Sir John Egan's 1998 report on the construction industry (Construction Task Force 1998) noted its confrontational and adversarial nature. Both the original report and its subsequent endorsement in Accelerating Change (Strategic Forum 2002) called for improved working relationships-so-called 'integration'-within and between both design and construction aspects. In this paper, we report on our observations of on-site team meetings for a major UK project during its construction phase. We attended a series of team meetings and recorded the patterns of verbal interaction that took place within them. In reporting our findings, we have deliberately used a graphical method for presenting the results, in the expectation that this will make them more readily accessible to designers. Our diagrams of these interaction patterns have already proved to be intuitively and quickly understood, and have generated interest and discussion among both those we observed and others who have seen them. We noted that different patterns of communication occurred in different types of meetings. Specifically, in the problem-solving meeting, there was a richness of interaction that was largely missing from progress meetings and technical meetings. Team members expressed greater satisfaction with this problem-solving meeting where these enriched exchanges took place. By making comparisons between the different patterns, we are also able to explore functional roles and their interactions. From this and other published evidence, we conclude that good teamworking practices depend on a complex interplay of relations and dependencies embedded within the team.

This community note describes a five-year academic-community partnership between a community organization and two universities in Kentucky. It also documents the potential of adventure tourism to help diversify the community’s economy and contribute to the quality of life in the region. While recognizing that adventure tourism cannot make up for the loss of the area’s traditional economic base, the data indicate that adventure tourism can make a positive contribution to the quality of life, environmental quality, and sustainability of the town. A major obstacle to achieving the community organization’s goals to develop adventure tourism has been the failure to get buy-in from local government leaders.