With the end of summer holidays and autumn fast approaching in UK, it is back to business as usual for most of us.
It is a fast-changing world these days and in a recent case in the Coroners Court in London procedural rules had been amended. This led to long discussions causing delay, frustration and even distress to other participants. As professionals we have a duty to keep up to date and, in this context, I welcome you to this excellent October 2013 issue of Management, Procurement and Law.
This issue contains five full papers and a discussion article.
First up, a paper by Wamuziri (2013) on ‘Factors that influence safety culture in construction’. Since the introduction in the UK of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 (2007) safety has become the number-one priority for responsible companies. Here the author makes an in-depth study of safety within organisations and defines factors that contribute to positive and negative safety culture in construction.
This is followed by a paper by Manu et al. (2013) on a difficult area in the industry, ‘A cognitive approach to trust management in construction’. Throughout the procurement process a degree of trust is essential to successful working relationships. How one defines this, or do we just use intuition, is analysed.
We then go truly international when it comes to managing construction in a multi-cultural environment with Murata’s paper ‘Cross-cultural leadership for global construction projects’ (Murata, 2013). A must read for both experienced and aspiring project managers who have not considered the adoption of ‘flexible leadership styles’.
Continuing the safety theme from our first paper Helen Lingard and Ron Wakefield’s paper, ‘A voluntary approach to designing for safer construction’ (Lingard and Wakefield, 2013), gives some practical advice on construction safety. Studies in Australia resulted in publication of a Guide to Best Practice for Safer Construction (CRC for Construction Innovation, 2007) and this paper illustrates with three case studies its implementation of design stage best practice.
Our final full paper, by Patterson and Trebes (2013), ‘NEC contracts for design–build–operate contracts’, explores the use of a combination of NEC contracts – that is, the Engineering and Construction Contract for the design and build plus the Term Service Contract for the operate aspect. Some changes to suit individual projects would be required but the combination has the advantage that the NEC base to the contract is now well known.
We conclude with a discussion and an interesting contribution by Coy to a paper by Aritua et al. (2011), ‘Competencies for the intelligent public sector construction client’, relating to the lack of engineering skills at public sector policy level.
All the papers deal with challenging issues in construction and I found them very informative and stimulating reading. I thoroughly commend them to you.
