Editorial

Citation

Hartmann, T. (2015), "Editorial", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. 22 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-05-2015-0070

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Volume 22, Issue 4.

I want to start my first editorial with thanking Emerald in the trust they give us as the new editorial team for the journal. I personally accepted this position because I see large potential in the journal as it combines a truly interdisciplinary character with a large and diverse international readership. I deem both of these aspects as important to ensure the scientific relevance of the field of engineering, construction, and architectural management in the years to come. Without much doubt, interdisciplinary collaboration between architects, engineers, and construction managers is the key that will allow the industry to provide the sustainable infrastructure systems and dwellings required for an increasing urban population in the years to come. At the same time, the civil engineering and construction management discipline has significantly shifted in the last decade from a discipline centered around a few global centers of practical and academic excellence to a discipline whose knowledge is truly spread globally. Globalization has created an open market for everyone, a level playing field for international firms, yet we have different regulations, cultural contexts, and states of developments around the world. Nevertheless, it is clear that the international market is no longer dominated only by European and US-based companies. Similarly, the academic world has become truly international with most universities competing to attract students and research talent from across the world. All this provides opportunities for, but also requires international knowledge exchange that the engineering, construction, and architectural management journal is well prepared to provide.

The papers in this issue are a great example of the international character of the journal. The five papers all address core issues within the field of construction management, each from their own specific international perspective. The first paper focusses on corruption, one of the prevailing problems within the industry worldwide, and provides deep insights into the behavioral factors that influence corrupt action in the Australian construction industry. The next two papers then provide insights into advanced international methods. Second paper of this issue focusses on the Japanese practice of Keisin. Keisin is a scoring system to evaluate the economic health of construction companies before they can bid on public works projects. Based on Keisin scores the study presented in this paper identifies indicators affecting defaults and exits of small and medium Japanese enterprises. The third paper of this issue introduces an advanced cost management method. The model applies Monte Carlo based sensitivity analysis to capture the correlation between construction costs and several risk factors. This model has been developed in an international collaboration between the Turkish minister of transport and researchers of the Ishik University in Iraq. The penultimate paper in this issue provides perspectives on very pressing and timely issues that the worldwide industry currently faces: how to cope with the adoption of building information modeling technologies. Again an internationally specific context forms the core of this paper. This paper provides insights about building information modeling adoption in Malaysia. The final paper focusses on the identification of the existing capacities of post disaster C&D waste management in developing countries, with a special emphasis on Sri Lanka to determine the capacity gaps and related influencing factors.

Within the globalized academic community that we are part of, more and more of locally specific studies, such as the ones published in this issue, will emerge. As a matter of fact, if one browses through the papers that have been published in the last years within the journal, one will find a large number of papers similar to the ones summarized above. The availability of such a growing number of locally specific studies, however, will require us as a community of researchers to shift our focus toward more comparative studies that explicitly start to discuss the differences across and the similarities in different regional practices. Such studies require focussed literature reviews of the studies that have been published previously. They also require explicit syntheses of these reviews pointing out differences and similarities. Finally, such papers will require an explicit discussion about the presented findings in light of these syntheses helping ECAM to play its role in the community.

Timo Hartmann