Santoso and Loosemore address the problem of managing expatriate managers on overseas construction projects. Presenting evidence that poor expatriate management is a major cause of failure on international projects, the authors interview 46 expatriates and human resource managers from five multinational Australian construction firms to explore how expatriates are selected, deployed, supported and repatriated. Their results show that what happens in practice departs significantly from what the international human resource management literature advocates. Contributing to the design of better expatriate human resource management systems, the authors argue that firms should develop more systematic and evidence-based approaches to selection, provide better preparation training and support for expatriates before and after they arrive on assignment and manage repatriation more sensitively. The authors also argue that given the growing internationalization of construction trade, much more research is needed in this area. In particular, it would be useful to know whether different recruitment, development, support and repatriation processes are needed for different professional groups and how these may change in response to the movement of employees between specific countries.
Davies and Harty describe the design and administration of a survey based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to measure expectations of the consequences of Building Information Modelling (BIM) use among the employees of a large construction contracting organisation in the UK. TAM surveys have been used extensively in information systems research to predict ICT usage. Scales for performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, compatibility and attitude were used, and an analysis of 762 responses showed expectations about the consequences of BIM use were broadly favourable. They also showed expectations that BIM would enhance job performance were strongly related to expectations that BIM use was compatible with preferred and existing ways of working.
Ibrahim, Costello and Wilkinson argue that a means of assessing the integration performance of an alliance team over the lifecycle of a project is crucial to ensure continuous improvement in delivering complex projects through the alliance model. There have been few studies which measure team integration performance in collaborative contracting. The authors used the Delphi method to identify the most significant key indicators of team integration and generated a performance index. They developed a conceptual alliance team integration performance index, as an initial step for guiding the owner and non-owner participants towards measuring integration performance over the life of an alliance project. Although the development of the index focused on road infrastructure projects in New Zealand, the same research method could be applied in other geographical locations and other types of infrastructure projects to develop similar index models for comparative purposes.
Challenging the current orthodoxy in knowledge management, Boyd identifies and analyses the gap between thinking and doing in construction. This is significant not only for the value of theory but also for the potential to improve construction practice. Using theory from a practice-based view point and in-depth interviews with practitioners, a profound difference is drawn between ideas and actions. Boyd shows the validity of a richer set of concepts that better explain practice and also suggest more applicable approaches to developing practice and learning in a practice situation. The significance of reflecting on events is key to these approaches. This work will be useful to practitioners as they struggle to improve their practice and to academics as they are required to demonstrate impact in their work.