Theorizing construction industry practice
Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:38:00 BST
A journal article, entitled: “Theorizing construction industry practice within a disaster risk reduction setting: is it a panacea or an illusion?” written by GDRC’s Prof. Bingu Ingirige has just been published in the Construction Management and Economics journal. You can read this paper by visiting: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01446193.2016.1200735
In this paper, Bingu investigates theorising construction industry (CI) practice within a disaster management (DM) setting. He argues that quantitative performance measures and the overly commercial focus within CI affects its wider remit in terms of the different customers that it serves. Given that communities and their built and natural environments are increasingly affected by natural hazard events, the CI tends to perform its duties within a DM environment on a more regular basis serving many affected communities. Such scenarios demand a wider social remit considering not just physical reconstruction, meeting cost targets, improving labour productivity, but going further towards improving resilience of communities and getting them better prepared to face up to any future hazard events. The current theoretical developments in CI often ignore this wider social remit and the competitive advantage that such contexts present to the CI stakeholders. Through a literature review and synthesis and analysing two documented case histories, Bingu presents how events in the past show the under developed advantage of the CI and that a carefully coordinated approach in theorising CI practice customised into a DM setting could benefit the CI industry.
