Practitioner understanding of value in the UK building sector
Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management
ISSN: 0969-9988
Article publication date: 26 April 2013
Abstract
Purpose
For over a decade, UK public sector construction policy and industry rhetoric has advanced a value agenda that advocates the development of project‐specific understanding of value. This study aims to examine construction practitioners’ collective cognition of value to determine how their facilitation may bias this intent. A value continuum is contributed.
Design/methodology/approach
Critique of the design quality indicator (the primary value agenda instrument) finds that it overemphasises objective value, confirming the need for practitioners to help stakeholders develop broader understanding of value. The freelisting technique of cultural anthropology is adopted to model practitioners’ collective cognition of value and, thus, their bias over this process. The standard freelisting protocol is followed.
Findings
Practitioners’ collective understanding is found to comprise related concepts that resolve to a one dimensional “value continuum” with subjective and objective terminals and which fully embodies value agenda intent. In contrast, the concepts articulated by the design quality indicator are biased towards the objective value continuum terminal, confirming the need for practitioners to facilitate stakeholder exploration of the full continuum if the value agenda is to be fully addressed.
Research limitations/implications
The value continuum only reflects the views of a small but typical sample of construction practitioners. Further work must characterise model completeness and consistency through the supply chain.
Originality/value
This is the first work to derive an empirical model of construction practitioners’ collective understanding of value. It achieves this by the novel linking of a cognitive modelling technique from cultural anthropology with an emic interpretation of the results.
Keywords
Citation
Thomson, D.S., Austin, S.A., Mills, G.R. and Devine‐Wright, H. (2013), "Practitioner understanding of value in the UK building sector", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 214-231. https://doi.org/10.1108/09699981311323970
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited