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The propose of this study is to focus on the mediating role of compliance with procurement regulatory frameworks in implementing public road construction projects.

A cross-sectional research design was adopted. Structured questionnaires were developed in a three-step process including generating items, purifying measurement items and validating measurement items. Variables were anchored on a five-point Likert scale because it is an efficient unidimensional scale that ensures all items measure the same thing and widely applicable in construction research.

The findings show that compliance with a public procurement regulatory framework significantly mediates the relationship between familiarity with a public procurement regulatory framework, monitoring activities, sanction on staff and contractors’ resistance to non-compliance and public road construction project success. However, compliance with a public procurement regulatory framework does not mediate the relationship between the professionalism of staff and perceived inefficiency with public road construction projects’ success.

Limited mediation studies and examples in the public road construction subsector affected this study to comprehensively investigate and compare study findings. Furthermore, the study adopted a cross-sectional research design that limits responses to one point in time. Finally, the study missed out other participants in different organizations and departments that could have had relevant information.

The study contributes to public procurement and construction management research fields by uncovering this strong mediating role of compliance with a public procurement regulatory framework that collectively would help the government to implement public road construction projects successfully. Because no single factor can reliably attain objectives, blending these factors through a hybrid governance system would enable the government to achieve value for money, increase the quality and quantity of paved roads and save funds that can be channeled to other priority sectors for economic development.

Despite scholarly efforts to establish project success factors, studies have been limited to factors directly impacting the project success without considering a mediating effect among the factors that affect the success of these projects.

Safety climate (SC) is considered a leading indicator of safety performance, but scholars suggest that a common SC assessment framework is yet to be developed. Following the debate between the importance of facet analysis and agent analysis, the purpose of this paper is to test a factor structure, developed by the authors in previous work and arising from their systematic literature review, highlighting the role of safety agents in a construction site setting.

Multi-level SC surveys were conducted at five construction sites in Sydney, Australia, collecting data from of 352 workers associated with a mega-construction project. While examining the factor analysis of different studies, data reliability and data validity of the survey findings were ensured and a goodness-of-fit of SC model was examined through structural equation modelling.

The systematic literature review of Newaz et al. (2018) suggested a five-factor model of: management commitment, safety system, role of the supervisor, workers’ involvement and group SC. However, empirical data indicated that the questionnaire used to measure “safety system” failed to pass scale reliability; thus, a four-factor model was proposed to develop an agent-specific SC factor structure in the construction industry.

The four-factor model indicates the role and level of influence of different safety agents to improve safety perceptions on construction sites. The findings of this study will encourage researchers in construction safety to use the simplified four-factor SC (agent-specific) model presented and test it to further develop a common factor structure for the construction industry. The fact that the model is comprised of four factors makes further implementation somewhat easier in the development of safety plans, and when considering the role of safety agents, therefore enhancing its potential value.

The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to identify major project management (PM) complexities in principal construction contracting; and second, to study the contribution of project management offices (PMOs) to addressing such complexities.

A two-stage research design was adopted through a structured literature review (SLR) and a qualitative survey study.

The two-stage study resulted in mapping out the contribution of 10 functional areas to 15 complexity factors that were retrieved from the literature and categorized using the TOE (technical, organizational and environmental) framework. Six outcomes including (1) facilitated processes, (2) improved decisions, (3) improved coordination, (4) enhanced alignment, (5) addressed uncertainties and (6) integrated oversight were identified that describe how PMOs can contribute to tackling complexities.

Similar to other qualitative studies, this study has some limitations in terms of the replicability of results. Regarding the exploratory nature of this study to explain the contribution of PMO to complexity, further quantitative surveys can be conducted using a larger sample to statistically examine the significance of proposed relations between capabilities and complexity factors.

This study provides an understanding of the contribution of PMOs to tackling ever-increasing complexities embedded in construction contracting. The authors suggest requirements to be considered by professionals toward overcoming such complexities.

Although prior studies have separately investigated PMO functions and PM complexities, this study explores the link between these two spheres to discuss one important application of PMO in this context.

Safety climate and its impact on safety performance is well established; however, researchers in this field suggest that the absence of a common assessment framework is a reflection of the state of development of this concept. The purpose of this paper is to propose a five-factor model that can be used to diagnose and measure safety climate in construction safety research and practice.

A systematic review was adopted, and following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, 574 articles were selected at the start of the study based on a developed review protocol for investigating safety climate factors. While examining the factor analysis of different studies, data reliability and data validity of the individual research findings were considered and frequency of factors uploaded was used to determine the significance as a quantitative measure to develop the ranking of safety climate factors.

The review identified that, from the established measures of safety climate in construction, there is little uniformity on factor importance. However, management commitment safety system role of the supervisor; workers’ involvement and group safety climate were found to be the most common across the studies reviewed. It is proposed these factors are used to inform a five-factor model for investigating safety climate in the construction industry.

The findings of this study will motivate researchers and practitioners in safety to use the five-factor safety climate model presented in this paper and test it to develop a common factor structure for the construction industry. The fact that the model is comprised of five factors makes it easier to be used and implemented by small-to medium-sized construction companies, therefore enhancing its potential use.

Off-site manufacturing (OSM) has emerged as a method of modern construction that provides several benefits including achieving lower costs, a quicker schedule and environmentally friendly solutions. Although numerous researches are available that advocate the adoption of OSM, the devotion towards OSM safety is somewhat limited. However, OSM invariably generates safety risks, including dynamics and uncertainty in safety management. There is a unique call to have an investigation on the identification of OSM safety risks.

To provide a full picture on the OSM safety, a systematic literature review was adopted based on interpretivist philosophical stance. The literature search was conducted in key electronic databases to identify OSM safety-focused publications. Bibliometric analysis was adopted to identify co-occurrences of keywords and collaboration among authors in OSM safety-related research publications. Content analysis was conducted to provide a taxonomy of OSM safety risks. The identified studies were critically analysed to determine the focus of OSM safety research and provide future research directions.

The results demonstrated frequently appeared OSM safety aspects while highlighting the limitedness of collaborative research outputs in common authorships. Content analysis subsequently unveiled safety risks in OSM under human, organisational and work environmental factors. A critical analysis of extant literature revealed seven research classifications of OSM safety. Directions were offered to enhance OSM safety by applying principles of targeted safety management concepts, technology-driven safety measures and bespoke training programs.

This study provides a comprehensive review on the identification of safety risks throughout OSM while presenting the avenues useful for the development of OSM safety management strategies.

Despite many studies that aim to argue, develop and position the concept of psychological contracts, few have explored how a psychological contract may be applied to safety in the construction industry. A psychological contract of safety (PCS) describes an individual's conceptualized belief that relates to mutual safety obligations, drawn from explicit or implicit promises of associated workers or its supervisor. This study investigates safety practices on construction sites through the lens of the widely applied and researched psychological contract theory emanating from a business paradigm.

The process of validating a PCS scale within the construction industry required the collection of data from a mega-construction project in Sydney, Australia. A quantitative methodology was used to collect data from 352 construction workers through a survey instrument designed to reveal their perception of procedures, policies and practices. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to ensure data reliability and data validity of the survey findings together with goodness of fit of PCS model.

The findings showed the presence of a PCS in a construction safety setting examined. A two-factor model underlying aspects, namely employer and employee obligations was recommended since the four-factor model, including relational and transactional components of both parties' safety obligations, could not be validated due to the discriminant validity associated with the particular constructs.

Conceptualizing the extant PC theory as a framework from which to leverage safety management initiatives brings a new approach to construction safety studies, revealing the influential role of supervisors in interpreting safety practices. The research aimed to identify safety obligations, which are influential in the development of PSC scale, further the research provides an explanation as to how a PCS may be contextualized in the construction industry.

The production of waste creates both direct and indirect environmental impacts. A range of strategies are available to reduce the generation of waste by industry and households, and to select waste treatment approaches that minimise environmental harm. However, evaluating these strategies requires reliable and detailed data on waste production and treatment. Unfortunately, published Australian waste data are typically highly aggregated, published by a variety of entities in different formats and do not form a complete time-series. We demonstrate a technique for constructing a multi-regional waste supply-use (MRWSU) framework for Australia using information from numerous waste data sources. This is the first subnational waste input–output framework to be constructed for Australia. We construct the framework using the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab), a cloud-hosted computational platform for building Australian multiregional input–output tables. The structure of the framework complies with the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA). We demonstrate the use of the MRWSU framework by calculating waste ‘footprints’ that enumerate the full domestic supply chain waste production for Australian consumers.

Traumatic events can cause post-traumatic stress disorder due to the severity of the often unexpected events. The purpose of this paper is to reveal how conversations around lived experiences of traumatic events, such as the Christchurch earthquake in February 2011, can work as a strategy for people to come to terms with their experiences collaboratively. By encouraging young children to recall and tell of their earthquake stories with their early childhood teachers they can begin to respond, renew, and recover (Brown, 2012), and prevent or minimise more stress being developed.

The study involved collecting data of the participating children taking turns to wear a wireless microphone where their interactions with each other and with teachers were video recorded over one week in November 2011. A total of eight hours and 21 minutes of footage was collected; four minutes and 19 seconds of that footage are presented and analysed in this paper. The footage was watched repeatedly and transcribed using conversation analysis methods (Sacks, 1995).

Through analysing the detailed turn-taking utterances between teachers and children, the orderliness of the co-production of remembering is revealed to demonstrate that each member orients to being in agreement about what actually happened. These episodes of story telling between the teachers and children demonstrate how the teachers encourage the children to tell about their experiences through actively engaging in conversations with them about the earthquake.

The conversation analysis approach used in this research was found to be useful in investigating aspects of disasters that the participants themselves remember as important and real. This approach offers a unique insight into understanding how the earthquake event was experienced and reflected on by young children and their teachers, and so can inform future policy and provision in post-disaster situations.

Policy is a very individual matter for each company concerned, in Peter Davis' view, hence it is virtually impossible to try to identify other people's trading policies. What he sets out to do in this paper, therefore, is to examine some factors which are likely to influence policy and then draw some general conclusions. The specific factors he examines are the consumer, the retail trade itself, and the suppliers. This is an edited version of a paper presented by Peter Davis at the IGD 1982 Convention, “Whose Move?”