ARCOM 2018: 34th Annual Conference – Belfast, UK
A Productive Relationship: Balancing Fragmentation and Integration
Emerging themes include, though are not restricted to:
- Construction and the digital divide (unequal distribution of who has access, skills and competence): Practices in the construction industry have recently been transformed with the use of more digital technologies. This is arguably pursued at the relative neglect (and expense) of the analogue world. There are questions raised around the unequal distribution of who has access, skills and competence to digitalise construction. Moreover, how policy-makers, practitioners and researchers value the non-digital in order to build a stronger, more productive construction industry?
- Who counts as a stakeholder and how are they engaged: Who and what counts as a stakeholder and how do they count? Stakeholder engagement has been a longstanding matter of concern in managing construction. The call to balance integration and fragmentation has also, in recent times, been manifested in the tensions found between democratisation and privatisation of the built environment. Current scholarship on stakeholder engagement has also broadened to consider the influences of humans and non-humans alike. What do these developments mean for changing the ways in thinking about which stakeholders count and how stakeholder engagement is done?
- Construction Management Research: Construction management as a research field has developed over the past few years to engage with scholarship in the wider management and organisational studies, as well as theories from the social sciences. While this engagement has resulted in more rigorous, theoretically-informed studies in construction management, there is also a need to maintain the distinctiveness of the field. In our attempts to mainstream construction management, how can we engage more fruitfully with the other disciplines and fields such that we maintain a strong sector-based identity while contributing to the mainstream?