What leads to the high capital cost of prefabricated construction in China: perspectives of stakeholders
Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management
ISSN: 0969-9988
Article publication date: 19 January 2022
Issue publication date: 14 March 2023
Abstract
Purpose
Prefabricated construction (PC) will play a vital role in the transformation and upgrading of the construction industry in the future. However, high capital cost is currently one of the biggest obstacles to the application and promotion of PC in China. Clarifying the factors that affect the PC cost from the perspectives of stakeholders and exploring key cost control paths help to achieve effective cost management, but few studies have paid enough attention to this. Therefore, this research aims to explore the critical cost influencing factors (CIFs) and critical stakeholders of PC based on stakeholder theories and propose corresponding strategies for different stakeholders to reduce the cost of PC.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on the stakeholder theory and social network theory, literature review and two rounds of expert interviews were used to obtain the stakeholder-associated CIFs and their mutual effects, then the consistency of the data was tested. After that, social network analysis was applied to identify the critical CIFs, critical interaction and key stakeholders in PC cost control and mine the influence conduction paths between CIFs.
Findings
The results reveal that the cognition and attitude of developer and relevant standards and codes are the most critical CIFs while the government, developer and contractor are crucial to the cost control of PC. The findings further suggest that measures should be taken to reduce the transaction costs of the developer, and the contractor ought to efficiently apply information technology. Moreover, the collaborative work between designer and manufacturer can avoid unnecessary cost consumption.
Originality/value
This research combines stakeholder management and cost management in PC for the first time and explores the effective cost control paths. The research results can contribute to clarifying the key points of cost management for different stakeholders and improving the cost performance of PC projects.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by research and application of rural housing system by dry-connected precast concrete sandwich panels, the branch project of key technologies of rural housing design and construction, National Key R&D Program of China, grant number 2018YFD1100903-02.
Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Citation
Liu, Y., Chang, R.-D., Zuo, J., Xiong, F. and Dong, N. (2023), "What leads to the high capital cost of prefabricated construction in China: perspectives of stakeholders", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 805-832. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-06-2021-0538
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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