Low, Gao and Mohdari investigate the realities of formalized marketing approaches and their importance to architectural firms in Singapore. They argue that, although marketing is known to help practices succeed, architects are yet to be convinced of its full potential. The authors leveraged four main functions of an architecture business development process framework for organizing and executing business development, which have been found to be applicable and of greater importance to architectural firms in Singapore. They also explored the architectural firms’ opinions of measuring marketing performance. These objectives were achieved by analysing the responses obtained from survey questionnaires disseminated to principal architects, business development managers, and senior architecture associates. Following the questionnaire survey, four interviews were also conducted with a mix of large and small architectural firms to gather industry perspectives. The results highlight the importance of the activities derived from the four management functions of the architecture business development process in the Singaporean architectural firms. The firms agreed and acknowledged that the desired performance measurement metric could enhance their business performances. These findings suggest an increasing recognition of marketing and measuring marketing performance as necessary components of architecture practice in Singapore.
One of the key concerns of today’s economy is to bridge a global skills gap. One result of this is the movement of labour, particularly in relation to construction. Due to the complexity of global work assignments, expatriates may struggle to adjust to a foreign way of life and to interact with locals in order to develop effective working relationships. Konanahalli and Oyedele focus on the importance of human cognition/intelligence to resolve key challenges associated with such adjustment. The authors look at key cross-cultural competencies necessary for carrying out critical architectural engineering and construction (AEC) activities on international assignments in culturally diverse settings. They carried out in-depth interviews to understand the experiences of a homogenous sample of British expatriates sent on AEC work assignments to China, Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Sub-continent. The findings highlighted a range of emotional intelligence (EI) competencies necessary for responding to general, interpersonal and overseas work situations. This exercise helped to formulate research hypotheses i.e. the theoretical framework, and to develop the research instrument, which was further used to survey British expatriates. This process also involved thoroughly scrutinizing and modifying the scales used to measure EI and cross-cultural adjustment to suit AEC contexts. The quantitative results confirmed the significant contribution of emotions to deal with adjustment to work and interacting with host country nationals in work and non-work situations. In terms of practical implications, the theoretical framework could inform human relations strategies on expatriate selection. We know from past studies that selecting the right person for the job is crucial for organizations to operate successfully in today’s global environment and to improve performance across all geographic markets.
Collaboration, although ubiquitous in the AEC sector, remains a complex and multifarious concept. This makes it difficult to successfully implement and assess, especially in the face of innovative approaches to project delivery, such as building information modelling (BIM), lean design and construction as well as integrated project delivery (IPD), which aim to foster collaboration within multi-disciplinary project teams. While many normative aspects of collaboration have been developed in prior research, there is a lack of a solid theoretical foundation to fully understand collaboration in the AEC sector. This in turn inhibits the development of a coherent body of knowledge. Poirier, Forgues and Staub-French propose a systemic model of collaboration to support the development of a body of knowledge and subsequent expertise in collaboration. To do so, they perform a review of several meta-analyses of collaboration conducted across several domains to uncover five core entities of collaboration: structure, process, artefacts, agents and context. Using a critical realist epistemic and ontological lens, they then articulate the five core entities to develop a systemic model of collaboration and use this model to frame the constitution of knowledge in collaboration in the AEC sector. Having developed the model, the authors discuss expertise in collaboration and what its acquisition would entail. Finally, they go on to discuss how innovative approaches to project delivery, including BIM, Lean and IPD, are impacting this newly formalized body of knowledge. The systemic model of collaboration developed by the authors prompts a move beyond the more normative and static conceptualization of collaboration that has been identified in prior work. It is posited that, to become an expert collaborator and thus transcend disciplinary practices, would entail the mastery of the body of knowledge articulated within this systemic and dynamic conceptualization of collaboration. The profound impact on collaboration due to the emergence of innovative project delivery approaches is also better understood through the systemic model.
The construction sector is often criticized for not being innovative or productive enough to keep up with other industries. Havenvid, Hulthén, Linné and Sundquist confront this problem with empirical studies of how construction actors operate within and across projects and what kind of drivers lead to renewal processes. The authors have developed a deeper understanding of how construction firms and their counterparts can engage in learning and innovation processes, referred to as renewal, over time. A specific focus is placed on the renewal effects following from client requirements, as earlier studies have identified clients as important drivers of innovation. Two in-depth case studies of large ongoing health-care construction projects in Sweden were performed with the specific focus of tracing the renewal effects of client requirements both within and across projects (past, present, and future). While the two cases represent different types of project both involve knowledgeable and demanding clients with a long-term focus on their investments and use of resources. Interviews with central project actors enable description and analysis of important dimensions of the connectivity between these construction actors, the various activities they engaged in and the resources they used and developed within and across projects. The industrial network approach emphasizes the interactivity and interdependence between firms, their resources and activities. The authors’ conclusions are that both client requirements and renewal effects are shaped through interaction processes between actors and how they engage in the use of activities and resources across projects. Thus, in order to comprehend any particular client requirement in any particular project, as well as its effects, a contextual understanding of how actors, resources and activities have become inter-connected over time is needed. From a managerial point of view, the results imply that, while managers often focus on the benefits of the individual project, there are long-term benefits that flow from engaging in the development of resources and activity coordination across several projects. More specifically, business relationships appear to be a central “carrier” of renewal in terms of enabling re-use and continuous development of both resources and activities over time. Thus, while maintaining a short-term focus on individual projects might be a strategy to cut direct costs, keeping a long-term perspective on business relationships to some important counterparts appears to be a more sustainable strategy. This way, long-term innovative benefits can be achieved, such as engaging in joint learning and development activities.
Despite their importance in preventing firms’ failure, and ensuring financiers and clients give loans and contracts respectively to only healthy firms, the performance of bankruptcy prediction models (BPM), especially those developed for the construction sector, seems to have declined. Alaka et al. investigated the methods and methodology of BPM studies to probe the cause of this stagnation. They carried out a systematic review of literature on the topic. They used meta-analysis to analyse the articles they found. In relation to methods, their findings show positive trends in the number of BPM studies that (i) used artificial intelligence techniques (over 80%), (ii) validated their results (over 87%), (iii) considered error cost (73%), and poor trend in use of (iv) equal data dispersion (38%). Construction-focused studies exhibited poorer trends in the first two and fourth criteria (58%, 79% and 17% respectively) and better trend in the third (84%). In terms of methodological approaches, all studies were found to have been essentially positivist in their outlook, through external observation of a firm’s financial data. They see this as inadequate because financial data can be doctored; most construction firms are SMEs, many of which do not produce comprehensive financial statements and there are many non-financial indicators of insolvency. The authors propose that pragmatism with mixed method is a more proficient methodology, with a subjective approach, in addition to the commonly used objectivism, to cater for these inadequacies. The hope is that these recommendations will encourage improvements in BPM performance, which will, in turn, reduce the number of business failures in construction.