Roine Leiringer

Technological innovation in PPPs: incentives, opportunities and actions

From a construction perspective, Public‐Private Partnership projects (PPPs) are often credited as providing real incentives for the actors involved as well as a business environment that is conducive to innovation and improved practices. The validity of four common rhetorical arguments used to promote the PPP procurement route is explored: collaborative working, design freedom, long‐term commitment and risk transfer. Particular interest is given to the extent to which espoused intentions correlate with experienced realities in allowing actors involved in the design and construction phases to be presented with, and able to exploit, opportunities for technological innovation. It is argued that there is reason to be cautious in fully accepting the purported benefits of the PPP framework and that the arguments often presented need to be revised. Alternative interpretations are provided.

Living up to the value agenda: the empirical realities of through‐life value creation in construction

Current research agendas are increasingly encouraging the construction industry to operate on the basis of ‘added value’. Such debates echo the established concept of ‘high value manufacturing’ and associated trends towards servitization. Within construction, the so‐called ‘value agenda’ draws heavily from the notion of integrated solutions. This is held to be especially appropriate in the context of PFI projects. Also relevant is the concept of service‐led projects whereby the project rationale is driven by the clients objectives for delivering an enhanced service to its own customers. Such ideas are contextualized by a consideration of broader trends of privatization and outsourcing within and across the construction industrys client base. The current emphasis on integrated solutions reflects long‐term trends within privatized client organizations towards the outsourcing of asset management capabilities. However, such trends are by no means uniform or consistent. An in‐depth case study of three operating divisions within a major construction company illustrates that firms are unlikely to reorientate their business in response to the ‘value agenda’. In the case of PFI, the tendency has been to establish specialist units for the purposes of winning work. Meanwhile, institutionally embedded operating routines within the rest of the business remain broadly unaffected.

Commercial Management of Projects: Defining the discipline

This is the first book to establish a theoretical framework for commercial management. It argues that managing the contractual and commercial issues of projects - from project inception to completion - is vital in linking operations at the project level and the multiple projects (portfolios/ programmes) level to the corporate core of a company. The book focuses on commercial management within the context of project oriented organisations, for example: aerospace, construction, IT, pharmaceutical and telecommunications - in the private and public sectors. By bringing together contributions from leading researchers and practitioners in commercial management, it presents the state-of-the-art in commercial management covering both current research and best practice. Commercial Management of Projects: defining the discipline covers the external milieu (competition, culture, procurement systems); the corporate milieu (corporate governance, strategy, marketing, trust, outsourcing); the projects milieu (management of uncertainty, conflict management and dispute resolution, performance measurement, value management); and the project milieu (project governance, contract management, bidding, purchasing, logistics and supply, cost value reconciliation). Collectively the chapters constitute a step towards the creation of a body of knowledge and a research agenda for commercial management.

Schools for the twenty-first century: school design and educational transformation

The Building Schools for the Future programme has been established to ensure that English secondary schools are designed or redesigned to allow for educational transformation. The programme represents the biggest single UK government investment in school buildings for over 50 years. For this reason, it poses a major challenge to those involved in the design of educational buildings. Inspiration is in part sought from exemplar schools around the world. The paper draws on a multiple case study of four such exemplar schools in Scandinavia that have been designed to address changes in the educational curriculum. The analysis depicts the degree to which the building design in each case supports the school approach to teaching and learning. The disjuncture between commercial and educational issues inherent in designing ‘good’ schools is highlighted. The findings show how it is important to find a balance between good design, commercial realities and educational approaches.

Tales of the expected: investigating the rhetorical strategies of innovation champions

Innovation continues to be high on the agenda in construction. It is widely considered to be an essential prerequisite of improved performance both for the sector at large and for individual firms. Success stories dominate the parts of the academic literature that rely heavily on the recollections of key individuals. A complementary interpretation focuses on the way innovation champions in hindsight interpret, justify and legitimize the diffusion of innovations. Emphasis is put on the temporal dimension of interpretation and how this links to rhetorical strategies and impression management tactics. Rhetorical theories are drawn upon to analyse the accounts given by innovation champions in seven facilities management organizations. In particular, the three persuasive appeals in classic rhetoric are used to highlight the rhetorical justifications mobilized in the descriptions of what took place. The findings demonstrate the usefulness of rhetorical theories in complementing studies of innovation.

Exploring the Role of Design Quality in the Building Schools for the Future Programme

Abstract The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme represents the biggest single UK government investment in school buildings for more than 50 years. A key goal for BSF is to ensure that pupils learn in 21st-century facilities that are designed or redesigned to allow for educational transformation. This represents a major challenge to those involved in the design of schools. The paper explores the conceptualizations of design quality within the BSF programme. It draws on content analysis of influential reports on design published between 2000 and 2007 and interviews with key actors in the provision of schools. The means by which design quality has become defined and given importance within the programme through official documents is described and compared with the multiple understandings of design quality among key stakeholders. The findings portray the many challenges that practitioners face when operationalizing design quality in practice. The paper concludes with reflections on the inconsistencies between how design quality has been appropriated in the BSF programme and how it is interpreted and adopted in practice.

BIM and the small construction firm: a critical perspective

ABSTRACT The need for technological and administrative innovation is a recurrent theme in the UK construction-reform agenda, but generic improvement recipes are beginning to give way to a more focused prescription: building information modelling (BIM). The current strategy is to mandate the use of BIM for government projects as a way of integrating the design, construction and operation of publicly procured buildings. This aspiration represents a partial turn away from a focus on managerialist agendas towards a belief in the power of digital practices to achieve the aspiration of integrated working, collaboration and innovation, a trend that is being reflected globally in relation to both national and firm-level policy interventions. This paper subjects this so-called ‘BIM revolution’ to critical scrutiny. By drawing on theories of the digital divide, a critical discourse is developed around the ways in which political reform agendas centred on BIM might not stimulate innovation on a wider scale, but could act to disenfranchise small firms that are unable (or unwilling) to engage with them. This critical analysis presents important new research questions around the technocratic optimism that pervades the current reform discourse, the trajectory of industry development that it creates and the policy process itself.

The futures of construction management research

Abstract Construction management is an internationally recognized area of research with an established and growing community of academics. It has grown from largely “research consultancy” activities to additionally attracting significant amounts of academic research funding and has, partially, moved away from its applied, engineering dominated origins to increasingly engage with, and contribute to, mainstream academic debates in business and management, economics and the social sciences. It has, as such, become an academic field in its own right. However, recent dynamics within both university institutions and national economies are changing the landscape of construction management research (CMR). A blurring of traditional university boundaries, reprioritization of research funding and increasing emphasis on national and international rankings have led to increased pressure on individual academics and the community they constitute. Drawing on scenario development we ask what, in the face of a turbulent environment, might the futures of CMR be? Four potential futures for CMR are outlined, depicted as four potential scenarios: convergence, retrenchment, disappearance and hybridization. These describe potential outcomes from the institutional dynamics currently at play. The intention is neither to predict the future, nor to prioritize one scenario over another, but to open a debate on the institutional pressures the field is facing, and what the outcomes might be.

Policy, Management and Finance for Public-Private Partnerships

The provision of public services and infrastructure through public–private partnerships (PPPs) has become increasingly widespread over the past two decades. Not surprisingly, therefore, the topic has received considerable attention from a wide variety of academic disciplines and the body of knowledge is steadily growing. This edited book sets out to ‘disseminate some of the progress that has been made in our understanding of PPP procurement in different contexts and regions’. The targeted audience is ‘those who seek to expand their knowledge of PPP, whether it is for academic purposes or as practitioners’. The book is divided into three parts. The first section on ‘policy’ focuses on how PPP policy presents unique challenges to all those involved. The section consists of eight chapters out of which the first four focus explicitly on the UK private finance initiative (PFI). The reader is then introduced to the South African and Indian contexts followed by an overview of PPPs in developing countries. The section is completed by a chapter on team building which seems somewhat out of place. In the second section on ‘finance’ attention is moved to the broad range of investment, modelling and accounting practices associated with PPP projects. Of the seven chapters four provide models and frameworks for PPP financing and three provide accounts of current practice. The third and final section on ‘management’ deals with how to improve the management of PPPs. This section is much more diverse in scope than the previous two. Indeed, the eight chapters deal with a wide range of topics with the writing styles spanning the spectrum between prescriptive and descriptive. The book is longer, has a broader scope and deals with a wider range of issues than most of its competitors. However, as seems to be the case with most edited books it is somewhat of a ‘mixed bag’. The book is very much a collection of 23 individual and separate chapters; the substantive contents of which vary significantly. Some of the chapters are very well researched, thought provoking and deserve to be widely read. Others are rather disappointing as they come across as too simplistic and in one case as a clear example of ‘information transfer’. That said, the focus on providing an international dimension to the topic is a welcome contribution. PPP is an international phenomenon and plenty of useful insights are gained from treating it as such. A positive dimension to the book is, therefore, the multinational set of authors and the different interpretations that they provide. The downside is that this has led to a degree of repetitiveness permeating the book. Not that I expect anyone to read the book from cover to cover, but if they did they would find an array of definitions and historical accounts of BOT, PFI and PPP. These differ in their Book Reviews 609

Explorative and exploitative learning in project-based organizations : improving knowledge governance through a project management office?

Organizational learning, in terms of both explorative learning within projects and exploitative learning across projects, is of strategic importance for project-based organizations (PBOs) in industries involving production of complex product systems (CoPS). In this conceptual article, we discuss and reflect on how organizational learning may be addressed in PBOs by the establishment of formal knowledge governance mechanisms in a project management office (PMO). Prior literature on PMOs has discussed a broad and diverse range of PMO functions, without conceptually reflecting on their interdependencies. Here, we synthesize the literature into seven main functions. From an organizational learning perspective, we identify significant synergies among the functions of Developing and maintaining a lessons-learnt database, Developing and maintaining project management standards and methods, Consulting and education, and Strategic management. We reflect on how a PBO may establish a centralized PMO utilizing these ...