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The purpose of this paper is to study knowledge integration (KI) when diffusing a systemic innovation. The objectives are to understand what mechanisms are used and when and what their effects are in terms of knowledge development.

The method comprised a longitudinal case study which followed a firm’s attempts to develop and diffuse a timber multi-storey building system (the systemic innovation) over a number of projects.

The findings emphasize actual projects as the most crucial activity for KI and when and why soft personalization mechanisms and codified knowledge should be mixed. Furthermore, it shows how different types of knowledge are built-up including construction process effects over a series of projects.

The research contributes with knowledge about mechanisms for the diffusion of a specific systemic innovation type and provides input regarding mechanisms to use. The introduction of the concepts “domain-specific,” “procedural” and “general knowledge” into construction has increased understanding of innovation diffusion and knowledge flows and where and how they are integrated.

The research shows how knowledge develops and through which mechanisms, and where problems occur. Construction organizations can learn from this to avoid mistakes and potentially better understand how to manage knowledge to diffuse a systemic innovation.

The research provides insight into systemic innovation diffusion over a series of projects and focuses on both projects and the construction process.

The purpose of this study is to examine product innovation as a means of addressing infrastructure shortages in developed economies and to improve the sustainability of infrastructure. The obstacles to product innovation in the road industry are compared between different types of participants in the supply chain to provide guidelines for interventions to improve innovation rates.

This exploratory study uses descriptive data from a large scale survey of the Australian road industry. The three top-rated product innovation obstacles for the following four types of participants are examined: contractors, consultants, suppliers and clients.

The four groups were found to disagree about the relative importance of the obstacles. Contractors and suppliers ranked “restrictive price-only tender assessment” used by clients as their number one obstacle, while consultants thought there was too much emphasis by the clients on direct costs compared with whole-of-life costs. On the other hand, clients felt suppliers do not do enough thorough testing prior to proposing a new product and disagreed with suppliers about who should carry the risk of new product failure.

The conceptual framework was found to yield novel insights with significant policy implications. The construction-specific contextual determinants that were integrated by the authors into a broad innovation diffusion process proved useful in categorising road product innovation obstacles across the four surveyed supply chain groups – without overlap or omission. The new framework also proved useful in ordering the key obstacles across groups for interpretation and discussion. In disaggregating product obstacles according to groups, these contextual determinants were proven to be mutually exclusive and to represent important focal points in promoting the uptake of product innovation in construction. Although the current study has usefully provided quantitative data concerning construction innovation obstacles, there are limitations due to its reliance on descriptive statistics. Future work by the authors is proposed to analyse the relationships between innovation obstacles and supply chain partners using inferential statistics to further develop and validate these early findings. The current study is an interim step in this work and an important contribution in identifying and addressing firm-level barriers seen to be constraining construction product innovation.

Results suggest there is a need for government clients to carefully consider the differing perspectives across the supply chain when developing strategies to encourage the adoption of mutually-beneficial innovative products on their construction projects. Inclusive focus groups examining the drivers, configuration and benefits of collaborative procurement systems are recommended to reduce innovation obstacles.

Society relies on urban infrastructure for daily living and the current study contributes to stretching infrastructure investment dollars and reducing the environmental impact of infrastructure provision.

No previous study has compared the perception of product innovation obstacles across different road industry supply chain partners. This is a significant gap, as differences in opinions across the supply chain need to be understood to develop the shared expectations and the improved relationships required to improve product innovation rates. Product innovation is important because it has been shown to improve efficiency (potentially addressing the road investment gap) and reduce deleterious environmental impacts.

The implementation and control processes of project planning and scheduling involve a wide range of methods and tools. Despite the development and modification and integration of the project management theory with newer scheduling approaches in particular, practitioners’ views on the efficiency and effectiveness of these methods and tools differ. This situation can be attributed in part to a lack of understanding of the most appropriate basis for implementing these methods and tools. This study, therefore, aims to overcome this deficiency by conceptualizing and adopting a taxonomy of planning and scheduling methods.

The study is based on a review and discourse analysis of the literature covering a large number of theoretical and empirical studies. The underlying theories of various planning and scheduling methods were analyzed with respect to the taxonomy criteria adopted in the study.

Using the taxonomy, the key characteristics of planning and scheduling methods considered in this study were identified and interpreted. These included concepts and theories; key features; suitability and usability; and benefits and limitations. Overall, the findings suggest that project managers should consider taxonomy as a support tool for selecting and prioritizing the most appropriate method or combination of methods for managing their projects. Recommendations include the need for more advanced or multi-dimensional taxonomies to cope with the diversity of project type and size.

The results of the study allow project managers to improve their current practices by utilizing taxonomy when considering the implementation of planning and scheduling methods. Moreover, taxonomy can be considered as a tool to promote learning on the part of those less experienced in planning and scheduling. Taxonomy can be considered as an initial platform for further research in this area.

This study aims to focus on a reinforcement supplier’s efforts to diffuse solutions, more or less innovative, in the construction sector to gain understanding of what facilitates and complicates innovation diffusion from a supplier perspective.

The interpretative research presented builds on 28 semi-structured interviews with the supplier and its customers and document studies. The research emphasizes dynamics in the diffusion process and rests on the assumption that the innovation content, innovation context and the innovation process interacts in the diffusion process.

The findings and the contribution from the study provide significant details concerning how the dimensions interact and how the diffusion process may unfold over time, but also that different solutions interact to push diffusion forward.

The study relates to one supplier’s work and the interplay implies uniqueness in different cases. Studies in other contexts could, therefore, also be suitable to develop findings and their transferability.

The study provides understanding for suppliers diffusing innovations in construction on how to act.

A major contribution from the study is that it puts emphasis on how the diffusion process proceeds in interaction with its content and context and problematizes this dimension. Furthermore, the importance of nuancing sub-contexts to display decisive factors in the diffusion process is emphasized.

The two‐fold purpose of this paper is identifying areas of difficulty in managing the needs of end‐users in the course of the design and delivery of construction projects and suggesting possible solutions.

The focus of the paper is the interaction between three principal parties: end‐users, project leader (a selected end‐user) and facility planner (a facilities professional). The context is two projects in the public sector: a university and a hospital. The end‐users of both are known from the start and participate in the whole process. The paper is based on a case study comprising 12 interviews – seven end‐users and five professionals.

The research shows that during the project's design and delivery, communication and attitudinal problems have to be managed alongside the inherent difficulty of understanding end‐users' real needs. To help in managing these issues, facility planners relied heavily on pedagogical and behavioural skills, rather than formalised methods as found in the literature.

The findings highlight areas of difficulty for managers and planners and how these areas were handled in practice. Suggestions on how to resolve some of the areas are presented and discussed.

Much of the research related to managing end‐users focuses on how to extract value from the construction process, for instance providing greater flexibility and improved air quality. This paper concentrates on relations between parties who are central to the briefing, design and delivery process

This paper aims to present a commentary and reflection on Nenonen et al.’s paper on theorizing with managers.

The paper is a conceptual reflection.

The author finds much to agree with Nenonen et al.’s work, but finds some aspects where greater breadth could be added to further strengthen it. The author further suggest that the alleged gap should be critically examined.

This paper extends Nenonen et al. by proposing a broader framework for viewing the relevance and implementability of academic marketing research.

Recent construction literature has been focusing more on integrative contracting approaches such as integrated project delivery (IPD). However, conceptual studies on integration in IPD literature are scattered and fragmented, that is, most of the studies only focused on the segmented dimension of integration. A systemic understanding of the concepts of integration in IPD project-based context is still lacking. To fill this gap, this paper analyzes two aspects of integration (dimensions and directions) in IPD literature and explores their extent in construction projects.

Grounded theory review and focus group discussion approaches were employed to perform a thorough conceptual review of the literature, frame the research into the theory and increase the fundamental understanding of the concept of integration in IPD literature.

In this study, IPD integrating techniques were identified and their integration dimensions and directions were discussed. Results show that integration in the project-based environment of IPD is a multidimensional construct. Based on organizational, contractual and operational characteristics of IPD projects, twenty-four integration mechanisms were identified and framed into seven clusters. The integration directions over project life-cycle were demonstrated in three contexts: (1) an on-site construction project, delivered traditionally, (2) an on-site construction project, delivered with IPD and (3) an off-site construction project, delivered with IPD.

This paper gathers the segments of integration into a comprehensive overview, which can help researchers and practitioners explore elements of IPD project success more precisely. A theoretical framework of integration clusters is developed, based on IPD literature. The impact of IPD on on-site versus off-site construction is illustrated from an integration direction perspective. Finally, future areas of studies for researchers and practitioners about the concept of integration in an IPD context are discussed. This paper provides a point of departure for future theoretical and empirical explorations.

This chapter discusses the extension of legal equality between male and female citizens in four states in North Africa – Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Algeria – through one specific lens: A married woman's legal capacity to initiate and obtain divorce without the husband's consent. Building on the works of Stein Rokkan and Reinhard Bendix on the expansion of citizenship to the ‘lower classes’, it is argued that amendments in divorce law by introducing in-court divorce for women, in addition to out-of-court divorce, is a significant institutional change that extends legal equality between men and women. The introduction of in-court divorce expands female citizenship by bolstering woman's juridical autonomy and capacity in state law. Changes in divorce laws are thus part of state centralization by means of standardizing rules that regulate family law through public administrative institutions rather than religious organizations. Two questions are addressed: First, how did amendments in divorce laws occur after independence? Second, in which ways did women's bolstered legal capacity in divorce have a spill over effect on reforms in other patriarchal state laws? Based on observations on sequences of change in four states in North Africa, it is argued that amendments that equalize between men and women in divorce should be seen as a key driver for reforms in other state laws, that reduce legal inequality between male and female citizens. In all four states, women's citizenship was extended in nationality law and criminal law after amendments in divorce law gave women unilateral legal power to exit a marital relationship.

There is an emerging consensus within the literature on failed and failing states that state failure is contagious across borders. For its part, the literature on regionalisation claims that states within the same region tend to form clusters of security – or insecurity – so that geographical proximity is closely associated with inert security relationships. This article – along with the individual contributions in the volume it introduces – seeks to bridge these two literatures, which otherwise rarely talk to each other. The approach taken throughout the volume is largely qualitative and case-oriented, yet methodologically diverse, while the articles have a shared comparative ambition. This introductory article examines the debate on failing states and contextualises the volume's contributions within that debate. It then does the same in relation to the debate on regional security, before moving on to examine the role and impact of emerging regional responses to insecurity. When we examine recent state-building initiatives, the effectiveness of external actors seems limited, while existing power holders – and the conflicts between them – are at the centre in processes for building states. This calls for studying the practice of state-building, and for rooting policies in viable practices, even when the driving actors are not inherently benign. To a considerable degree, a state's strength and functionality are relational: the state can only be understood in relation to significant other states. Within regions, hegemonic states – and the strategies pursued by other states in their efforts to cooperate with, balance, or counter the hegemon – have major implications for security. Regional cooperation emerges through concrete collaboration to address commonly perceived challenges, at times as an unintended effect of a targeted initiative. Key actors – and the networks of which they form part – are often transnational, spanning the borders of several states. The behaviour of transnational actors, how they interface with the system of states and regions and the potential for their conversion into constructive political forces remain poorly understood. As a whole, these are findings that inspire an agenda for future research at the interface between the state and the region.