Selection–Performance Decoupling in Construction Contractor Assurance: A Configurational Theory of Displayed Provision and Enacted Capability

Construction clients assess contractor assurance before award, and the instruments they commonly use, including prequalification questionnaires, industry assessment standards and management-system certificates, report a single position on a single continuum. This conceptual paper develops a theory that instead treats construction contractor assurance as two different kinds of dimensions: enacted assurance capability, the routines a contractor performs, and displayed assurance provision, the artefacts through which those routines are represented to outsiders. The two differ in a property that configurational theory has not treated as consequential, namely what it costs an external assessor to establish a contractor’s position on each. Where assessment is predominantly documentary, and assessors face binding limits on budget, access and time, displayed provision is cheaper to verify and is therefore argued to receive greater relative weight in prequalification and selection, whereas enacted capability retains the stronger direct association with delivery performance. The paper names this divergence selection–performance decoupling and distinguishes it from the policy–practice decoupling described within organisations. Integrating capability theory, institutional theory and work on organisational routines, it derives four contractor archetypes, Embedded, Declarative, Silent and Minimal, and six propositions with explicit scope conditions and falsification criteria, developed for health and safety assurance. It identifies a reflexivity problem in contractor assessment: instruments assess the cheaper dimension more reliably than the practice it represents, and conventional improvement may deepen rather than correct this. A three-stage assessment model is proposed. The paper is a theory-development contribution; it reports no empirical tests, and it advances propositions as falsifiable claims rather than findings.