Construction clients’ ability to manage uncertainty and equivocality

Abstract

While risk and uncertainty management have received much attention within construction management research, management of information interpretation remains unexplored. Situations that are generally overlooked are those where increased amounts and flow of information are not the solution to the human problem of managing multiple meanings of information and conflicting interpretations, i.e. ‘equivocality’. The aim is to identify and differentiate between construction clients’ uncertainty and equivocality about industrialized construction in Sweden, and, in the light of those findings, to evaluate clients’ current information processing practice on investment decisions in new-build in order to assess and discuss clients’ ability to manage uncertainty and equivocality. Based on information processing theory, analysis of aggregated data from three previous studies shows that there is a need to manage both uncertainty and equivocality. At the same time, clients’ ability to do this is found to be limited. Consequently, when industrialized construction moves clients beyond their current frame of reference, clients’ information processing practice does not support decision making. It is also proposed that differentiating between uncertainty and equivocality will enable a more profound understanding of the sequential order for information processing, i.e. that one must define questions (reduce equivocality) before one can find answers to the questions (reduce uncertainty).

Keywords:

• Client
• uncertainty
• information processing
• equivocality
• industrialization

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the people in all of the property owner organizations who kindly participated in interviews and provided valuable information and data. Valuable comments from the referees are also gratefully acknowledged. The financial support from TräCentrum Norr (a R&D centre at Luleå University of Technology), Formas-BIC, and the Competence Centre of Lean Wood Engineering, is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. Both terms describe the same phenomenon. Industrialized construction is the most frequently used term in Sweden whereas the terms ‘modern methods of construction’ (MMC) or ‘offsite production’ are used in the UK.

2. In 1994, a change in the Swedish building code, to a more functional approach, allowed the use of timber as a framing material in multi-storey buildings. Since then, industrialized construction of buildings has taken a market share of about 15% in Sweden and has mainly been driven by non-local, smaller contractors using timber as a framing material. Timber is used mainly because of the material’s high strength/weight ratio and manufacturability, which support industrialized (factory) production and enable long-distance transportation of volumetric modules. For further research on this type of industrialized housing construction, cf. Höök and Stehn (2008), Johnsson and Meiling (2009).

3. Quotes are translated from Swedish.