Building sustainable hospitals: A resource interaction perspective

In response to a growing influence of patients, higher specialisation, technological advancement and the need to provide care services more efficiently, the issue of sustainability in healthcare has gained prominence. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the social and economic sustainability of healthcare are dependent on interconnecting resources across organisational borders and in different settings over time. Adopting a product development process perspective, the paper explores the gap between a planned healthcare facility and how it actually came to be used, through a longitudinal case study of the Skandion clinic, a small, highly specialised, hospital in Sweden. The findings suggests that integration of healthcare resources over time is central to achieve social and economic sustainability goals. The results hereby contend the prevailing view of hospitals as independent organisational units and highlights the need for more holistic analyses of sustainability in healthcare. Analyses which take into account the complex interdependencies stretching across networks of interconnected facilities and organisational units

A Resource Perspective on the Long-term Effects of project Partnering

Project partnering has become an all the more established form for client-contractor collaboration. Although a well-reported phenomenon in the construction management literature, most studies focus on partnering practices in single projects and the immediate effects for the directly involved actors. Few investigations have studied the long-term effects of partnering, including both directly involved project actors and indirectly affected actors in relation to the constructed assets. If partnering is meant to enhance the quality of constructed assets, it should also improve their ability to support user activities. With the purpose of exploring the long-term effects of partnering in relation to interrelated projects and the various users of the constructed assets, the following research question is posed: what are the direct and indirect effects of project partnering on a long-term basis? To scrutinize this, a longitudinal case study covers a series of projects involving the same key actors and the subsequent operations of one of the constructed assets-a first of its kind proton radiation clinic in the Nordic countries. By mapping the involved actors’ resources across the projects and within a larger health care system, various effects are traced. A key conclusion is that the actors directly involved in partnering have the opportunity to reap several benefits from joint resource development within and across projects, while the actors using the constructed asset struggle in relating the developed resources within the projects to resources of the wider permanent context of the building in use

New ways of organising construction due to user demands

This paper investigates how client demands affect organisational renewal in construction, more specifically how the combining of technical and organisational resources are directly and indirectly affected by demands from the user. We adopt an industrial network perspective and focus on inter-organisational interaction between the actors involved in two specific healthcare construction projects in Sweden. The findings show that user demands affect organisational renewal with regard to both onsite and off-site operations and that effects due to user demands can be spread outside the \u27temporary\u27 network to the \u27permanent\u27 network. Hence, user demands create direct and indirect effects on both the combining of organisational and technical resources across individual projects and organisational boundaries. These findings imply that in order to understand innovation in construction it is necessary to study how technical and organisational resources are combined across organisational boundaries and across projects

Researching the Interactive Business Landscape

In this chapter, the authors focus on three challenges related to the attributes of the interactive business world and on the related implications for methodology. The first challenge is how to capture the continuity of business relationships, which implies: (1) Taking a two-sided (bilateral) view when researching business relationships, (2) collecting data on content and consequences of business relationships and (3) developing a research design to capture development over time. The second challenge is how to set boundaries and trace network-like structures, which implies: (1) identifying the relevant relationships that appear to affect each other in a network-like manner, (2) capturing interdependences among relationships (how they affect each other) and (3) researching forces generating network dynamics (how these interdependencies are established and change over time). The third challenge is how to observe and research interaction processes in business relationships, which leave little traces and are difficult to record. This requires the attention on (1) the choice of point(s) of observation, (2) the handling of the subjective understanding of interaction and (3) researching how interaction unfolds. The authors conclude with a discussion on the complexity of handling these challenges, and related methodological choices, when \u2018research objects\u2019 are interconnected