Is construction an industry?

Abstract

There has been a frequent misconception in analyses of construction sectors of the national economy: the tendency to describe these activities as 'an industry' or a small and stable set of 'industries'. This has led to confusion. Construction was inappropriately assimilated to various forms of manufacturing industry. Characteristics of the construction process were treated as 'problems', to whose solution substantial energies were unnecessarily diverted. There has been muddle about the extent to which macro-level planning is appropriate, notably on R&D strategies and innovation for improved industrial efficiency. Construction projects increasingly use unfamiliar technological bases, comparable to 'technology fusion' in other sectors. A more fruitful emphasis may be to regard construction as organized as agglomerations of projects -rather than as a discrete industry or a fixed constellation of firms. The idea of the 'demand chain' is introduced. The paper concludes that a 'technological paradigm' should replace the 'industry paradigm' and that an enduring question remains to explore what is meant by construction 'capacity'.

Causal relationship between construction flows and GDP: evidence from Hong Kong

“…It is expected that short term growth rates of construction ¯ows can easily ¯uctuate a lot due to changes in capacity utilization, even if the rate of capacity growth is quite steady. Groak (1994) argues that construction activities are determined signi® cantly by projects, not by ® rms. Because of the ¯exibility of the construction industry, the construction activity can be slowed down through the extension of construction durations.…”

The unmanageability of construction and the theoretical psycho-social dynamics of projects

“…Groak's (1994) concept that projects are `…unpredictable (but inventable) configurations…' must be set against the requirement to manage the instability of the psycho‐social interactions across project boundaries involving the cultural diversity of construction and the formal rationality of contracts and procedures in a more inclusive model of organizational processes within the project as the team changes through time. These analyses point towards the normal instability of the project team confirming a further condition of the unmanageability of construction.…”

The unmanageability of construction and the theoretical psycho‐social dynamics of projects

“…As 80% of projects involve one-off clients and are non-recurrent, 'demand for construction' could be interpreted sociologically as outsiders carrying their uncertainty into a social field destabilized by previous clients, that is society. Eliding Groak's (1994) concept of construction as 'a population of projects' with Trist's (1976a) idea of the instability of social fields as 'the ground for adaptive planning' re-interprets construction as a set of shifting figures (projects) on a shifting sociological ground. The fragmentation of construction arises in a wider social order uncertain as to its expectations of the constructed world in which it lives and works and transits through.…”

“…The destabilized and politicized (Boyd & Wild, 1999) internal conditions require special skills of intervention to assist the coping of the actors in the system. Groak's (1994) concept that projects are '…unpredictable (but inventable) configurations…' must be set against the requirement to manage the instability of the psycho-social interactions across project boundaries involving the cultural diversity of construction and the formal rationality of contracts and procedures in a more inclusive model of organizational processes within the project as the team changes through time. These analyses point towards the normal instability of the project team confirming a further condition of the unmanageability of construction.…”