Choudhury investigates the predictors of actual construction time for food grain warehouse projects in Bangladesh. He reveals that apart from cost and timely procurement of construction materials, construction time of such projects is significantly affected by political events. Choudhury contends that the cumulative effects of losses due to these events could be significant for the national economy of Bangladesh, considering the fact that most of the development projects in the country are constructed through loans or grants from multilateral development agencies. The proposed model provides a logical method for estimating construction time taking political risk into consideration. Even though the economically damaging effect of political unrest is self‐evident, to a certain extent, the author suggests that this is possibly the first attempt at quantifying it with reference to construction works in Bangladesh.
Rozenfeld, Sacks and Rosenfeld present a novel approach for predicting construction safety risk levels in support of proactive safety management at construction sites. They have developed a model that accounts for exposure of workers in time and in space that can be used to quantify predicted risk levels. The model enables more efficient management of resources applied to improve construction safety. With reliable prediction of safety risk levels, construction managers can take safety into account when scheduling work, thus avoiding dangerous combinations of simultaneous work by different teams. In short term work planning, teams can avoid risks by rescheduling and/or by providing other solutions to reduce risks to acceptable levels. The model has been tested on two construction projects, a residential building and a high‐tech laboratory and office building. With minimal effort, a full future picture of the safety risk at any stage during the projects could be drawn, helping managers and workers identify risks inherent in the activities, and the safety conflicts between them.
Houthoofd argues that the ‘business’ is the appropriate level for exploring competitor intelligence and so defining the business is a first essential step in strategy formulation. He offers a business definition that links the supply side and the demand side of the market. More precisely, a business or business domain is the competitive arena determined by products sold, customer type(s) targeted and the geographic extent of the target market(s). From a practitioner viewpoint, a business can be defined by categorizing firms in separate groups according to the geographic reach of their target market, product(s) sold and market segments served. The author uses Porter’s established five forces model to discuss differences in average performance between businesses but also identifies some lesser known theories that are promising in explaining heterogeneity in performance between firms in the same business.
The valuation of multistage BOT projects is an important practical issue that needs to address the possibility of premature abandonment and the sunk costs associated with upfront dedicated asset investments for future expansion. Huang and Pi have developed a real option approach to solving this issue by modelling multi‐stage projects as sequential compound options. Their analysis shows that multi‐stage investment can substantially increase project value when project value is uncertain, and that dedicated asset investments have a profound impact on project value.
Johnsson and Meiling investigate the severity of defects in industrialized house construction. They explore timber‐framed module production from two small Swedish companies, using quality audits from three phases of the building process to provide statistical measures of defects. Together, their interviews, site visits and document reviews indicate quality benefits from module prefabrication. The authors suggest that existing defect notations are a neglected source of quality improvement information, which can be used to help realize the benefits of off‐site construction.
Sexton and Lu note that new knowledge produced by academia often does not satisfy the needs of practitioners. Their review concludes that this unsatisfactory state of affairs is frequently the consequence of the cultural, motivational and operational differences between the two communities. The authors present actionable knowledge as a useful concept which can fuse the expectations, contributions and outputs of academia and practitioners. Within this context, they argue that action research is an appropriate methodology to develop successful actionable knowledge. Results from an action research project are given which provide researchers and practitioners with a greater understanding of the key factors which shape the degree to which action research produces actionable knowledge: change focus, collaboration capabilities and systematic process. Further, the authors demonstrate that criteria used for so‐called Mode 2 research have utility in evidencing actionable knowledge. The authors show that appropriate actionable knowledge frameworks and measures may have significant prescriptive value in the design of funding calls and the evaluation of research proposals and outputs.
Bygballe and Jahre observe that different logics exist in construction around the creation of value. They argue that this has resulted in a debate between an economic‐oriented and a production‐oriented perspective of construction management. By applying a value‐configuration analysis to a case study from the Norwegian construction industry, the authors illustrate that multiple value‐creating logics exist within construction, even within the same company. Because different logics involve different interdependencies, value‐drivers and cost‐drivers, tensions may occur. Their study shows how balancing different value‐creating logics and tensions between them may be handled through closer intra‐organizational and inter‐organizational interaction. The authors suggest that, in order to understand management in construction, there is a need to go beyond focusing on either an economic or production‐oriented perspective of construction. Instead, the handling of different types of interdependencies must be incorporated and, as illustrated in this study, interaction seems to play a key role in this respect.