Zhang, Austin, Glass and Mills have carried out a study into values in the UK offices of a global construction management services organization. Schwartz's values survey instrument and values theory are, for the first time, applied extensively in an organizational context, as opposed to the more usual comparative intercultural research. The authors collected values profiles from most of the employees through an organizational‐wide survey. Follow‐up workshops and postworkshop activities facilitated the sharing of common values and helped staff representatives develop their own organizational values statements, independent of senior management, before a final negotiation with them. The authors argue that the shaping of collective organizational values should be based on a clear understanding and communication of employees' personal values and that Schwartz's circumplex model of human values and the associated survey instrument are helpful neutral framing devices to initiate and structure such a debate. Compared to the usual management‐imposed approach, this bottom‐up process is a unique but natural way to shape organizational values. It can help make hidden values explicit and improve alignment and understanding between individuals and their host organization.
Construction contexts are characterized by complexity and disparate perspectives. Harty develops the concept of relative boundedness, which considers the extent to which innovation remains within, or extends beyond, the sphere of influence of the implementing actors. Relatively unbounded innovation is characterized by a lack of a coherent central driving force or mediator with the ability to reconcile potential conflicts and overcome resistance to implementation. This is a situation indicative of much construction work. Harty uses an Actor‐Network Theory (ANT) oriented approach to analyse empirical material from a large construction project, revealing different ways that relative boundedness is constituted and transformed; through the robustness of existing practices and expectations, through the delegation of interests on to technological artefacts and through the mobilization of actors and artefacts to constrain the scope of negotiations over implementation.
Leiringer and Cardellino argue that studies relying on key respondents' recollection and interpretation of elapsed actions and events would benefit from looking more closely at how the described actions are justified and legitimized. They take as their starting point the observation that much contemporary research is heavily reliant on interviews and that considerable explanatory weight is given to the experiences and opinions of certain key individuals. The paper investigates how innovation champions frame their accounts of how specific innovations (in facilities management) were initiated, adopted and diffused. The findings show that a greater appreciation of the way rhetorical strategies manifest themselves in data collected through interviews could serve to be very useful in researching innovation.
The UK construction sector workforce remains predominantly white and male. Clarke and Gribling highlight obstacles to the increasing participation of women and black and Asian minority groups in the construction sector and identify the ways that these can be overcome. This work has particular relevance in the UK because of its focus on Heathrow Terminal 5 which was one of the largest projects in Europe, with what is often regarded as exemplary employment and working conditions. This project is used as an example to inform conditions being established for the London Olympic developments. From an academic point of view, the paper is significant because the authors have included consideration of those with disabilities and they have proposed a social, rather than a capability, model in approaching this.
There is an unsubstantiated perception that maintenance of off‐site solutions is difficult and expensive. This, coupled with the lack of cost data of using off‐site technologies, has contributed to the slow uptake of such technology within the UK construction industry. Pan, Gibb and Sellars present the cost data of maintaining off‐site and in‐situ bathrooms for student accommodation. They investigate the records of 732 maintenance jobs which span three years for 398 bathrooms, including pre‐cast concrete modules, Glass Reinforced Polyester (GRP) modules and in‐situ bathrooms. They reveal that in‐situ bathrooms were significantly more expensive to maintain and that the maintenance was more complex, involving a wider range of problematic areas. For off‐site modules, drainage, toilets, vents and sink were identified as the main problematic areas for maintenance. The design imposed significant effects on the long‐term cost of off‐site bathrooms.
Caldas, Chou and O' Connor develop a negotiation‐based decision support model for supporting the planning and design phases of highways. Specifically, they investigate the effective implementation of a utility adjustment contracting strategy that puts utility adjustment work into the highway contractor's scope of work, theoretically reducing many adjustment‐related challenges and risks. This strategy is referred to as the Combined Transportation and Utility Construction (CTUC). They suggest that the research will help academics and practitioners to assess and better understand the project circumstances with which the benefits of the CTUC approach can be leveraged, and to better comprehend how utility owners' CTUC‐related concerns can be most effectively addressed. They contend that the proposed model can improve the quality of this complex decision‐making process, especially for less experienced project managers or designers.
Höök and Stehn examine the applicability of lean principles and practices to industrialized housing, taking account of the production culture. Their literature review reveals that applicability of lean principles requires a facilitating organizational culture, but where the construction setting of the traditional construction project culture seems to influence the applicability of lean. Using a production questionnaire the authors show that, despite the move of housing production into an industrial environment, the strong on‐site related project culture remains. This emphasizes the importance of, and the difficulty in, change of culture towards a lean culture in construction. The authors show that if there is to be a change towards a lean culture, it will have to be focused on the operatives and senior management. They call for more research that relates applicability of lean principles and practices to cultural change.
Lingard et al. examine the impact of the introduction of alternative work schedules on four case study construction projects in Australia. The alternative work schedules were designed to eliminate regular Saturday work, a reported source of work‐family conflict to both waged and salaried construction workers. At two of the projects the alternative work schedule involved compression of the work week (i.e. lengthening weekday work hours and eliminating Saturday work). At these two sites the alternative work schedules were favourably received by employees. The other two projects, weekend work was eliminated without extending the length of hours worked between Monday and Friday. This strategy was welcomed by salaried workers but very unpopular with waged workers, due to the consequent reduction in opportunity to earn pay at overtime/penalty rates. The results illustrate labour market challenges to the introduction of alternative work schedules as a means of providing better work‐life balance to construction workers.
Marzouk, Madany, Abou‐Zied and Ibrahim present a framework for handling construction pollution using multi‐objective optimization. The framework is for calculating the pollution generated in each activity of the project, as a result of dust, harmful gases and noise. The authors claim that the framework accounts for the dynamic nature of construction activities including different types of relationship and the changing nature of activities. They use a sensitivity analysis to examine optimization parameters (number of generations, population size, crossover and mutation values). The authors argue that the results could be useful for supporting the minimization of pollution generated on construction sites.