Over the last 10 years quality management in the French construction industry has triggered a range of innovative ideas spanning all professions, ideas that have been developed further through action-research. The creation of quality clubs is one of the first examples of this, followed by the...

The two largest construction companies in Sweden, NCC and Skanska, previously have acted according to what here is called a multi-domestic strategy. Such a strategy implies that each market is treated essentially in isolation. Due to perceived pressures for local responsiveness, the firms have...

The 'European construction industry' is a fiction that tends to obscure its heterogeneous character and to mar studies and policies of the European Commission aimed at improving the internal and external 'competitiveness' of the sector. In order to assess the process of integration in Europe...

Voluntary building assessment schemes have emerged worldwide to help assess the environmental performance of buildings. As building environmental assessment is a rapidly evolving field, the scope and details of such assessment schemes are continuously undergoing updating and refinement....

It is a little more than 15 years since the associations representing construction professionals in the UK surrendered to government pressure and abolished mandatory fee scales, predicting as they did so that inevitably abolition would lead to a decline in the standard of service provided to...

Considerable energy is being directed towards an indiscriminate policy of conflict reduction in the construction industry but the problem of construction conflict may be in its management rather than in its incidence. Conflict reduction is a response to the industry's inability to manage...

Resource efficient design and construction, i.e. doing more with less, contributes to decreasing the negative environmental implications of resource consumption. However, the environmental effects of buildings arise from the combination of many design and management decisions, and good...

Rework that is experienced in construction projects is often caused by errors made during the design process. Factors that contribute to design errors are identified and used to design and develop a systems dynamics model, which is used to simulate a number of practical scenarios that can be...

The article describes the development and expected future direction of knowledge infrastructure pertaining to sustainable building in The Netherlands with particular reference to two computer programs based on lifecycle analyses: Eco-Quantum Residential and Eco-Quantum Research. The first is a...