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This study aims to investigate practitioners’ perceptions of strategic work in municipal facilities management: how public facilities management is changing, what is included in strategic public facilities management and who leads the strategic work.

A literature review begins with mainstream studies of strategy management, ultimately concentrating on municipal facilities management. Findings are based on a 2020/2021 questionnaire targeting 356 practitioners in municipal facilities management across Sweden (50% response rate). The statistical treatment includes factor analysis.

Most respondents indicated changed ways of managing facilities in the past five years; most reported that they were in an organization with an explicit goal of working more strategically. Respondents associated strategic facilities management with governance, facilities, sustainability, technology change and communication. Frequently, it was the management team of the facilities management department that led strategic work.

Research into municipal facilities management is dominated by studies in Northern Europe, and more studies from other regions are needed. How strategies and work roles evolve in parallel appears to be a fruitful direction of further research.

Facilities managers need stronger competences and more resources to engage in strategic facilities management. Findings indicate a need to integrate sustainability aspects better into long-term strategic work.

More strategic municipal facilities management is of obvious social value.

This is the first study of practitioner perceptions of work on strategic facilities management in municipalities.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse site managers’ ICT preferences for monitoring resource use in refurbishment projects.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) developments for the construction industry are increasing the scope for more efficient planning and monitoring of refurbishment projects. The analysis is based on the unified theory of acceptance and the use of technology model. After a short initial survey, a Swedish web/postal questionnaire has received 78 responses from refurbishment site managers, implying a 34 per cent response rate.

Managerial choices related to ICT depend more on perceived performance expectancy than on effort expectancy. Large projects and larger firms are associated with more extensive ICT use. Site managers see little need to link to refurbishment clients’ ICT systems. Performance expectancy and age are found to influence ICT choices.

Site managers play a crucial role in everyday use of ICT tools in the construction industry. The outcome of this investigation is useful for developing digital support, including applications of building information modelling, to improve refurbishment site practices.

Much has been written about ICT support for new construction practices, but not much attention has been paid to refurbishment site managers’ media choices.

The aim of this paper is to explain why construction groups facing opportunities for product system innovations, such as green buildings, may choose to integrate construction and property development, taking on facilities management (FM) for a limited period.

Conceptual analysis based on prior literature and illustrated by a single case of integration.

For product system innovations, an in-house developer should be more able to reduce uncertainty than independent developers, due to unobservable long-term technological quality for customers, because the property becomes associated with lower risk after having been owned and operated. Alternatives such as building certification systems support incremental innovations, warranties suffer from double moral hazard in the long run and risk allocation in public–private partnership projects often fails to encourage system innovations. Integration allows the contractor to work continuously with innovative projects, developing new capabilities, which allow the firm to signal proficiency to the market, employees and the investment community.

The phenomenon is new, and further empirical surveys are needed to confirm the hypothetical conclusions drawn here.

The value of close collaboration between those who develop innovative green building technologies and facilities managers is outlined.

The relation between the scope of corporate activities in construction groups, technological innovations and FM has not been studied before.

Against the background of earlier publications on the future of facilities management (FM) and acknowledging digitalization and sustainability as two major shaping forces, the purpose of this paper is to place contributions to the special issue in the perspective of current opportunities for FM research.

After a review of publications since the 1980s, dealing with the future of FM, there is an analysis of how the forces of digitalization and sustainability have emerged over five decades. The articles of this special issue are introduced against this background. Opportunities for future FM research are identified, and the relation between research, education and practice is discussed.

Megatrends outlined in the 1980s still shape how FM develops. Digitalization supports sustainability not only through workplace change and building design but also through performance measurement, certification schemes and an awareness of the wider urban context.

Opportunities for FM research are created by digitalization and concerns with sustainability, combining environmental and social aspects. Relations between organizations studied in an FM context are important. Within organizations, employee issues and risk management are emphasized.

Policies and schemes for sustainable buildings should be linked to sustainable FM more clearly. The relation between research, education and practice needs to be consolidated as a basis for research and development, as illustrated by a number of studies belonging to this special issue. To reach the goals of sustainable development, we need to develop the knowledge and theoretical frameworks that can be applied to and used by practice. The recent ISO FM definition appears as narrow and should be extended to recognize facilities’ life-cycle issues as well as broader urban and social concerns.

This paper highlights the importance of basing FM research on an understanding of the fundamental forces that shape change.

The purpose of this study is to identify methods appropriate for measuring the direct productivity of facilities management (FM) with respect to the providers, on both the industry level and the firm level.

This is a literature survey and conceptual analysis.

Prior studies are dominated by subjective assessments of how the office environment affects individual labour productivity. While the available EU data on productivity growth for the FM industry indicate a negative trend, they might be misleading. More recent research on the productivity of business services providers could be applied to the measurement of the productivity of FM firms. Co-production and effects of client satisfaction are important issues for measurement.

The analysis is concentrated on the direct productivity of FM providers. There is a need to develop objective measures of provider productivity, and there is a particular challenge in measuring how FM clients contribute to the productivity of FM providers.

Providers of FM services should be able to assess the efficiency of their resource use more clearly and to balance user satisfaction against resource use more efficiently.

The effects of co-production with clients need to be recognised, considering productivity effects on both providers and clients jointly. Sustainability is an argument for an increased focus on resource use in FM.

This is the first overview of issues raised when measuring the direct productivity of FM itself rather than indirect FM effects on office worker labour productivity.

Facility resources of growth firms have seldom been studied. The purpose here is to analyse how firms that increased their number of employees changed their office space use between 1995 and 2000 in the Gothenburg region. Six firms have been selected among those who had 1‐25 employees in 1995 and 50‐500 employees in 2000. Site visits with retrospective interviews have been used. Results indicate that growth firms tend to relocate when passing from an entrepreneurial to a managerial phase. Once having relocated within the region, these firms tend to plan for multisite operations with new small offices. Spatial expansion seems to be triggered when no more than 20sq.m are left per full‐time employee. When density rises, these firms avoid raising the proportion of remote work. This may reflect that security is a crucial issue, and a concern with protection would also explain an emphasis on creating office boundaries for visitors.

While service quality receives growing attention in the construction industry, few studies have dealt with the relation between craftsmen and building users. However, when office staff are present in the building during conversion projects (refurbishment or office completion) craftsmen and users will interact. To analyse how this craftsman‐user interaction leads to satisfied or dissatisfied users and ultimately to reputations in the market, a questionnaire survey of office staff and craftsmen in two refurbishment and one office completion project has been carried out. While critical incidents are not as important as expected, the service provided by the contractor appears to be the key to improved reputation. Furthermore, minimizing noise and dust produced should reduce the number of negative views from building users. Findings from the craftsmen survey identify information and work satisfaction as fundamental ingredients for a contractor striving for a positive relation with the users.

Predicting effects of artificial intelligence on service occupations can be supported by a long historical perspective. Historical databases and archaeology help reconstructing the service sector in ancient societies. Here, the purpose of this paper is to analyse occupational specialization within services in cities of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, as well as how the service sector is reflected in architectural remains, to identify differences and similarities with today’s Europe.

Occupational titles are traced in epigraphical and literary sources, sorted according to ISCO-08. Secondary sources are used for the architectural evidence of service activities, as well as for the role of contests and entertainment in antiquity.

Compared to current European service employment, professionals were fewer in classical Athens and imperial Rome, which had a greater proportion of specialized salespersons. There were few office buildings and no civic hospitals, but heavy investment in facilities for entertainment and well-being. Quality assessments for goods were little developed; contests for cultural and sports activities assessed entertainment service quality.

This study covers two periods in classical antiquity and is restricted to Mediterranean cultures, although findings may help understanding the service sector in poor countries with informal employment.

While particular services provided in ancient cities have been studied, there has been no broad comparative overview of their service occupations. Services in earlier societies with primitive information and communication technologies can provide clues for current developments.

The use of external providers, multiple or single, for peripheral support services has expanded during the 1990s. This investigation analyses patterns of support service outsourcing against a background of industry and national differences. Questionnaires and interviews with managers of three Swedish and three UK process industry plants (chemical, newspaper and steel) show to what extent facilities management (FM) and FMrelated services were outsourced in 2000 and expectations for the next two years. Why process industries tend to rely less on outsourcing than other manufacturing industries can be partly explained by the consequences of process interruption. The UK tendency to outsource is stronger than in the Swedish cases, probably owing to stronger ties between employers and employees in the Swedish process industry. The management of skills and tacit knowledge also emerge as explanations. Lower population density in Sweden may contribute to a higher degree of integration in companies.