Guest editorial

Citation

Dulaimi, M. (2007), "Guest editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 14 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ecam.2007.28614faa.002

Guest editorial

The theme of this special issue is “Sustainable development through culture and innovation”. Sustainability here refers not only to environmental sustainability but to sustainable organisational and economic development of groups and firms. All the papers in this issue focused on the latter rather than the former. Almost all papers selected for this special issue focused on the challenge of creating collaborative and integrative working relationships between teams separated alongside corporate and national lines.

The increased interest in adopting procurement frameworks that encourages more collaborative working is reflected in the number of papers, in this special issue, that have investigated integration, collaboration and effective team work in international joint ventures and multicultural teams. Such working arrangements challenge the construction industry to integrate and/or facilitate the integration of the different groups. Failing to do so would risk the attainment of performance targets, at project and corporate levels. The papers have highlighted a number of reasons for failure to work in an integrative matter such as lack of trust, lack of commitment and unwillingness to work beyond corporate and national culture boundaries. What we can conclude is that cultural differences are exacerbating an age-old problem of lack of integration in construction.

Ling et al. in their paper demonstrated the serious cultural gap, in attitude and practices that are still to be addressed to avoid wasting valuable resources. Similarly, the paper by Dulaimi shows that the objective of knowledge sharing in international joint venture projects, in many cases, is no more than wishful thinking if the partners are not committed to and put the effort to achieve it.

Liu et al. have found evidence how different professional qualifications and different nationalities have had led to differing practices and attitude toward work. The work of Ela Oney-Yazici et al. has shown how the corporate culture in most construction firms surveyed in Turkey was not “compatible” with their business environment. The implication, in my view, is that although such attitudes and approaches cannot immediately change, management will have to create the conditions and motivation for individuals and teams to bridge such differences. Evidence from one of the case studies in Dulaimi’s paper shows that when senior management demonstrated the commitment and communicated the benefit and importance of bridging cultural differences more positive working attitude was created.

The paper by Gajendran and Brewer showed how the adoption of ICT is influenced by cultural context. They argued that to achieve best-fit ICT integration strategy there should be a clear prior understanding of the cultural context of both the implementing organisation and the project environment into which they are to be deployed.

The increased interest in collaborative working arrangements, such as Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), has put greater pressure on the construction industry to integrate teams with different corporate and national cultures. Akintolye and Main study has provided evidence of the importance contractors have attached to adopting collaborative working arrangements. Their study shows that of all the main reasons for contractors to embrace collaborative working arrangements, such as risk-sharing and access to innovation and technology cannot be achieved without creating teams that are more integrated. The work of Kumaraswamy et al. provided a possible tool for contractors to achieve this. Their paper examined the importance and provided the framework for incorporating relational factors in the selection of PPP’s teams. They presented arguments and evidence that showed that when addressing the compatibility of the different teams, as well as financial and operational capabilities, would contribute to “suitably integrated long-term development”.

Mohammed DulaimiGuest Editor