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Many organizations have moved to adopt high performance work designs in an effort to enhance organizational flexibility while increasing efficiency, output, and product quality. As a result, the use of voluntary organization-sponsored teams such as task forces, project teams and quality improvement teams has become increasingly common. Relatively little research, however, has examined the process through which the membership of such groups is assembled. Even less is understood about the factors that encourage greater employee participation in these types of teams. Relying on social exchange theory, social identity theory, and the diversity literature, we explore the group creation process from the individual as perspective. Specifically, we explore the factors that motivate an individual to join a particular team. Propositions relating the influence of group and relational attributes to member-initiated team selection are then developed that further expand our understanding of the effects of group attractiveness, social categorization, relational demography and network processes on group creation. In closing, we discuss the implications of our model for managers and suggest some directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the key characteristics of the highest‐performing construction projects, so that future procurement, briefing, design and construction management processes can be improved in the light of these experiences.

Workshops were carried out in Australia, Singapore and the USA involving 40 senior participants, representing a good cross‐section of the stakeholder interests around construction. These individuals were each asked to identify the best construction project with which they had been involved at any point in their careers and to identify the major reasons for its success.

A synthesis is provided of the characteristics that characterise the exemplary projects cited by the workshop participants. These are typified by the “4Cs”, namely constraints driving collaboration and creativity, ideally leading to community benefits. The 17 exemplars provided by the participants show project teams facing demands that act to break the dysfunctional paradigm of normal practice, so allowing refreshing and motivating actions to follow. This schema is reinforced by the three case study vignettes that illustrate in more detail the factors at work and their interactions. Linkage to prominent issues apparent in the literatures related to procurement, briefing, design and construction management are shown, together with pointers as to the connections between these issues as experienced in specific real world, project situations. In particular, the potentially pervasive impact of selective priority‐setting is highlighted.

This paper provides a glimpse of how construction operates at its best, the industry explicitly contributing to, and getting credit for, adding value to society economically, but also culturally, socially and environmentally.

The work reported on here covers 17 mini‐cases and three fuller cases, all drawn from three countries. Further work to build additional cases from a wider range of countries would test the broad outline of the 4Cs model and increase one's understanding of the dynamic mechanisms at work.

Taking both an event-centered and a process approach to cause lawyering, the chapter asks: (1) if, when, and how working with movements can lead to one being functionally seen as a cause lawyer and (2) whether researchers should include “hired gun” and state attorneys in the cause lawyering conversation. These questions are addressed by seeing how various cause lawyer qualities are exhibited by a range of attorneys involved in anti-abortion protest regulation cases. The research suggests that reasons exist to view previously excluded attorneys through the cause lawyering lens, and to continue pursuing the cause lawyer qualities discussed here.

I ENTERED the literary world late in the immediate post‐war years when changes of literary taste and loyalty were already in the air. The first broadcast I gave was, I remember, an attack upon Virginia Woolf. Her books had nurtured me as an adolescent, and I was in reaction against her influence.