficient information, including the financial, contractual, legal, administrative, and technical aspects regarding the tender scope. This information, in turn, enables the tenderer to perfectly study the tender, know his/her contractual obligations and rights, and price its schedule of rates easily and accurately [1,10]. Hence, the more clarity and consistency the tender documentation has, the more certainty the tenderer has when interpreting his/her assigned responsibilities and rights. Conversely, the less clarity and consistency the tender documents have, the more ambiguous the understanding of their terms becomes.

According to Youssef et al. [11], the clarity- and consistency-related issues of the words, sentences, paragraphs, and clauses in a contract's textual documentation are known as the readability issues. The severity of this issue lies in that when the readability of a text in a contract document is low, its possibility for being interpreted in terms of low commonality degrees by the contracting parties is high [12]. This, unfortunately, makes the consistency between the contract parties on their duties and rights unattainable. Consequently, their contractual relationship is fueled by disputes [13]. Focusing on the readability issue in the sub-contracting's tender documentation, the sub-contractors confirm that the documents provided to them in practice are often not plain and consistent [1,14]. Regrettably, since the construction community has been plagued by this problem, and hitherto, there has not been a sufficient answer for the next question: "what are the readability issues in the sub-contracting's tender documents?". The reason is completely comprehensible, as the sub-contractors associated studies always receive unfair interest from the construction industry researchers [14]. Therefore, it is not surprising to examine the literature on the factors affecting the construction documents' readability, which is really very limited [15], to find that scant investigations, if any, have been conducted on the sub-contracting documentation. This gap can negatively influence the success of applying the disputes-avoiding mechanisms (DAMs) of the sub-contracting arrangement. This is because the analysts of the DAMs (e.g., [16]) clearly reported that providing easy-to-read documents without ambiguity or contradictions in their interpretation is among the top-ranked effectual ways for avoiding the disputes in the sub-contracting arrangement. As Chong and Zin [13] explained, this mechanism is a proactive-based dispute preventing approach, and accordingly, its achievement depends on a previous knowledge of the sources of unclarity and inconsistency in the contract documentation for being eliminated. Thence, the lack of specifying these sources impedes the shaping of a disputes-free contractual relationship between the general contractor and the sub-contractor.

Against this backdrop, this research intends to draw the answers of the two most frequently raised questions in the construction community: (1) "what are the readability issues in the sub-contracting's tender documents?" and (2) "what are the measures for enhancing the readability in the sub-contracting's tender documents?". Based on the answers to these

questions, the consequences of the present paper are twofold. First, it acquaints the drafters of the sub-contracting's tender documents with the agents responsible for the readability issues in these documents and their anti-measures. This is a highly desirable knowledge because, upon its basis, the drafters can remove the sources of the unclarity and inconsistency from the sub-contracting's tender documentation. Accordingly, the interpretation of these documents' content becomes clearer and more comprehensible, fostering the agreement between the general contractor and the sub-contractor on their contractual responsibilities and rights. This, in turn, establishes a harmonious framework free of the lesion of disputes between the general contractor and the sub-contractor. Drawing on this implication, the second contribution of the research is realizing a proactive anti-dispute strategy in the sub-contracting practice by providing easy-to-read documents for its contracting parties, without fuzziness or inconsistency in their explanation. These contributions will be realized by examining real documents of 34 tenders of the sub-contracting arrangement in Egypt, employing the Content Analysis Approach (CAA). This is one of the first recognized endeavors to define the readability issues in the sub-contracting's tender documentation from the documents submitted to the sub-contractors in practice. This is for both the international construction community in general and the developing construction markets like that of Egypt in particular.

This study chose to consider the case of Egypt's construction sector as the research context, given the greater expansion of the Egyptian government than ever before in terms of executing several mega national projects for serving its economic growth. According to a recent report on Egypt, the values of the contracts awarded in 2020 and those underway in Egypt are nearly USD 14.9 billion and USD 435.9 billion, respectively, positioning the country as the third-biggest project market in the Middle East and North Africa [17]. Undoubtedly, this expansion cannot be realized without the effective cooperation between the Egyptian prime contractors and their sub-contractors. Certainly, the success of this cooperation requires the contractual relationship between the general contractor and his/her sub-contractors to be free of the troubles of conflicts, disputes, litigations, and legal proceedings for running their construction project smoothly. As a proactive management strategy against these troubles [15], the tender documentation of the sub-contracting should be written clearly to ensure commonality in the interpretation of their terms by the general contractor and sub-contractor. Unfortunately, the literature in Egypt on the issues pertinent to the readability problem and their countermeasures with respect to the sub-contracting's tender documents is silent similar to their counterparts in the developing and developed countries. This gap, in turn, portends severe consequences on the effectiveness of the cooperation between the general contractor and the sub-contractor in specific and the construction project's work progress in general, either in the Egyptian construction market or any construction sector elsewhere. Hence, this research, by addressing the readability issues in the sub-contracting's tender documents in Egypt, bridges a significant gap in the construction tender management literature. More significantly, it serves as a pioneering study for directing the scholars in other economies to take a step forward towards examining their sub-contracting's tender documentation for assessing and improving their readability and consistency.

The remainder of this paper reviews, in Section 2, the research methods of the prior works concerning scrutinizing the readability issues in the construction documentation and their countermeasures. Further, it outlines the gaps un-approached by these works. Section 3 involves the methodology adopted to extract the readability issues from the assembled sub-contracting's tender documents and to define their anti-measures. Section 4 analyzes the findings and compares them with those of the found peer researches of the developing economies to generalize the implications of the study towards these countries. Section 5 discusses the findings and their implications. Finally, Section 6 sums up the study and introduces its limitations, along with the future research directions.

#### **2. Literature Review**

Generally, text readability is described as the measure of reflecting the ease of reading of a written textual document and comprehending its content [12]. For embedding this measure in the construction documentation, it is necessary to provide the industry's drafters with the factors obstructing the comfortability in reading and apprehending these documents, along with their corresponding countermeasures. Disappointingly, the responses of the construction industry researchers to these necessities are countable. More critically, most of the scholars' efforts have been focused on one type of construction documentation, i.e., the contracts (e.g., [13]). In accordance with Youssef et al. [11] and Koc and Gurgun [15], the works associated with exploring the readability issue in the contracts have been based upon: (a) comparative-based case study, (b) text analysis algorithms, (c) interview, and (d) questionnaire survey. In the course of the comparative-based case study, Broome and Hayes [18] concentrated on investigating the drafting style of the New Engineering Contract (NEC), comparing it to that of the FIDIC contracts. Building on interviews with 81 personnel from the organizations of the employers, contractors, and sub-contractors, the study denoted that the NEC conditions are clearer and more understandable than those of the FIDIC contracts. This has been ascribed to the improper drafting of the FIDIC conditions in terms of having too-long sentences, several redundant legal expressions, and poor layout. By Lam and Javed [19], another comparison has been fulfilled between the practitioners in the United Kingdom and Australia to recognize the probable pitfalls in the output specifications of the contracts interrelated with the public– private partnership/private finance initiative. Referring to many cross-referencing to other documents has been highlighted as an influential readability issue in emerging the pitfalls in the output specifications.

Using the text analysis algorithms, the second literature strand in the body of knowledge of the readability issue has been emerged. Rameezdeen and Rajapakse [12] measured the readability in the NEC 1993 and FIDIC 1999 New Red Book, utilizing the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) algorithm of the text analysis. This algorithm employs the average sentence length along with the average figures of syllables per word to denote the reading degree of a text. Further, its standard range is from 0 to 100, where the closer the FRES is to 100, the higher a text's ease-of-reading becomes. Based on this algorithm, the FRES values of the NEC 1993 and FIDIC 1999 are 40.70 and 29.70, respectively, indicating the high readability of the NEC 1993. Six years afterward, Rameezdeen and Rodrigo [20] utilized the algorithms of the FRES, Average Sentence Length (ASL), and Average Packet Length (APL) to quantify the readability of the clauses pertinent to the FIDIC Red Book versions: 1969, 1977, 1987, and 1999. The independent variables in the ASL and APL are the number of words, sentences, and packets in the clause. Moreover, the lower the scores of the ASL and APL are, the higher the clause's readability is. According to these algorithms, FIDIC 1999 has been termed as the easiest readable edition because it has the highest FRES with the lowest ASL and APL, in comparison with the three other editions. A year later, the FRES algorithm has been called up again by Rameezdeen and Rodrigo [21] to study the impact of modifying the standard forms-based contracts on the readability. Using 281 amended clauses from 12 infrastructure projects executed in Sri Lanka against their original counterparts in FIDIC 1987 and 1999, the researchers concluded that amending the originally drafted clauses makes their clarity and readability too difficult process.

In another line of efforts, the research strategies of the questionnaire survey and interview shaped the mainstream trend in discussing the features of the readability issue, especially in the developing economies. In Malaysia, Chong and Zin [13] administered a questionnaire-based survey of 11 problems related to the clarity of the standard form-based contracts utilized by the public sector. Based on the responses of 30 Malaysian experts, lengthening the wording of the contract clauses' sentences has been graded as the topranked cause behind contract unclarity. Menches and Dorn [22], additionally, surveyed 26 students of a construction management course to scrutinize their emotional reactions towards drafting the contract clauses in both positive and negative styles of language. The

findings illustrated that formulating the contract clauses in a positive manner of language raises the reader's positive emotional reactions, and vice versa. Three years later, Chong and Oon [23] carried out a two-round Delphi survey to explore the feasibility of using plain language in elucidating the legal formulating in Malaysia's construction contracts. All of the 12 participants in the survey unanimously affirmed that formulating the contract clauses in plain language serves as a line of defense against many readability issues, encompassing the sentences' length as well as their presentation in passive voice and negative manner of writing. In the same vein, Masfar [24] reaffirmed that simplifying the language style of the public works contract within Saudi Arabia by using plain language is essential to avert the readability problems of the length, complexity, and ambiguity of the contract clauses.

In another investigation, additionally, following the semi-structured interview research approach, Besaiso et al. [25] analyzed the perspectives of 12 Palestinian professionals concerning the readability, clarity, interpretation, and understanding of the clauses associated with FIDIC 1999 Red Book. In this respect, the experts criticized the readability and lucidity of the FIDIC clauses, given the extensive use of cross-referencing, the length of the sentences, and the presence of phrases with uncertain/double meanings. Most recently, through a comprehensive review and face-to-face group interview with three experts, Koc and Gurgun [15] presented 18 risks influencing the construction contracts' readability. The identified risks were then included in a questionnaire survey that used the Fuzzy Visekriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje approach to assess their consequences on the readability of the contracts. The replies of 18 experts indicated that the unnecessary complexity in utilizing nouns and the inappropriate employing of referents is the most significant risk contributing to rise in readability issues in contract documents. Far from the few realized studies concerning exploring readability problems in contracts, fewer researches have been accomplished by Ali and Wilkinson [26], Chong and Zin [13], and Chong and Oon [23] to determine their countermeasures. These works have been achieved relying upon two methodologies. First, reviewing the related archival literature, either to compile a list [13] or develop a guideline [23,26] of the measures that can be followed to confront the readability issues. Second, surveying the compiled list of the measures among the practitioners to investigate the extent to which the presented measures are influential to boost the contracts' readability [13]. Drawing on these efforts, the scholarlybased knowledge has been provided with an important guideline of several measures for improving the contracts' readability. More details of these measures can be found in the aforementioned studies.

On the basis of the foregoing discourse, the prior works can be characterized by four noteworthy features. First, the studies in the area of the readability of construction documents are too limited, emphasizing on the contracts. Second, the research approaches of the interview and questionnaire survey have been broadly used in the methodologies of the readability works. Although utilizing these methods captures evidence from the extensive expertise of the parties involved in the contracts, the evidence is anecdotal [27]. More critically, usually the contributions provided in accordance with these methods are influenced by the number of the participants in the study. This, in turn, adds a major limitation to the extracted findings in terms of their generalization and representation [15]. Third, concerning the other literature on the readability, in which their approaches have been built on text-analysis algorithms, their outcomes are not sufficient to be relied upon for reflecting the contract's readability risks. This is completely understandable, as the independent variables of these algorithms do not consider the grammatical structure or the language style of the evaluated contract clause. These algorithms, however, appraise the readability of the contract clause in terms of the number of its words, sentences, and packets. Fourth, neither the researches associated with the questionnaire survey and interview nor those related to the text-analysis algorithms have been interested in touching on the readability issues with respect to the sub-contracting's tender documents.

Aggregating the aforementioned features together, the result is that there is an urgent need to perform a systematic examination of the sub-contracting's tender documents to obtain a deep and realistic comprehension of the readability issues in these documents. Hence, a better allocation for the anti-measures of these issues can be realized. Consequently, in a more clear and consistent manner, the sub-contracting's tender documentation can be drafted in the future for boosting the commonality in the explanation of their terms by the general contractor and sub-contractor.

#### **3. Research Methodology**

To objectively answer the study questions, the author adopted a scientifically sound and broadly utilized methodology consisting of 5 steps. Figure 1 summarizes the target, outcome, and sequence of these steps. Additionally, each step will be illustrated in detail within the subsequent sections.

**Figure 1.** Research methodology steps.

#### *3.1. Data Collection*

In this research, the source of the data is the documents submitted to the sub-contractors in practice during their tender process with the general contractors. Obtaining data in studies pertinent to construction management has several methods, such as a questionnaire survey and interviewing. However, extracting the data from real documentation or contracts presents direct and factual information with respect to the issue being investigated. More importantly, it handles the shortcomings of the data gathered relying upon the questionnaire survey and interviewing in terms of the potential recall and bias of the participants in the survey or the interview [27]. To this end, two Egyptian sub-contractors based on the author's personal acquaintances have been contacted to provide the sub-contracting's tender documents. The firms of these two sub-contractors have been established in 1998 and 2017. Moreover, they have the last grade (i.e., seven) according to the classification system of the Egyptian Federation for Construction and Building Contractors (EFCBC), which is responsible for grading the construction companies in Egypt based on their capitals, employee numbers, and assets. Depending on these two Egyptian sub-contractors, the documents of 34 tenders have been compiled to form the data of this paper.

Table 1 shows the characteristics of the collected tenders in terms of their issued year, number of pages, and scopes. It appears by examining the tender documents that they are released from one of the leading construction companies in Egypt. This firm's class, in accordance with the classification system of the EFCBC, is a first-grade company. Owing to its participation in many mega national projects, which involve a lot of the specialized works, it always depends on receiving the sub-contractors services for accomplishing its contracted projects. A deep examination of the tender documents, additionally, informs that their common contents are a simple invitation letter to the tender, bill of quantities and schedule of rates, specific and general conditions, and requirements related to the occupational safety and health. Yet, the specifications and design drawings have been found in a little of the tender documentation. These tenders are: 06, 07, 11, 13, 18, 22, 23, 24, 27, 29, 31, and 33. It is worth mentioning that all the tender documents have been written in Arabic, since Egypt's first language is Arabic. Nevertheless, English has been used to describe some terms, mainly in the bill of quantities and schedule of rates as well as the design drawings.

Another observation concerning the tender documents is that the sub-contractors have been invited to the tenders and received their documentation via their e-mail accounts. However, if the sub-contractors want to participate in the tenders, they have to deliver their documents in hand to the sub-contractor department of the prime contractor. The last column of Table 1 includes the scopes of the tenders sent to the sub-contractors. As this column presents, various trades relevant to the civil, architectural, electrical, and mechanical engineering disciplines have been mentioned. In the civil engineering field, the main activities are: plain and reinforced concrete; excavation and dewatering; joint sealing; compaction and paving; road signs and surface markings; fencing and gates; insulation; laying curbs and interlocking tiles; and building using stones. Yet, the architectural trades encompass the works of aluminum and glass doors and windows, floor covering, and finishing. As for the electrical and mechanical specializations, the associated trades are: installing and commissioning of an electrical and mechanical filtration system for pools, establishing high-density polyethylene pipelines for drainage and cable protection, and electrical installation and commissioning of a fire alarm system. Certainly, the diversity in the tenders' scopes means that the drafting style of their documentation is different from one tender to another. This diversity, in turn, affords an excellent opportunity for the current study for illustrating several factors of the readability issue in the sub-contracting's tender documents.


**Table 1.** Tender documents characteristics.

\* means the tender documents contain the specifications or the design drawings.
