Pellegrini‐Masini et al. present the results of a whole life cost analysis of fabric interventions to reduce CO2 emission of approximately 30 to 50% on two house variants prominent in the existing building stock. The authors compare the net present value of three sets of interventions with a non‐intervention base case. Their results suggest that no clear financial case exists for the three sets of interventions, even when forecast energy price increases over a 25 year period are considered. The results are placed in the context of social research on pro‐environmental behaviours and statistics of consumption data. They suggest that in current market conditions, the mass deployment of investment required to produce the necessary domestic sector CO2 emission reduction is unlikely. The results are significant for policymakers and scholars engaged in the policy and academic debate discussing the current market for energy efficiency domestic technologies and the most suitable policies to deliver an abatement of domestic carbon emissions.
Jewell, Flanagan and Anaç, prompted by the growing importance of construction professional services to the UK’s export performance, explored the definition and nature of these services. There has been a shift over the past 20 years from exporting construction (contracting, materials and components and professional services) towards professional services. The business of delivering professional services overseas has changed considerably over the last two decades due to globalization and changing forms of procurement, but this is not reflected in the way export data for professional services are collected. The data relating to the export of construction professional services are poorly understood. Their intangibility makes them difficult to define and measure. Data collected from the authors’ interviews with industry leaders suggest that the export data needs to reflect better the project‐based nature of construction professional services, which involves many sub‐sectors of the industry, and be more disaggregated to better represent the export performance of construction goods and services. This may help policy makers and industry leaders have better information about the core competencies and export potential.
The recent global financial crisis has had a profound impact not only on the general economy but specifically on the construction sector across the globe. While the construction sector in Hong Kong is not exempt from the shock, the territory has gone through similar crises owing to the 1997 Asian Economic Turmoil and 2003 SARS outbreak. The experience of the Hong Kong construction sector may be valuable to develop a method to predict construction demand during economic uncertainties. Fan, Ng and Wong propose using the Box‐Jenkins technique to forecast the recovery period of Hong Kong construction demand after two major impacts using historical data over the past 20 years. The results show that overall and residential construction demand during the recovery period from 2nd Quarter of 2006 to 4th Quarter of 2008 can be accurately forecasted. Despite the fact that the time‐series technique is known for its limitation in forecasting for dynamic data series, the authors demonstrate the applicability of the Box‐Jenkins technique in forecasting construction demand during a recovery period subsequent to major macroeconomic impacts. It may be interesting to also find out the predictive power of this technique in other construction sectors across the globe once they are recovering from the recent global financial crisis.
Smyth addresses efforts in the UK to pursue continuous improvement through initiatives prescribed in the government commissioned Egan reports, Rethinking Construction in 1998 and Accelerating Change in 2002. The implementation was conducted through a series of institutional arrangements, especially Constructing Excellence, in recent years. Demonstration Projects featured throughout the ten year period researched. Smyth analyses progress that was made towards continuous improvement for those organizations involved and for others through knowledge transfer. Two overall findings emerge. First, while there has been regular improvement on a project‐by‐project basis, the lessons have not generally been transferred across projects into contractor and supplier programme management, nor embedded as competencies into contracting organizations. Second, in recent years there has been a shift towards initiatives with greater consultant and subcontractor input and less from main contractors, which has also been coupled with sustainability content.
Jones, Ross and Sertyesilisik have tested the Unfolding Model of Voluntary employee Turnover (UMVT) for the first time in the construction sector. A convenience sample of 320 construction professionals was taken from the Global Construction Consultants, Davis Langdon. The sample provided useable online survey data from 104 respondents who had voluntarily left their previous employers in the last four years. The results reveal that UMVT’s ability to interpret voluntary employee turnover among construction professionals was weak. In contrast to previous studies of UMVT, a significant number of respondents (81%) followed paths other than the original five theorized paths. As a result, the authors propose a new extended version of the UMVT that includes two new paths that have been theorized adding to the understanding of voluntary employee turnover and may in the long term, help support Human Resource Management in construction professional practices to predict and manage voluntary employee turnover.
Chao introduces a decision support system (DSS) for estimating overhead rates that is connected to a firm’s cost system and uses a neural network model for performing the estimation. The author contends that a selected rate on top of direct cost to cover all project overheads without detailed estimates is a common practice for bidders in construction, but the practice depends on the ability to relate the overhead level to project conditions and should be based on actual costs of past projects. Through a simulation of the DSS using a firm’s project data over six years, the approach is shown to achieve accuracy improvements by model updates with a growing database. Chao suggests that the risk of making a loss due to an under‐estimate of the model may be assessed using the methods provided.
Badenfelt investigates the complex and dynamic relationship between aspects of trust and control in client–contractor interactions. Previous research has predominantly recognized the use of formal control mechanisms such as partnering arrangements, financial incentives and open book accounting to create and maintain trust in high‐risk collaborative interorganizational relationships. In contrast, Badenfelt has identified, through a longitudinal case study that involved building a large laboratory for a high‐technology company in Sweden, the power of more informal and subtle control mechanisms, as well as trust nurturing actions performed by project participants at a one to one level. She also found that control mechanisms may differ in extent and type in different phases of the project and that the behaviour of contracting parties is also influenced by previous experience of working together. Since many control activities, as well as trust‐nurturing actions were found to be an expected response to deal with a certain type of individual, she proposes that social roles and values ought to figure more prominently in research focusing on issues related to incentive design and collaborative interactions.
Bradley examines several ultrametric methods in the study of urban building event dynamics where data can be difficult to obtain. Using an example dataset from South Germany, he finds, for each building stock, segments of the timeline that exhibit similar behaviour. The results do not differ significantly for different methods, but reveal a difference in the dynamics between larger urban building stocks on the one hand, and smaller ones on the other hand. The methods can be used in future research to extend the existing scarce knowledge on urban building stock dynamics in a regional context.