Risk management for design and construction

Ovidiu Cretu, Robert B. Stewart and Terry Berends, John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2011, 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0-470-63538-

Innovate or Perish? Exploring some of the Myths of Construction Innovation

The construction innovation literature suggests that managers face a stark choice. They can innovate or perish in the face of growing global competition and an increasingly uncertain and dynamic world. Innovation is presented as a key area of reform needed to raise business performance, yet at the same time it is argued that Australia is falling behind in the global innovation stakes. Evidence suggests that the Australian Construction sector is a poor innovation performer when compared to all-industry averages and contributes relatively little to the national innovation effort. Drawing on international innovation research, this paper argues that these views are overly simplistic and explores some of the myths that surround the process in the construction industry. Through interviews with some of Australia’s leading innovators and policy-makers it suggests that many of the factors that are said to drive innovation are not as straight forward as they may seem. There are important qualifications to consider and it would seem that construction innovation is a highly interactive and amorphous process, involving many people with multiple interests dealing with day-to-day challenges.Keywords: Innovation, opportunism, strategy, risk

Grey Kestrels in Tanganyika

Volume: XXI

Safety training and positive safety attitude formation in the Australian construction industry

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Poor safety is a perennial problem for the construction industry worldwide. While there has been a large amount of research on construction safety training and its importance in developing positive safety attitudes, much of the evidence has been anecdotal. To address this gap in knowledge, this paper presents the results of an attitudinal survey of 228 construction employees from a variety of professional and trade backgrounds operatives in Australia who went through mandatory site safety training. It was found that the training was largely ineffective in changing workers’ safety attitudes. The minor change in safety attitudes that did occur were largely cognitive and behavioural in nature while the affective component of safety attitudes remained virtually unchanged. In other words, construction operatives emerged from the training with a slightly better knowledge of safety risks, a better intention to behave safely but not caring any more about safety as an issue. It was also found that gender, age and education are potential mediators in the safety attitude formation process. It is recommended that when developing safety training programs in the future, more attention should be paid to tailoring programs to the demographic characteristics of the people being trained and to the use of new interactive and immersive technologies and learner-centric andragogical pedagogies

Untangling rhetoric and reality in the CSR debate – the role of corporate social responsibility in effective business strategy

While there is a strong moral case for corporate social responsibility (CSR), the business case for CSR is certainly not irrefutable. A better understanding of how to integrate CSR into business strategy is needed but with ever increasing momentum towards sustainability as a business driver, it is often difficult to untangle the rhetoric from reality in the CSR debate. Through an analysis of eight case studies of leading firms from throughout the construction supply chain who claim to engage in CSR, we explore how consulting and contracting firms in the construction and engineering industries integrate CSR into their business strategy. Findings point to an inherent caution of moving beyond compliance and to a risk-averse culture which adopts very narrow definitions of success. We conclude that until this culture changes or the industry is forced by clients or regulation to change, the idea of CSR will continue to mean achieving economic measures of success, with ecological goals a second regulated priority and social goals a distant third

The multi-objective optimum design of building thermal systems

The thermal design of buildings as a multi-criterion optimisation process since there is always a pay-off (balance) to be made between capital expenditure and the operating cost of the building. This thesis investigates an approach to solving 'whole building' optimisation problems. In particular simultaneous optimisation of the plant size for a fixed arrangement of air conditioning equipment, and the control schedule for its operation to condition the space within a discrete selection of building envelopes. The optimisation is achieved by examining a combination of the cost of operating the plant, the capital cost of the plant and building construction, and maximum percentage people dissatisfied during the occupation of the building. More that one criterion is examined at a time by using multi-criteria optimisation methods. Therefore rather than a single optimum, a payoff between the solutions is sort. The benefit of this is that it provides a more detailed information about the characteristics of the problem and more design solutions available to the end user. The optimisation is achieved using a modified genetic algorithm using Pareto ranking selection to provide the multi-criterion fitness selection. Specific methods for handling the high number of constraints within the problem are examined. A specific operator is designed and demonstrated to deal with the discontinuous effects of the three separate seasons, which are used for the plant selection and for the three separate control schedules. Conclusions are made with respect to the specific application of the multi-criterion optimisation to, building services systems, their control, and the viability of 'whole building design' optimisation

The social procurement practices of tier-one construction contractors in Australia

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Social procurement is becoming an increasingly important requirement in the delivery of private- and public- sector construction projects across the world, yet there is relatively little research done in this area. Mobilising Furneaux and Barraket’s social procurement typology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers from eight tier-one contractors in the Australian construction industry to explore and classify the types of social procurement strategies used in projects, the types of social value created and the barriers to implementation. Documentary data were collected in the form of company policies and contract requirements. Results demonstrate the conceptual merit of Furneaux and Barraket’s typology in a construction industry context by highlighting different constraints on social value creation for each type of social procurement. These results also indicate that approaches to social procurement in the Australian construction industry are generally driven by a philosophy of risk mitigation rather than opportunity maximisation, and are confined to low-value and low-risk construction activities and are constrained by a lack of existing and new supply chain social-value creation capacity. Construction industry social value chains are fragile in Australia, and it is concluded that in building the sector’s significant untapped capacity to deliver social value to the communities in which it builds, priority should be given to three main strategies: third sector capacity building; barrier-to-entry reduction and skills development in managing new cross-sector collaborations among public, private and third sector organisations

The Influence of Personal and Workplace Characteristics on the Job Stressors of Design Professionals in the Chinese Construction Industry

Rapid growth in the Chinese construction industry is exposing many design professionals to elevated stress levels with negative implications for their health and well-being, and in-turn project outcomes. However, it is surprising that there has been little research into job stressors affecting design professionals in the construction industry. The aim of this paper is to help address this gap in knowledge by reporting the results of research that explored the job stressors of design professionals and how they vary across various personal and workplace characteristics. Data was collected via a survey of 408 design professionals in the Chinese construction industry, supported by in-depth sensemaking interviews with nine Chinese design professionals. Survey data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics combined with qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Results indicate that task-related stressors are the leading sources of job stress for design professionals in the industry. Managing job workload, job requirements, and job ambiguity are the main task-related stressors and are linked to time pressures, working overtime, high workload, balancing multiple projects, and high levels of responsibility. Results also indicate that gender, marital status, age, education background, years of design experience, design discipline, position, and professional title are mediating factors in a design professional's job stressor profile. Being the first large-scale empirical investigation of the job stressors among design professionals in the Chinese construction industry, the findings provide new empirical and conceptual insights into an increasingly important yet under researched problem and concludes with practical recommendations to reduce job stress for design professionals in the industry, which has broader relevance in other countries