JOINT CIB W070, W092 & TG72 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: DELIVERING VALUE TO THE COMMUNITY 89 CULTURAL ASPECTS OF CLAIMS MANAGEMENT IN INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUCTION JOINT VENTURES BURAK YILDIZ i1 AND HEYECAN GIRITLI 2 1 GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY, ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, ISTANBUL, TURKEY 2 2 ITU FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, 34437, TASKISLA, STANBUL, TURKEY Joint ventures, a special type of strategic alliances, have been enjoying increasing popularity in global competition. Employees of international joint ventures may come from diferent countries and thus hold diverse values. It is therefore important to address cultural diferences in the context of international construction joint ventures (ICJVs). During the implementation of international construction projects, there will always be many kinds of claims arousal from all contractual parties. In this context, claims management has become more and more important and imminent in the international construction contract environment. his paper aims to focus on cultural diferences in explaining how claims management situation afects international construction companies. Besides, it explores to answer additional supportive questions like; what causes the claims and what are the claim conditions applied and what are their interpretation and related resolution. A questionnaire survey was designed to achieve this objective. It included questions regarding causes of claims, factors afecting claim management, and self-construal statements of Marcus & Kitiyama (1991). On the basis of the indings, this paper corroborates the argument that the dominant cultural values and/or perceptions of the society are not very much inluential on individuals’ perceptions, and may difer from the same values of the society. Keywords: claims, claims management, culture, dispute avoidance, joint-ventures, international construction joint-ventures, organizational culture INTRODUCTION Internationalization of construction irms, by exceeding the national boundaries and having operations in other countries, increases the need of forming partnerships with construction irms from other nations. Sometimes this need becomes essential. Joint venturing is not only the best partnership model meeting the dynamic requirements of the project based construction industry but also the most preferred type of business making. Even though the purpose is to strengthen the capacity, still some conlicts may occur within time owing to the diferent nationalities and business cultures of the partnering companies. Many of these conlicts are usually resolved in short time without issues whereas some cases bring along a claim situation due to lack of common understanding of the partners. As the claims management is closely related to the way and attitude they are dealt, the method of handling potential claim cases therefore is the most important phase in the whole process. In a wider scale, socio-cultural elements and the dominant business culture of the society can be listed as factors afecting diferences in perceptions of events ending up in claims. Inner dynamics, group culture and business culture of a irm can be listed as mid- scale factors. Educational backgrounds, level of individualism and the professional backgrounds of the professionals involved in the decision making processes can be listed as narrow scale factors, in other words individual factors. his study basically examines the impact of culture on claims management and it is basically focused on the claims among partners of international joint venture projects, which is a very speciic ield of research. he main purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between the cultural perceptions of decision makers who are involved in claim processes and claims management mechanisms among partners of international joint ventures in construction industry. As an expansion to the main purpose of the study, some speciic purposes can be listed as follows: • Review and examine the current views about claim management in international joint ventures, • Classify the causes of claims by their levels of importance, • Analyse the general approaches in claim management by level of agreement, • Determine the relationship between culture and claim among partners of international joint ventures. i. byildiz81@yahoo.com