Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Volume 23, Issue 1.
Welcome to the first issue of ECAM’s Volume 23. Over the past year, the editorial team has made considerable progress in revising the editorial boards, improving time to publication, updating the journal’s aims and scope, establishing arrangements for promotion of ECAM through a range of avenues, updating of reviewers’ area of expertise in ScholarOne and devising mechanisms to increase the profile and visibility of ECAM. These improvements are expected to improve the throughput of papers submitted to ECAM and will be more perceptible to authors and reviewers during the course of this year. They are also expected to result in greater recognition for ECAM.
In this issue, we have put together six papers covering a variety of interesting topics. The first paper by Oo and Lim addresses the increasing use of games in teaching important concepts in many fields. They present a game-based learning approach to teaching bidding in a construction management course. Details of the game, its use in courses and the feedback from students are all described. They conclude that the bidding game is an effective learning tool that allows students to explore and experiment with different bidding strategies.
Holt, Goulding and Akintoye’s paper is concerned with a survey-based investigation of the enablers, challenges and relationships between research impact and theory generation. Several facets of the "research impact" requirement of UK research quality assessments are discussed. They also explore the dichotomy between "practical" impact-oriented research and "blue-sky" research that may not have immediate impact but could generate new theories.
The paper by Morrow, Hare and Cameron address the issue of design engineers’ perception of health and safety and its impact on the design process. Using a grounded theory approach, they interview design engineers from several organizations and identify three categories of designers – doers, receivers and givers – with each category having a different understanding of, and response to, health and safety issues in design. The paper includes recommendations for educational establishments and professional bodies in improving health and safety through design.
Bowles and Morgan evaluate the performance of a collaborative procurement initiative in the social housing sector. Their paper reports on a specific study in Scotland, which involves a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, and explores the extent to which a novel approach to the procurement of affordable housing delivered value for money. Details of the approach,its implementation and the associated outcomes are presented, and a number of interesting conclusions drawn.
The subject of ethics and the extent of its embeddedness in construction organizations is the focus of the paper by Oladinrin and Ho. The authors identify the factors that support the embedding of codes of ethics in organizations and, using a survey,they sought to establish how appropriate these were in a wide range of construction organizations in Hong Kong. The paper provides useful information for construction-sector firms seeking to improve ethics management in their organizations.
The final paper in this issue is by Bowen, Govender, Edwards and Cattell. It presents an explanatory model of attitudinal fear of HIV/AIDS testing in the construction industry, with a particular focus on the South African construction industry. The authors found that the inter-relationship between knowledge about HIV/AIDS, prejudice towards HIV+ persons, and the fear of testing is complex and nuanced. They recommend that intervention strategies by construction firms should explicitly address attitudinal fear of testing, amongst other things.
Chimay Anumba
