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Labour productivity in construction has fallen behind other industries in most of the world and has declined continuously for decades. Although several scholarly research projects have been conducted to salvage the prevalent low labour productivity in construction, contractors in the construction industry have continued to grapple with the devastating impact of low productivity. The purpose of this study is to determine key areas of focus necessary to promote productivity growth in construction.

Bibliometric and scientometric assessments were conducted to map the existing construction labour productivity (CLP) studies and establish key focus areas in the research domain. The keywords “Construction Productivity” OR “Construction Labour Productivity” OR “Construction Labor Productivity” OR “Construction Worker Productivity”.

Emerging trends in the CLP research field are reported. The study also determined the most productive authors and collaboration among authors, most productive journals, most active regions and publications with the highest impact in CLP research.

Documents published in the Scopus database were considered for analysis because of the wider coverage of the database. Journal and conference articles written in English language represent the inclusion criteria, while articles in press, review, book chapters, editorial, erratum, note, short survey and data paper were excluded from analysis. The study is also limited to documents published from 2012 to 2021.

The study brought to the awareness of the industry practitioners and other construction stakeholders, the key knowledge areas that are critical to promoting productivity growth in construction.

Except bibliometric analysis, previous research studies have used different approaches to investigate productivity in construction. The study presented future research directions through the emerging knowledge areas identified in the study.

Quality in the construction industry is an important issue yet ignored during the initial stages of the life cycle of a project, that is, the design and construction stage. The contribution of stakeholders, especially the architects is generally suspended though it has huge significance in terms of cost and time related to quality. This research endeavors to examine the issues related to the design and construction stages of the project from architects' purview, to understand the relative importance of these issues in the Indian construction industry.

The study of qualitative data conducted formed a basis for online quantitative data collection that was further analyzed with the help of cross-tabulation and multiple correspondence analysis methods.

The study concludes that the budget of a project is a corresponding factor related to quality concern for architects. The study also established that the quality issues corresponding to high budgets are closely related to the construction stage and are identified as preparation of checklist, and bidding process of hiring the contractor on the lowest bid.

The study is limited to analyzing the perspective of architects; however, other stakeholders of the construction industry may represent a different opinion.

This research emphasizes the importance of the client's role, and need for integration and coordination among stakeholders in the construction industry for effective quality control and management.

The research presents an exhaustive literature review on quality issues and its importance with respect to cost implications, standard practices, sustainability and the life cycle of the project.

To address requirements and specifications of construction project, academics need to build a project classification model. In recent years, project success concept, particularly on large-scale construction projects, has been a controversial issue, especially in developing countries. Hence, in this paper, after introducing a sustainable success index (SSI), a novel method called “rough set approach” had been adopted to induce decision rules and to classify construction projects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

At first, 20 effective success factors and 15 success criteria based on three pillars of sustainability of economy, society and environment had been categorized. The research data used for analysis had been collected from 26 large-scale construction projects in Iran and five other countries. After collecting data collection, observations had been analyzed and 51 decision rules were generated, and the projects were classified. Eventually, in order to evaluate the performance of the generated rules, confusion matrix was applied, and the model was validated.

The results of the present study show that rough set theory (RST) can be an effective and valuable tool for building expert systems. Practical applications of these results along with limitations and future research are described.

Perhaps for the first time, in the present study, a number of large-scale construction projects are classified based on SSI. Applying RST for building rule-based system and classifying projects in construction project area are novel attempts undertaken in this paper. The rules induced in this study can be applied to develop a sustainable success prediction model in the future studies.

Research studies related to sustainability and green building have made monumental contributions to the concept of sustainable construction (SC) in Nigeria. This paper therefore aims to present a historical review of the development of SC in Nigeria over a 10 year period. The review also provides constructive perspective on the benefits of SC and the present state of enforcement of green building in Nigeria.

A historical review strategy was applied to the study. Using secondary data sources, 47 influential journals from emerald, scopus and science direct database focusing on “SC”, “sustainability” and “green building” in Nigeria between 2012 and 2022 were used for the analysis.

The analysis deduced that the development of SC in Nigeria have undergone a triple period of development: the inception period (2012–2016), the transition period (2016–2020) and the advancement period (2020–present). The review juxtaposes the three timeline to show rapid growth in the awareness of SC, but revealed moderate levels of implementation in some major cities in Nigeria. Therefore, the author finds and argues that the advancement of SC in Nigeria can be achieved through the synergy, commitment and active roles of researchers, academics, practitioners, policy makers and the government in enforcing existing green policies.

The study is the first academic paper to undertake a decade long historical review of SC in Nigeria. This review provides an up-to-date understanding of the developments, changing dynamics and future progressions in the field of SC in Nigeria.

This study aims to propose a method known as the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy TOPSIS) for complex project selection in organizations. To fulfill study objectives, the factors responsible for making a project complex are collected through literature review, which is then analyzed by fuzzy TOPSIS, based on three decision-makers’ opinions.

The selection of complex projects is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) process for global organizations. Traditional procedures for selecting complex projects are not adequate due to the limitations of linguistic assessment. To crossover such limitation, this study proposes the fuzzy MCDM method to select complex projects in organizations.

A large-scale engine manufacturing company, engaged in the energy business, is studied to validate the suitability of the fuzzy TOPSIS method and rank eight projects of the case company based on project complexity. Out of these eight projects, the closeness coefficient of the most complex project is found to be 0.817 and that of the least complex project is found to be 0.274. Finally, study outcomes are concluded in the conclusion section, along with study limitations and future works.

The outcomes from this research may not be generalized sufficiently due to the subjectivity of the interviewers. The study outcomes support project managers to optimize their project selection processes, especially to select complex projects. The presented methodology can be used extensively used by the project planners/managers to find the driving factors related to project complexity.

The presented study deliberately explained how complex projects in an organization could be select efficiently. This selection methodology supports top management to maintain their proposed projects with optimum resource allocations and maximum productivity.

Prior research has emphasised the importance of the early phases of construction projects, as well as the difficulties of procuring engineering services – especially due to the uncertainties. Despite that, studies on the public procurement of engineering services are scarce. Although scholars have shown that uncertainty may affect the choice of control modes, the level of uncertainty that characterises services is not addressed by the two task characteristics: knowledge of the transformation process and output measurability. The purpose is to investigate organisational control in public procurement of engineering services.

The existing control model was adjusted in this study by conceptually adding uncertainty as a third aspect to the two task characteristics. A single case study of the Swedish Transport Administration was used. The empirical data, comprising 14 interviews with managers from the client and engineering consulting companies, were analysed using flexible pattern matching and visual mapping approaches and then illustrated using the model.

The public client did not base its choice of control modes on uncertainty, but rather on the other two task characteristics. Consequently, the service providers argued that the chosen control modes reduced their creativity, increased their financial risks and caused unclear responsibilities. This study therefore shows that uncertainty is an important factor to consider in the choice of control modes, both from a theoretical perspective and from the service providers' point of view. The developed model may therefore be useful for researchers as well as practitioners.

This study is the first attempt to add uncertainty as a task characteristic when choosing control modes. The results contribute to the scarce control literature regarding the procurement of engineering services for construction projects and the procurement of other services with high uncertainty.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the main causes of delays in the projects are from the client (relative importance index (RII)=0.716), labor and equipment (RII=0.701) and contractor (RII=0.698). Hence determining the contractual responsibility of delay is the most likely source of dispute in construction projects and many techniques have been used in the courts to demonstrate the criticalities of a delay event on the project schedule. Therefore, authors try to investigate all process-based techniques of delay claims and evaluated and conformed them with principles by Society of Construction Law (SCL) protocol and Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering International (AACEI) in order to choose the best techniques based on the specific circumstances of each project.

This section is divided into two distinct parts: refers to the methods used to assess the perceptions of clients, consultants, and contractors on the relative importance of causes of delay in construction industry; and refers to advantages and disadvantages of various techniques used to analyze delays and their conform with SCL protocol. A questionnaire was developed to assess the perceptions of clients, consultants, and contractors on the relative importance of causes of delay in Iranian construction industry. The respondents were asked to indicate their response category on 78 well-recognized construction delay factors identified by authors.

In total, 78 causes of delay were identified through research. The identified causes are combined into seven groups. The field survey included 58 contractors, 55 consultants, and 62 client. Data collected were analyzed by RII and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The authors identified main causes of delay and ten most important causes, according to Table AII, from the perspective of three major groups of participants (clients, consultants and contractors). The ranking of categories of causes of delay, according to Table I, were: client-related causes (RII=0.716); labor and equipment category causes (RII=0.701); contractor-related causes (RII=0.698); material-related causes (RII=0.690); design-related causes (RII=0.666); external causes (RII=0.662); and consultant-related causes (RII=0.662). But according to the discussions and given that determining the contractual responsibility of delay is the most likely source of dispute in construction industry and many techniques have been used in the courts to demonstrate the criticalities of a delay event on the project schedule.

All process-based techniques of delay analysis have been present in this paper and categorized in 11 groups. In order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of them by clients, contractor and consultant, a thorough review conducted to reveal the nature of techniques. In the next step, given that selecting the most appropriate technique based on constraints and specific conditions of each project is one of the most important steps to carry out a successful delay analysis. The authors conformed, all process-based techniques of delay analysis, by SCL protocol and AACEI principles. Finally, the result of this match was brought in order to choose the best technique based on the specific circumstances of each project.

This study primarily aims to analyse stakeholder management challenges and how these emerge in the stakeholder landscape in a large hospital project. From this analysis, the authors aim to identify the implications that stakeholder management has on value creation in a hospital project.

The research method is qualitative. Empirical data were collected in three cycles: project internal documentation, thematic interviews and survey. The literature related to hospital projects, stakeholder analysis and management, stakeholder salience and landscape is summarised, informing the qualitative design of the study.

The authors noted the importance of project-specific stakeholder identification, salience analysis and landscape description. The regulatory, formal and contractual stakeholders give an over-simplistic picture on stakeholder map. The operative stakeholder map and landscape describe the complexity, uncertainty, dynamism and institutional context inducing the challenges for the stakeholder management. There is an evident potential of utilising the stakeholder landscape and its elements in the resulting collaborative value creation in hospital projects. Multiple and changing stakeholders with differing expectations are an important opportunity to improve the value creation process.

Stakeholder management has recently attracted much attention in the industrial project setting. This research attempts to identify the operative stakeholder landscape in a large hospital project, not to mention its impact on value creation. This study offers a framework that can help academics and project management practitioners tackle the challenges amongst project stakeholders.

Maintenance policy is an element of building maintenance management that deals with organisation policy, planning and procedures, and delineates how maintenance units in an organisation will manage specific building components, auxiliary facilities and services. Given this contextual setting, this study investigates whether organisational maintenance policies (OMPs) utilised in developed countries are relevant in developing countries – using Nigeria as a case study exemplar.

An empirical research design (using deductive reasoning) was implemented for this research. Specifically, a Delphi study conducted revealed 23 elements that impact OMP development in Nigeria.

Of these twenty elements, six had a very high impact on maintenance management (VHI: 9.00–10.00), nine variables had a high impact (HI: 7.00–8.99) and eight other variables scored a medium impact (MI: 5.00–6.99). Emergent findings reveal that the elements of organisational maintenance policy that engender effective building maintenance management include preparation of safety procedure, optimisation of the maintenance policy, optimisation of the maintenance action plan, well-defined priority system, risk factor establishment, suitable maintenance procedures and a clearly delineated process.

The study findings will guide policymakers in identifying the main elements required in maintenance policies development towards making national public asset preservation and economic gains. Also, the content of the future educational curriculum on maintenance management study will be more receptive to the body of knowledge and the built environment industry.

Cumulatively, the research presented illustrates that these elements replicate those adopted in other countries and that effective maintenance management of public buildings is assured when these elements are integral to the development of an OMP.

There is a pressing need to increase investments in sustainable infrastructure to promote low carbon economic growth and ensure environmental sustainability. Consequently, this study examines the socio-political factors underlying the adoption of green bond financing of infrastructure projects.

Primary data was gathered from experts with advanced experience in, or knowledge of green bonds in the Kumasi Metropolis. To identify respondents with pertinent knowledge that is relevant to the study, purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used. One-sample t-test and relative importance index were used in this study's statistical analysis.

‘Training and experience with sustainable finance’ was seen as the most important social factor underlying the adoption of green bond financing of infrastructure projects by the respondents and ‘Governmental tax-based incentives’ was rated as the leading political factor.

This pioneering research attempts to ascertain the socio-political factors affecting the adoption of green bond financing of infrastructure projects. Emergent results of analysis and concomitant discussions add knowledge to fill a void in literature on the social and political factors affecting the adoption of green bond financing of infrastructure projects in developing countries.