Editorial

Citation

McCaffer, R. (2004), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 11 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ecam.2004.28611aaa.001

Editorial

With edition 11.1 ECAM has entered its second decade and it provides a feeling of some satisfaction. ECAM has a wide international author base and we have developed a super network of friends and colleagues through our authors. There is always a pleasing flow of new-comers to the author base as hitherto new countries or institutions offer papers, but for me the most pleasing part is to watch the emergence and development of new and younger academics and we are pleased that ECAM is there as an outlet for their work. Industry also keeps an eye on ECAM, occasionally offering papers, but more often monitoring the thinking that is evolving from academia. Industry likes to criticise academics for being impractical, detached, not as relevant as we should be yet I think a lot of industries have a closet respect for a lot of academic work and we see it in the correspondence that ECAM has with the industry.

In this edition, there are six papers ranging from a mathematical algorithm that might aid planners to a very challenging productivity study that simply says to industry that you can do much better. If this productivity study has impact and changes the productivity levels in just one company it will affect the whole industry, who will follow, such is the power of research and publication.

As usual, this edition draws on the international community with four authors from Hong Kong, one from Poland and seven from the UK although the UK figures do need disaggregating into four from Scotland, one from Wales and two from England.

There is one single authored paper, three with two authors and one with three authors. Only one paper involves two institutions.

The following are the papers in this edition.

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  Shen and Liu introduce us to the use of value management in China. Based on an analysis of case studies in the literature backed by interviews the current usage of value management in China revealed together with a comparison with the international community. Presenting the current value management practices the authors also highlight the remaining opportunities and the obstacles to value management development.

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  Hejducki offers a solution to the sequencing of construction processes. The solution comes in the form of an algorithm for sequencing construction work. As well as describing the algorithm an example is presented. It is interesting that this type of mathematical approach to improve planning techniques is being pursued in the emerging economy of Poland where as the approach is less popular in the UK and USA.

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  Dainty, Raiden and Neale introduce us to the concept of the psychological contract that exists between the employer and employee covering the less formal aspects of the employment relationship covering the expectations of both parties that are not formally in a contract. A study of 30 construction project managers reveals that this relationship is dynamic and reciprocal, but that the re-structuring of construction firms is shifting the relationship towards mutual self-interest and lack of organisational commitment from the employee. Guidance to construction firms on HR practices is offered.

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  Phua and Rowlinson argue that co-operation between the construction organisations is the basis for project success. The authors go onto argue that the extent of co-operation that leads to project success has hitherto never been quantified. The authors undertook a study to model and measure the importance of co-operation in relation to other factors and believe that they have identified a fruitful approach.

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  Dunlop and Smith attempt to solve UK construction's need for more productivity to be globally competitive by revising the estimation and planning of concrete pours. Concreting operations from a major part of Civil Engineering projects and seems a good place to start. The authors studied 200 concrete pours in three different projects subject to the data “lean” construction philosophies and demonstrated that major productivity increases could be achieved. Now having demonstrated that the industry's current methods are unproductive how we implement the author's findings industry-wide. This is an interesting approach and it would be valuable to learn the findings of others in the same field of productivity. A long time ago when I was in the field we used to have work study attempting to achieve the same improvement. What ever became of work study?

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  Delaney and Wamuziri present a paper that investigates the impact of merger announcements on the stock market performance of the acquiring and target firms in the UK construction industry. Their results indicate that the target firms' shareholders enjoy a use in value, but the bidding firms do not in the period surrounding the announcement date.

Ron McCaffer