Mbiti, Blismas, Wakefield and Lombardo present a study of the fluctuations and slow growth in construction activity in Kenya. Using documentary and interview data, they describe the occurrence over a 40 year period – 1964 to 2003. By comparing the profile of construction output levels in Kenya with profiles of outputs of 11 generic system archetypes, the authors show that the system archetypes underlying this problematic behaviour are the balancing process with a delay and the limits to growth phenomena. The authors argue that these observations are useful in the formulation of policies on management of construction demand and development of construction capacity. In order to minimize fluctuations in construction activity and foster continual growth of the activity in Kenya, Mbiti et al. recommend regulation of the response of the industry to changes in demand for its services, and concerted expansion of the construction market beyond the country’s borders.
Wu, Kumaraswamy and Soo provide an explanation of the observation that some continuing clients in mainland China, defined as clients with continuous large project portfolios, may choose to exploit their contractors. Based on gametric reasoning, they suggest that three prerequisites need to be fulfilled to attract such clients into choosing collaboration. The authors obtained data from legislation and from a questionnaire survey, and found that these clients’ deviation from collaborative approaches can be attributed to prevalent institutional arrangements, differentials in appreciation of the value of relationships, and opaque payment track records. The authors suggest that transaction attributes cannot exclusively decide clients’ choice in project governance.
Lu, Olofsson and Stehn propose a lean‐agile model of homebuilders’ production systems using value stream mapping. A simulation model is developed to evaluate and validate the effectiveness of the proposed lean‐agile model. The authors argue the proposed lean‐agile model contributes to the ‘leagility’ paradigm by moving it from a conceptual discussion to a specific model of a production system. By providing simulation evidence, the authors reveal that the proposed lean‐agile model produces lower inventory levels than even‐flow‐construction, and a more stable process with shorter cycle times than sales‐driven production. In addition, it offers new opportunities for homebuilders to balance responses to market demands and the efficiency of the production system.
The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May, in Sichuan Province in southwestern China, destroyed 15 million housing units and caused widespread destruction to the built environment. With the large‐scale and intensive reconstruction unfolding in August 2008, lack of resources required for reconstruction combined with resourcing capacity bottlenecks limited the degree to which a successful recovery could occur. In December 2008, Chang, Wilkinson, Potangaroa, and Seville conducted a field‐based survey to examine what factors inherent in post‐quake recovery environment affected resource availability for housing reconstruction. Apart from project‐related factors, the capabilities of participating construction professionals and other exogenous factors such as legislation and policy, general economic environment and resource transportation were brought to the fore. The authors suggest that understanding these factors and their impacts on disaster housing recovery is an integral aspect of construction project planning. An extra step the authors have taken is to analyse the aspects that are likely to enhance and strengthen the actual ability or capability of the construction industry to rebuild houses after a major disaster. The research is located at the intersection of scholarship in the areas of disasters, construction management, and housing policy. While grounded within empirical studies in disaster management and resource procurement, the research applies theoretical insights from the field of project management to examine resource availability during post‐disaster housing recovery. The authors believe that this warrants attention from the construction industry and that this work contributes to future public policy debates on resourcing post‐disaster reconstruction, in China and beyond, by providing a better understanding of the impact of resource availability, construction interventions, and disaster recovery planning on housing recovery outcomes.
Even though the internationalization of actors in the construction sector has attracted the interest of construction management scholars from time to time, it is still a very much under‐studied area. Abdul‐Aziz et al. examined the ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘which’ and ‘why’ of the internationalization of Malaysian quantity surveying firms to determine which internationalization model most suitably captures the phenomenon. These models tend to focus on one particular aspect of firm internationalization at the expense of others. Hence no one model captures all the complexities of firms serving markets across borders. The authors found that the network theory and international entrepreneurship fields of study were most relevant for capturing and explaining these phenonmena. This work points to how Malaysia’s quantity surveying services sector can generate greater foreign revenue.
Identification of key sectors in an economy is crucial for the formulation of planning decisions. Construction is an industry which has long been used by policy makers as an instrument to induce growth through derived demand. Gundes presents a detailed investigation on the role of construction in the rapidly developing economy of Turkey during the post‐1970 period. The analysis on the relationships between income, growth and construction investment revealed that during different economic conditions such as growth, slowdown and stability, the behaviour and the responsiveness of the industry changes. She found that public sector investment cuts in particular have an important effect on the amplitude and the timing of slumps of the industry. The examination of linkage indicators showed that although construction is commonly considered to be a leading sector, its forward linkages are weak and its strong backward linkages are not evenly distributed across industry groups. In the light of these results, the author highlights the most important issues to be considered in the use of construction investment in industrial policy making.
Thomson provides a initial insight into the nature and speculated inability of a ‘Project Sponsor’ to provide and control the interface between pluralistic construction clients and industry practitioners. Examined through the lens of client perceptions of project success in an illustrative case study, the author finds that the project sponsor was unable to reconcile the complexity of conflicting demands emerging as a consequence of internal conflict within a central UK government client. In the project studies, functional units of the client body subverted the formal project sponsor role to engage directly with industry practitioners perceived as most receptive to their political intent for the studied refurbishment project. This issue was compounded by shortcomings in industry practitioners’ clarification of project intent and scope, which allowed divergent and emergent client requirements to unduly influence the project’s definition of success without constraint by available resources. The author argues that the Project Sponsor role may have to be reconsidered in situations where clients are pluralistic and internally complex. Specifically, he argues that the ability of a single person to reconcile the resulting emergent change is questionable.
Brown and Phua argue that identity issues, which are a current vogue in management and organization studies, have not yet received the attention they merit from scholars in construction management. They show that identity themes are already present in the construction management literature, and make the case for a more explicit, sustained and programmatic approach to the study of subjectively construed identities through qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic methods. The authors suggest that identity is an important factor that may help to explain differences in performance between construction managers and the success and failure of projects. Ultimately, they express the hope that identity studies may not merely be a frame for exploring processes of organizing, nor just a mean of stimulating innovative research, but rather a continuing point of contact between construction management and broader debates in organizational and social sciences.
Dursun and Stoy investigate the statistical adequacy of categorization with respect to project location for modelling construction duration. The authors aim to respond to the epistemological gap in duration modelling regarding categorization of the sample with respect to qualitative attributes when linear regression analyses are employed. In this context, a data set is generated from a global construction client. A restricted model which ignores the effect of location, and a full model that retains indicator and interaction variables are developed. The authors hypothesize that substantial variations shall be observed between those. Least square parameter estimation is followed by computation of F‐ratio. The procedure resulted in rejection of null hypothesis which literally means that grouping observations based upon their locations is adequate for linear construction duration estimation models. In addition, standard methodology that evaluates the adequacy of categorization for regression models is presented in detail. This, in turn, may provide researchers with a convenient instrument to justify the classification of the observations when linear regression analysis is employed.