Ludwig Martin

Emerging contractors in South Africa: interactions and learning

Purpose – The South African construction industry is undergoing transformation. Part of this metamorphosis is the explosion in the number of “emerging contractors”. However, emerging contractors have a tendency to fail to develop into sustainable enterprises due to inadequate construction knowledge and lack of experience. These shortfalls can be potentially overcome by learning through appropriate interactions with others who possess the required knowledge and experience but there is an absence of comprehensive data about the form and frequency of such interactions and reliance has tended to be on small scale samples or anecdotal reports. The paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approach – A survey amongst emerging contractors on interactions in the civil engineering sector was carried out, collecting mainly quantitative but also qualitative data for analysis.Findings – Significant relations between particular forms of interactions and knowledge perceived to be held by the respondents exi...

A Constructivist Approach for Teaching Research Methodology in Construction Management

Construction Management (CM) is an acknowledged field of expertise and profession that requires students to research real world problems. To prepare the students for this task, many CM programs contain a Research Methodology (RM) course. However, after taking part in these courses, many students still lack the ability to define the scope of their research problem and find an appropriate research design. In order to counteract this situation, a constructivist approach to teach RM was developed. A role-play is the central element of this approach in which the students take on the role of “problem-owners” and “researchers.” The teaching approach was embedded in RM courses at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) and at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (South Africa). In both cases the lecturers noticed that the students became more aware of the complexity and vagueness of construction management problems. They were better able to define the research problems and communicate the relevance of the problem at hand. The approach further helps to put RM in a more realistic and pragmatic perspective.