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Rachel Banning was assigned a new role in HR with the responsibility to update recruitment and orientation systems to meet the rapidly growing demand for manpower at McCune Contracting, an oilfield services provider in Alberta, Canada. McCune’s industry peers were competing to attract the same skilled employees, within a relatively small talent pool. The HR team was only a few short weeks away from the upcoming peak “turnaround season” when they would be expected to recruit and deploy 500 new temporary workers for their clients’ sites. Banning knew she had to take immediate actions to fix as many of the systems issues as possible and to eventually set the team up with a more permanent solution for systems integration.

The authors had access to McCune Contracting to complete field research for this case.

The case is designed for business students at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The case can be used in operations management courses to discuss the topic of process analysis and operations strategy or in management information system courses as a comprehensive case study for use at the end of the course. The case might particularly appeal to students who have worked in human resources management areas or the service industry.

Theoretical underpinnings include a process view of organizational performance, internal supplier and internal customer orientation, performance improvement, information systems integration and value chain analysis.

The construction industry has shown an inherent inability to adopt advanced technological innovations. The construction innovation literature is highly fragmented and outlines an overwhelming number of factors that arguably influence the transfer of technological innovations in construction. Factor-based research in the construction innovation literature tends to set out technological innovations and their adoption as socially neutral events, overlooking the role of context in the adoption process. Hence, the authors’ understanding of how technological innovations are transferred and implemented in the construction industry remains limited by the constraints of reductionist approaches adopted by factor-based research. This paper aims to advance the authors’ understanding of the actual experiences of technological innovations transfer in construction. Instead of introducing another set of factors, the research, through empirical investigation, develops a comprehensive and holistic framework to re-interpret the existing factor-based literature taking into consideration the role of the construction context and the socially constructed nature of technological innovations.

This research uses a participatory exploratory multiple case study design strategy, which has much in common with action research. The factors that could influence the transfer of technological innovations were investigated in three selected case studies over an extended period of time. During the research, a prototype system application of construction integration was used as a basis to discuss the adoption of technological innovations.

The findings suggest moving from the commonly held beliefs in the rational school of technological innovation and the functionalist paradigm towards constructivist approaches to capture the role of context and the stoically constructed nature of technological innovations. It is suggested that construction companies need to develop management capabilities to manage the changing political environments of the adoption process. The research supports the emerging view of technological innovations in construction as a collaborative-based innovation, which is a function of relationships and context.

The research is limited by the settings of the action research design and the use of an interpretive approach. Because the focus was on investigating the “why” question, little attention was given to the “how” question. Accordingly, the findings provide little insights into the way organizations can manage the changing political and social environment of the adoption process. The authors also acknowledge that in spite of their best efforts to build a theoretically grounded framework of factors, they may have overlooked some relevant studies. However, the objective of this research was not to conduct a systematic literature review or to come up with a framework that quantitatively captures all previous research studies; instead, the objective was to build a holistic framework that can be used as a base to analyze the role of construction context and the socially constructed nature of technological innovations in the adoption process.

The research offers several practical insights. First, it suggests that construction companies need to develop management capabilities to be able to lead the changing political environment of the adoption process successfully. Second, the research supports the emerging view of technological innovations in construction as a collaborative-based innovation that is a function of relationship. From a policy perspective, the research provides the basis to reconsider the effectiveness of federal and provincial policies that promote advanced technological Initiatives. The majority of these policies focus on the technical aspects in assessing the adoption of technological innovation, providing little incentives to companies to manage the changing political and social environment of the adoption process.

This research offers several theoretical and methodological contributions. First, it advances the authors’ understanding of the actual experiences of the transfer of technological innovations in construction organizations. Second, instead of introducing another set of factors, the research develops a framework to re-interpret the existing factor-based literature, considering the role of construction context and the socially constructed nature of technological innovations. The research uses the theoretical lens of the social construction of technology framework to analyze the adoption process. The existing literature suggests that such research is scarce and highly needed. Third, unlike the mainstream reductionist approaches, this research adopts an exploratory action research inquiry design that uses both inductive and deductive inquiry approaches to understand the socially constructed nature of innovation transfer in construction. The adopted research design offers a valuable methodological contribution to the existing body of knowledge.