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A national report on the management skills for the future of the housing construction industry in Australia suggests a number of innovative management training pathways. Three pathways are considered here as alternatives to traditional MBA courses: using portfolios for accrediting workplace competences in management development; coaching and mentoring through networks or learning partnerships with master builder; and adapting models of “action learning” in the workplace as practical means for gaining formal, management qualifications. The challenge facing the building industry (particularly housing construction) is finding flexible modes of delivery of management training that will attract the majority of small builders and contractors. Alternative pathways must also be integrated into a national management development framework. One key, therefore, is to construct workable, alternative models that can be supported by all stakeholders in this industry.

This paper aims to evaluate the quality control systems for constructions in seven countries in Europe with the purpose to trace innovative approaches and best practices that can serve as examples for other countries.

The paper is based on a series of research projects carried out over a number of years. The research results were updated in 2016 with a desktop research project in seven European countries. The results from this latest project form the heart of this paper. The information is organised into tables that describe and analyse the main features of the quality control systems of the countries (e.g. scope, focus and main characteristics of the procedures and quality demands on building professionals).

Several similar trends can be recognised in the quality control systems of the various European Union (EU) countries. Quality control is getting more and more privatised and the control framework is setting checks and balances throughout the construction process. Other findings are that scope and focus of the statutory control is unbalanced. Within the control processes emphasis is put on the safety aspects of complex constructions. Far fewer demands are made on the quality of the builders. Re-orientation of the building regulatory framework seems to be needed.

The paper only focusses on European countries where private quality control is established and on selected topics. The findings are based on desktop research and not on the practical experiences of the stakeholders involved in the countries studied.

The paper draws some important recommendations for policymakers in the building regulatory field. It suggests both an enhancement of the effectiveness of the quality control procedure as well as the commitment of builders to comply with the regulations.

The quality of constructions is essential for the wellbeing and safety of its users, its occupants or its visitors. This applies to the whole range of quality aspects: structural- and fire safety, health, sustainability and usability aspects. The analyses and recommendations of this paper aim to contribute to an improvement of the overall construction quality.

The paper makes an original contribution to the (limited) literature that is available in this field. The results can be used to situate the quality control systems of each member state within the EU, to assess the main trends, and it can be used as a guide to develop strategic choices on possible improvements in each country.

The purpose of this paper is to consider decisions of the courts of three jurisdictions: Ireland; England and Wales; and Australia, in relation to recovery of economic loss in negligence for building defects and to identify the extent to which the legal environment of each jurisdiction has informed the approach of the courts to the issue.

The approach taken for this purpose is to review the extent of legislative intervention in each jurisdiction to provide measures of protection for home buyers, and whether that intervention has limited the scope of what may be recovered in negligence for defects.

The findings of the research indicate that the retreat from recovery for defects, led by the courts of England and Wales through a series of cases in the 1980s and 1990s, may be regarded in part as a product of their environment, and that legislative intervention in the area of remedies acted as a limitation on the scope of the duties that the courts were prepared to impose.

Although the issue of recovery for building defects in negligence has been covered extensively in the literature and jurisprudence, the cross-referencing of the common law position with the legislative context in the jurisdictions considered provides insights into the approaches of courts and why the position of the courts of England and Wales may not transpose comfortably to other jurisdictions.

This study aims to provide insights into ecosystem builder futurists’ work and their orientations toward creating more connected communities of the future.

Anticipation of and relationship with the future are not straightforward. How we approach the future and our relationship with it has underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions (Poli, 2010, 2017). Forecasting (Makridakis et al., 2008), foresight (Bishop and Hines, 2012; Hines and Bishop, 2013; Popper, 2008), futures studies (Bell, 2009; Gidley, 2017) and anticipatory logics (Miller and Poli, 2010; Miller et al., 2017; Nadin, 2010; Poli, 2017) inform this research study of a select group of futurists’ relationships with the future. This research explores ecosystem builder futurists’ work and their orientations toward creating more connected communities of the future. A primary driver of this research aims to understand how futurists with emergentist understandings think about and work with their clients to better understand how to facilitate individual and community transformations through anticipatory future perspectives.

This qualitative study was designed to explore the why, where and how of the ecosystem builder futurists. The “why” question of their work focused on capacity building, disruption and community for evolving systems revealing an emergentist orientation to the future. The “where” question, focusing on where their passions and ideas for futures work came from, revealed a commitment to forge new territories and support communities through the change process. Finally, the “how” questions revealed using both/and methods of traditional and innovative approaches with a special focus on changing the hearts and minds of those who participated in their community change initiatives.

A total of 15 ecosystem futurists participated in this study. Their perspectives were strongly affiliated and aligned with ecosystem building and communities of the future ideas. The narrow focus, however, is important to represent this particular population of the futurists.

There is a great need for ecosystem futurists who can work with communities for social and community transformations. This paper introduces ecosystem builder futurists as a unique population of futurists with specific drivers for and perspectives of change.

Especially in post-normal, mid-pandemic times, there will be more opportunities and need for ecosystem builder futurists to engage groups of individuals in transformative and community building processes. This study focuses on ecosystem futurists and how they work toward fundamental, community change.

Futurists work across many areas and emerging fields. A search of futurist activities reveals some of these areas including Marketing, Team Building, Coaching, Strategic Planning, Partner Management, Marketing Strategy, Ecosystem Building and Sustainable Community Development, to name a few. The purpose of this study is to describe the perspectives and underlying drivers of a particular group of futurists who have been working in large and small communities, organizations, governments and with clients with an underlying focus on creating communities of the future.

Georgian architecture dominates much of the urban vista of the British Isles and is also evident in many former British colonies. A product of the eighteenth century, it is an architectural style richly embedded in its social and political context. The defining feature of a Georgian building: a perfectly proportioned, standardized and symmetrical façade echoes the balance inherent in Pacioli’s double entry treatise. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accounting in the construction and widespread adoption of the standard Georgian house. It finds that eighteenth century builders’ price books (“estimators”), disseminating detailed materials and labour costing information on all components of house construction, inherently acted as norms or standards of cost behaviour. Essentially, it is argued, they constituted a form of human accountability which, located within a broader network of diverse actors, culminated in the diffusion of Georgian Classicism.

The purpose of this study is to determine the barriers and constraints executive decision-makers have to face during the delivery method selection stage of water and wastewater projects using alternative project delivery (APD) methods, e.g. design-build (DB), design-build-operate (DBO) and construction management-at-risk (CMAR).

Structured interviews were conducted with 18 executive decision-makers from public agencies to identify the reasons for transitioning to APD from the design-bid-build (DBB) method. Respondents were also asked about the major obstacles they faced during the decision-making process, as well as key positive and negative factors in using APD methods. The executive decision-makers were also asked about their lessons learned during this process. In addition, this study collected key steps in making APD water and wastewater projects successful. All of the findings from the interview phase were validated by seven public agency executive decision-makers of water and wastewater industries.

One major study finding was that executive decision-makers chose the APD method because it provided cost and schedule benefits and the owner could also choose the designer or builder based on qualifications. The study also found that the main obstacles executive decision-makers faced were: (1) difficulty in implementing APD methods because they do not follow the low-bid process, (2) reluctance to use DB/CMAR because of the status quo and (3) unfamiliarity of city councils/elected commissions with the DB/CMAR process. The validation survey found that most findings from the initial phase of interviews were confirmed by the executives who took part in validation phase.

The major limitation of this research is the small sample size. As the executive decision-makers are very hard to reach for interviews, the authors failed to get interviews from a large number of them, despite repeated efforts made by the authors. Another limitation of this study is that the authors contacted most of the executive decision-makers listed in the WDBC list. These executive decision-makers worked for public agencies and, therefore, the views from private agencies could not be included in this research. The authors understand that the validation of the study findings is very important. However, due to the scope and limited time available for the research, the authors could not validate the findings of this study with other public agencies.

Selecting APD methods instead of DBB methods in water and wastewater projects for public agencies is a crucial issue during the project planning phase. Agencies' executive decision-makers need to understand the advantages and disadvantages of APD methods, along with the transition process in order to smoothly deliver projects. The findings of this study will assist public agency executive decision-makers to mitigate risks, overcome obstacles and become more educated about the APD method process, so that these projects can be successfully delivered within budget and on time.

This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by identifying lessons learned related to various APD method issues, which can be utilized by municipal executive decision-makers to successfully complete future APD projects.

This paper seeks to provide an examination of the UK private house building industry and its record of delivering to customers a quality end product.

The paper reviews the literature regarding quality and the perception of quality along with the problem of defining quality in relation to new private houses, and also includes the results from both qualitative and quantitative data collection from interviews and questionnaires with new home owners, showing the scope of the problem in the Northwest of England. The literature examines not only the private house building industry, but also other industries and their quality procedures. The paper then goes on to identify and analyse some of the possible reasons for the apparent lack of customer satisfaction with current UK private house builders and their products.

The industry must either find out for itself what it is that its customers want or take note of the current research. The author is of the opinion that it is not a major task to significantly improve the current customer satisfaction ratings and frequency of defects reported in new houses. The house builders need to establish a set of quality criteria that they can deliver to their customers on a consistent basis, they need to establish a robust management system that ensures that the tradespeople on site are aware of the quality criteria and that the company will accept no deviation from the agreed criteria. This would then ensure that the customer has a set of criteria on which to judge the level of quality delivered in the end product and not be allowed to make subjective assessments on non‐existing criteria. In short, the builder would then only have to work towards delivering one set of criteria instead of multiple criteria depending on the number of customers on each site.

This is currently an area that is under‐researched and thus this is original research.

This paper aims to investigate bank credit policies and uncover yacht building finance assessment factors from bank credit policies toward the yacht industry.

This study’s questionnaire attempts to identify survey respondents’ degrees of awareness through difference analysis, and then uses entropy weighting and gray relational analysis to discover priority ranking order of bank credit assessment considerations from the perspective of Taiwan’s banking sector.

The research findings show that yacht builders have to review their ship financing application methods and improve shortcomings to meet banks’ credit granting requirements.

Banks emphasize yacht builders’ repayment ability to protect their depositors and shareholders.

Construction defects in residential buildings are causing significant impacts both on consumers and the industry. As a consequence, several countries have established new home warranty schemes. However, designing a public policy for domestic building warranties can become a difficult task. In fact, many of these programs in the past have failed, collapsed or gone bankrupt. Therefore, the purpose of the current research is to provide a systematic comparative representation of various active programs internationally.

The methodology relied on a multiple-case study research design. The case selection covered a total of nine jurisdictions with compulsory home warranty programs. Those included Japan, France, United Kingdom, three provinces in Canada (Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta), and three states in Australia (New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland). The study applied a data collection protocol to gather all the evidence in a replicable manner for each individual case. Subsequently, a cross-case analysis was conducted to identify similarities and variations between programs.

The findings unveiled institutional practices that aimed to resolve, compensate, or rectify defects in residential constructions within these countries. The review mostly suggested that every home warranty program presents certain unique characteristics. At the end, this paper proposed an analytical illustration representing the diversification of components adopted by each jurisdiction.

Nowadays, there is still not a consensus within the academic community on what is an optimal solution when conceiving a new home warranty program. Hence, the current study aims to fill this knowledge gap by presenting the plurality of methods employed by several countries. This paper seeks to help policy makers and industry leaders to improve their home warranty scheme based on awareness derived from observations and analyses of what has been accomplished elsewhere in the world.

The accessible nature of straw bale building lends itself well to self-built and workshop-built housing; straw is known to be both relatively inexpensive and easy to work with for people new to construction. A question then arises as to whether or not hiring an experienced builder can reduce overall costs of such a structure. This study conducts a worldwide survey to straw bale home owners to answer this question and to determine general economic data on straw bale homes, such as: what home owners value, who the main builder typically is, and what usually causes budgets to overrun. A key finding is that self-building is economically justified if the projected saving is higher than the cost of a contractor and if the usually longer time needed to build the home is amenable to the investor. An economic case study is also conducted on a straw bale home in Radomlje, Slovenia. All building expenses are categorized by building phase and subgrouped by cost in accordance with accepted building standards. A key observation is how demanding any specific building phase is in comparison to conventional building.