The contribution by Nordic academics and researchers toward creating a distinctive facilities management body of knowledge has been impressive over the past decade. The Nordic region boasts a strong Facilities Management industry and practice base. But also, and perhaps even more importantly, the region boasts of a mature academia whose research output has predominantly been a response to the specific needs of the practitioner market. As a selection of invited research papers on the growth and development of Facilities Management in the Nordic region, Facilities Management Research in the Nordic Countries: Past Present and Future is a timely celebration of the exciting research conducted in the region over the recent years.
As the name indicated, Facilities Management Research in the Nordic Countries: Past Present and Future is divided into three broad parts:
the development of Facilities Management research in the Nordic countries;
important current research themes; and
the way forward.
Within these wider sections, one finds themes as broad-ranging as adaptability, sustainability, life cycle costing, added value to customers and owners, as well as the management of knowledge, partnerships and the particular dynamics of national Facilities Management markets.
A set of papers also focus on public sector service and building procurement (especially schools and hospitals), which can have a lasting impact on service provision post-acquisition. One can understand that the problems and issues related to the procurement route and choices made while procuring public sector facilities are essentially embedded in the nature of the public sector itself (accountability, multiple stakeholder needs, agency relationships, ethics), as well as the large size of public sector building and service procurement itself. The researchers address these issues very ably in the papers, while providing a clear, distinct context of the Nordic countries.
There is also an interesting discussion on workspaces, what constitutes as workspaces and the facilitation of creative environments. These papers are worth a read.
Another stream of work that caught my attention was the work presented on sustainable Facilities Management. The authors have chosen to call this sustainable facilities management (SFM) and vehemently argue that sustainable Facilities Management ought to be regarded as a distinct sub-discipline within Facilities Management. The argument is fairly robust, but one does find room for counter-arguing whether it is premature to carve out sub-disciplines within a field which itself is barely out of a long-running identity crisis. This is especially true, as our community’s long-standing discussions of what constitutes as Facilities Management research and what lies beyond its realm happen to crop up here and there in the collection itself!
The collection itself is crisp and carefully structured. The papers fit the themes well, almost as if the themes emerged from them and not vice versa, which is a rare feat. The printing of the book is fine, the paper beautiful and heavy. This, itself (for avid fans of quality-printed texts at least), makes for a very pleasureable read.
While the book is not readily available through mainstream retailers, it can be ordered directly from the publisher, or from www.polyteknisk.dk/home/Detaljer/9788750210337
