Powell et al. examine gender differences in construction scientific publication as an indicator of women’s under‐representation in academic construction research. They reveal important gender differences within construction research and between European countries, as well as showing that among publishing authors; women have a higher citation rate, and are more likely to be single‐authors, than their male colleagues. As this is an exploratory study, the authors suggest several avenues for further research, for example, to investigate whether women are less likely than men to collaborate in construction research, possibilities for women’s higher than average citation rate and factors contributing to women’s horizontal segregation within the construction sector.
Cooperative agreements between firms in uncertain, volatile economic environments have become a critical strategic alternative by which firms obtain competitive advantage. This general tendency is especially true in the construction sector, where many projects are carried out through alliances between firms. Indeed, the scale of many public works projects obliges firms to form alliances. A broad understanding of the factors that influence the formation of such strategic alliances appears to be essential for making further progress in investigating the way that strategic management of a firm’s alliance portfolio should be managed. Castro, Galán and Casanueva propose a model to explore the way in which both exogenous and endogenous factors influence the formation of alliances in the construction sector. In this sense, the authors argue that interdependency and complementarities (exogenous factors) have habitually been put forward as the reasons to justify the formation of alliances. In contrast, the influence of a firm’s social relations networks (endogenous factors) has barely been studied and, for the authors, these factors are essential to understanding the process of alliance formation. To test their model they studied cooperative project coalitions in the Spanish public works construction sector from 2001 to 2007. The authors conclude that, when a construction firm decides to compete for a public tender, the decision about the partner firm in the formation of an alliance is strongly determined by the social networks in which the firms are embedded.
Laishram and Kalidindi examine public‐private partnership road projects. They characterize them as highly leveraged capital projects, built on debt finance. In determining whether to provide the capital, lenders have to consider carefully the risks and the debt servicing capability of a project. Thus, the authors have developed a desirability rating analytical tool (DRAT) to enable lenders to judge the debt‐servicing capacity of a project. DRAT has been tested in India and shown to provide valuable information for decision‐makers and managers.
Contractors need adequate cash for funding the execution of construction operations. This is a challenge. As well as payments from their customers, contractors procure funds from external sources, including banks. Typically, such cash incurs financing charges. Given that clients pay after the work is done, while retaining some small proportion, and that the contractors’ credit is limited, contractors often operate under cash‐constrained conditions. The most proactive financial strategy that contractors can follow is to devise project schedules based on cash availability. The concept and technique of finance‐based scheduling achieves the required integration between the functions of scheduling and financing by incorporating financing costs into the project cost as well as scheduling under cash constraints. Previous studies have integrated CPM schedules with cash flow models to devise finance‐based schedules using the integer programming technique. Projects with repetitive activities are a special category of construction project, being characterized by a set of activities that are repeated sequentially at different locations or units. Typically, projects of repetitive non‐serial activities can efficiently be scheduled using the line of balance (LOB) technique. Past research has already combined the CPM and LOB techniques. Ali and Elazouni integrate the CPM/LOB model with the cash flow model in an Excel environment. The integrated model offers a tool to estimate the values of contractors’ negative cumulative balance (contractors’ indebtedness) along the project duration. His technique can be readily employed to maintain indebtedness below specified credit limits.
Shu‐Shun and Shih develop the theory of constraints (TOC) as a means for dealing with construction project scheduling complexities. TOC deals with schedules as systems, with three fundamentals; system, goal and constraints. Their approach acknowledges that schedules are primarily constrained by the availability of resources, as well as the dependencies between the activities. Their analytical approach to scheduling produces schedules that are much more refined than would otherwise be the case, and therefore more powerful as a management tool. They have termed their framework of schedule constraints “critical resource chain”. This framework provides project schedulers with a systematic approach for understanding and analysing their schedules.
Ruddock and Ruddock argue that the economic benefits to the construction sector from technological change can only be properly identified if the impacts of hidden innovation and investment in intangible assets are recognized and measured. This, they argue, is particularly pertinent in the context of understanding productivity measurement in the sector. Traditional measures of innovation and investment do not capture the dynamic changes in the sector that are taking place as knowledge‐intensive activity increases in importance. The authors suggest that intangibles and, more generally, knowledge capital should be a driver of growth in the sector but that the impact of the knowledge economy is hidden by measurement problems. They consider the consequences of treating knowledge expenditure as investment and conclude that the development of a mechanism for capturing such investment would be an important first step towards assessing its significance. They investigate the feasibility of compiling a list of measurable variables within the categories of intangible investment and seek to identify viable measures of intangible assets.
It is a well known fact that the price of construction is affected by crude oil prices. This relationship is highly visible for unit‐based contracts without price adjustment clauses. Damnjanovic and Zhou investigate the evidence of this behaviour by formulating and testing two hypotheses using Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) and publicly available data sets. Their results support the claim that an anticipated change in oil prices and market‐implied volatility significantly affects the prices of bid items in highway construction. In other words, contractors price the risk related to crude oil market expectations in terms of both future prices and anticipated volatility. Furthermore, the models show that the impact of these two factors cannot be ignored, in particular for projects with longer durations. The authors suggest that owner organizations should carefully analyse crude oil market trends before considering adding a price adjustment clause. They believe that their results could assist owner‐organizations in managing risks on project as well as on programme basis.
Kulatunga, Amaratunga and Haigh investigate the critical success factors (CSFs) of collaborative construction research and development (R&D) during the initiation, conceptualizing, development and launch phases as well as the project management phase. They identified R&D activities as vital to address the challenges faced by the construction industry during the development of new and advanced products, processes and materials, services and management activities. They argue that the lack of knowledge on CSFs of R&D could result in poor implementation. The authors show the importance of (a) proper up‐front work during initiation and conceptualizing; (b) skills, commitment and motivation of the research team during the conceptualizing and development; (c) effective dissemination of work at the launch and (d) effective resource management and co‐ordination of work throughout the project. Interestingly, the authors discovered that the emphasis in funded collaborative research projects is on satisfying the requirements of funding bodies and industrial partners, rather than the needs of academic researchers. The R&D‐specific CSFs are important factors that should be integrated with R&D projects at various phases. Understanding the implications of these CSFs could lead research teams to be more effective at providing supporting factors for the implementation of R&D in the construction sector.