The Chinese construction market is composed of 31 parts, which differ from each other in terms of competition situation. This suggests that contractors, domestic or overseas, should pay close attention to the differences in competition situations when transferring from one local construction market to another. Nevertheless, contractors in China usually pay little attention to these differences due to the similarity of culture and construction policies. As a result, they will be less competitive in a new local construction market. The competition strategies identified by Ye, Shen and Tan are intended to assist contractors operating in new markets or localities. The aim is to help those construction businesses operating in China to make sure that their competitiveness continually improves. The authors recommend that contractors adopt five response strategies in responding to various competition situations. This provides a new approach for formulating competitive strategies in China.
Lu and Sexton consider the career journeys of senior female managers in small construction firms. Through a grounded theory approach a turning point model is produced which distinguishes the interplay between human agency and work / home structure. The career journeys of the interviewees are characterized by person‐specific ad‐hoc decisions and opportunities which are not influenced by external policies aimed at improving the representation of women in construction. The authors contend that the current policies need urgently to be revised to recognize and accommodate the idiosyncratic motivations and circumstances of women who wish to progress to senior management positions. Further, they argue that policies need to be sensitive to the unique characteristics of small construction firms.
McGuffin and Obonyo assess the impact of employee coaching programmes in the construction sector as a means of improving productivity. Their argument for the investigation is that employees who feel valued at a personal level will be motivated to perform at the highest level. In addition, they will also be very loyal to their employer, which reduces the risk of the organization having a high employee turnover rate. The key benefits of coaching are in fact things which are very difficult to track and assign a commercial value to. The findings are, therefore, very important as they provide an objective assessment of reported benefits based on a survey of employees of a very large multinational construction company.
Al‐Sudairi and Al‐Motairi formulate a mathematical model, which assists project managers in optimizing land‐use allocation in housing projects using goal programming. The optimization model includes 17 goals based on the requirements of the Ministry of Municipalities and Rural Affairs (MOMRA) in Saudi Arabia. The model provides a benchmark mechanism to evaluate any proposed design, or even existing sites. Additionally, linear goal programming model can be utilized in optimizing land‐use allocation for housing projects. This is because prioritization and deviation variables are indeed key features in modeling land‐use allocation problems. The authors conclude that certain planning constraints are more sensitive than other constraints. This means that, site area, density, distribution of housing units and other certain semi‐public facilities need careful attention.
Anagnostopoulos and Koulinas develop a simulated annealing hyperheuristic algorithm to generate better‐levelled resource profiles. The authors suggest that hyperheuristic algorithms are an emerging approach to optimization and have been used in various applications. Their procedure is implemented within a widely used project management software package. The authors suggest that the results from the application of the proposed algorithm to a case study suggest that hyperheuristics are a promising research direction and could be used to a variety of project scheduling problems by combining existing approaches into multilevel algorithms.
Loosemore, Phua, Dunn and Ozguc study diversity on Australian construction sites. They report on a survey of 1155 construction operatives, examining the extent of diversity and how it is experienced by workers. They reveal that while cultural diversity presents challenges to productivity and operatives’ health, welfare and safety it also perform positive functions such as providing group support and safe‐havens. This contributes to the limited and poorly conceptualized understanding of the positive and negative roles of cultural diversity on construction sites. Thus, the basis of a framework is provided to manage diversity more effectively, to create a potentially more harmonious, safe and productive workplace.
Tuuli, Rowlinson and Koh examine manifestations of control in five construction project management teams involved in two ongoing construction projects in Hong Kong through case studies. Control in this context refers to all devices and systems employed to ensure that acts, behaviours, outcomes and decisions of individuals, teams and organizations are consistent with meeting organizational or project goals, objectives and strategies. The authors found that stakeholders employed a portfolio of control modes comprising both formal (behaviour‐based and outcome‐based) and informal (self‐based and clan‐based) control mechanisms although formal control remained the dominant mode. Informal control mechanisms were often invoked by those being controlled to augment the inadequacies of formal control to match the continually evolving project environment, suggesting that control in projects is not a static phenomenon. The authors argue that effective control in projects is therefore not a choice between formal and informal control but a question of complementarity to foster a cohesive and coherent blend.
Ökmen and Öztaş examine how uncertainty and correlation can both be considered in the cost analysis of construction projects. Their review reveals that current approaches do not take the correlation between costs and the correlation between risk‐factors into account simultaneously. To overcome this, they propose a model ? the correlated cost risk analysis model (CCRAM) ? that construction organizations can use in evaluating the effect of uncertainty and two‐sided correlation on cost estimations. CCRAM captures the correlation between the costs and risk‐factors indirectly and qualitatively. The authors illustrate how the model can be used through a case study. The efficiency and effectiveness of the model is evaluated through an application of CCRAM and Monte Carlo Simulation based method on the same data. The findings show that CCRAM operates well and produces more consistent results compatible with the theoretical expectancies.