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Although social media use at work has made great impact on employee work performance, little is known about the effect of social media use at work on construction employees, especially construction managers. In this way, the purpose of this study aims to investigate the impact of social media use at work on construction managers' work performance based on the enabler-process-intermediate outcome-performance framework.

This study adopts the knowledge seeker's perspective to empirically investigate the mechanism through which social media use at work impacts construction managers' work performance. Questionnaire survey was conducted with 210 construction managers to test the research model proposed in this study. A component-based structural equation modeling technique was employed to analyze the data.

Results show that social media use at work positively influences knowledge acquisition both internally and externally, and knowledge acquisition promotes task self-efficacy and creativity, which in turn improve construction managers' work performance. In addition, the interaction of task self-efficacy and creativity is found to negatively influence work performance.

These findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding about the impact of social media use at work on construction managers' work performance. This research also provides informative insights for practitioners on how to improve work performance.

Legalists and social scientists have not been able to explain the expansion of gay rights in a conservative age because they refuse to respect the special qualities of judicial decision making. These qualities require the Supreme Court to look simultaneously at the past, present, and future, and, most importantly, to determine questions of individual rights through a consideration of how citizens are to live under a continuing rights regime. Unless scholars understand how and why Supreme Court decision making differs from that of more directly politically accountable institutions we can expect no greater success in explaining or predicting individual rights in the future.

This study aims to investigate the influence of external factors identified by the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal (PESTEL) framework on corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance in Vietnamese construction firms.

The snowball sampling method was employed to gather 182 validated responses. Employing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the research analyzed how these factors correlate with CSR practices under institutional theory.

Results indicated that social, economic, environmental, legal and technological factors positively impacted CSR performance. Among these, social factors had the most significant effect, followed sequentially by economic, environmental, legal and technological influences. Intriguingly, political factors demonstrated no significant association with CSR performance.

The strong impact of social factors confirms that societal norms and cultural values are critical in shaping corporate behavior in Vietnam. Firms can leverage this insight by intensifying their community engagement and social investment. Additionally, the negligible role of political factors in shaping CSR suggests that firms might not need to focus heavily on political engagement in Vietnam. However, firms should remain aware of legal changes as legal factors influence CSR outcomes.

Despite CSR’s growing importance, there remains a notable research gap regarding how external macro-environmental factors influence CSR performance, particularly within the construction industry. The findings emphasize the importance of aligning business strategies with socioeconomic and environmental aspects.

Social procurement is becoming an increasing policy focus for governments around the world as they seek to incentivise new collaborative partnerships with private organisations in industries like construction to meet their social obligations. The limited construction management research in this area shows that the successful implementation of these policies depends on a new generation of social procurement professionals who are promoting these policies into an institutional vacuum with little organisational identity, legitimacy and support. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what these actors do to promote and build support for the implementation of these policies in their organisations.

A thematic analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 social procurement actors in the Australian construction industry is presented.

Results portray an experimental, disconnected and nascent institutional field of practice with a high degree of role ambiguity and conflict. In the absence of a clear organisational identity and legitimate power-base, social procurement actors are forced to rely on incremental rather than radical innovation and the power of stories to persuade others to engage with their vision for creating social value through construction.

Contributing new insights to the emerging “practice theme” in social procurement research, this paper provides important conceptual and practical information about the attributes which determine their success, how they fit into existing organisational structures and how they build support to achieve enabling institutional change. Academically, the results advance understanding of how social procurement professionals are implementing these policies into their organisations. Practically, they provide new information which enable social procurement professionals to improve their practices and construction companies to recruit the right people into these roles and design their organisations to more effectively support them.

Construction is one of Australia’s largest employers of young people and the industry is facing a major labor shortage, with young people expected to account for much of the shortfall. Surprisingly however, there been little research into the pathways for young people into construction employment. The aim of this paper is to address this gap in research by exploring whether project-based intermediaries can support the development of disadvantaged young people’s trust in the often-problematic systems which are meant to help transition them into employment in construction.

Employing an in-depth case study approach, this research mobilizes theories of personalized and generalized trust to report the results of interviews with 15 sectoral leaders; focus groups with 12 young people working in construction; and interviews with 11 young people being transitioned into construction employment through a unique project-based intermediary developed by a major Australian construction company as part of its social procurement requirements.

Findings show that project-based intermediaries can play an important trust-building role in transitioning disadvantaged young people into work in construction. They do this by bridging a young person’s strong social ties (family and friendship) and weak social ties (with government and construction industry organizations), both of which can be problematic when used in isolation to seek employment in construction. By performing a crucial bridging role between a young person’s individual self-interest in acting alone to find work and their collective interest in being part of a collaborative group, the project-based intermediary creates a new form of linking social capital, enabling social procurement policies which target young people to work while also addressing wider systemic problems in Australia’s employment systems.

This research addresses the lack of employment research into young people in construction and the paucity of theory in social procurement research more broadly. It takes an original approach in aligning theories related to a duality of personalized trust and generalized trust seen against the duality of individual intentionality and agency (self-focused) and shared intentionality and agency (group-focused). By doing so it provides new conceptual and practical insights into the important role that construction project-based intermediaries like the one studied here can play in providing innovative cross-sector and collaborative solutions to the world’s growing youth unemployment crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to re-visit social construction of technology (SCOT) framework in understanding of innovation in the construction sector and unpack the role of innovation brokers in this context.

This is a conceptual paper adopting SCOT framework to understand innovation in the context of the construction sector. The role of innovation brokers is unpacked in the paper, currently under-explored in the construction innovation studies.

The authors suggest SCOT framework as a useful overarching frame through which to understand construction innovation. The authors argue that innovation brokers should be positioned to oversee the interface of multiple social groups.

Further empirical research is proposed to test the theoretical assumptions outlined in the paper. The research agenda is to conduct further empirical research adopting a socio-technical theoretical lens and appropriate qualitative or mixed-design methodologies. There are other socio-technical theoretical frameworks that could be used to explore socio-technical interactions in different ways, e.g. socio-technical systems theory, sociomateriality, actor-network theory, etc.

Three propositions are developed regarding the position of an innovation broker from the perspectives of multi-social-groups interfaces, shifting significance of the roles of innovation broker and the collaboration with government.

The authors outline the value of SCOT framework for innovation study within project-based construction sector. The authors contribute to better understanding of the role of innovation brokers in the system of construction innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to discover similarities and differences in the construction industry in China and the United States by using data analytic tools on data crawled from social media platforms.

The method comprised comprehensive data analytics using network link analysis and natural language processing tools to discover similarities and differences of social networks, topics of interests and sentiments and emotions on different social media platforms.

From the research, it showed that all clusters (construction company, construction worker, construction media and construction union) shared similar trends on follower-following ratios and sentiment analysis in both social media platforms. The biggest difference between the two countries is that public accounts (e.g. company, media and union) on Twitter posted more on public interests, including safety and energy.

The research contributes to knowledge about an alternative method of data collection for both academia and industry practitioners. Statistical bias can be introduced by only using social media platform data. The analyzed four clusters can be further divided to reflect more fine-grained groups of construction industries. The results can be integrated into other analyses based on traditional methodologies of data collection such as questionnaire surveys or interviews.

The research provides a comparative study of the construction industries in China and the USA among four clusters using social media platform data.

Construction projects have huge impacts on the social sustainability of the neighbouring community. The purpose of this paper is to identify and understand the key factors of a construction project that contribute to the social sustainability of a neighbourhood.

Questionnaire surveys relating to two case studies of regeneration projects in Saudi Arabia were carried out to ascertain and analyse the perceptions of residents of the neighbourhood communities in which the projects were built.

The results derived from factor analysis suggested five significant underlying social factors: health and physical comfort, accessibility, integration, economy and participation. These are defined as the core social functions necessary for enhancing social sustainability in the neighbourhood community as a result of new construction.

Ideally, a construction project will create spaces where people can interact socially, develop a sense of community and grow and prosper. This study reveals how the neighbours of the project felt about it and what sort of input they wanted to have in the design, construction and operation of the facility. For developers emphasising sustainability, this is the essential data.

This paper aims to propose a framework that puts the stakeholders at the forefront of achieving sustainability in the social context. This research, thus, argues that the social sustainability outcomes in construction are best achieved by taking into account the satisfactions of the stakeholders.

Based on sustainability and equity theories, a dynamic assessment model has been developed to evaluate the contributions of projects in a social context. Multiple stakeholders and their differing interests associated with the construction projects have been integrated using social network analysis. The mapping of the relationships between the project stakeholders, with respect to their relative stakes and seven social core functions, have been integrated in the assessment model.

The findings of this research suggest that the degree of satisfying the needs of diverse stakeholders is highly significant in achieving social sustainability performance of projects. Using a case study from Saudi Arabia, the applicability and significance of the assessment model has been demonstrated. The application of the model provides the opportunity to identify any problems and to enhance the overall performance of projects in the social context.

The functionality and efficacy of the model need to be further tested outside the Saudi Arabian region.

The research is original in the sense that for the first time, a novel approach has been developed, putting the stakeholders at the forefront of achieving sustainability outcomes in construction projects.

Socially responsible procurement (SRP) utilises government expenditure on construction procurement as a means of generating social value from construction activities. The paper proposes that SRP is a type of innovation delivering social value in the form of employment opportunities to local communities. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of SRP in Northern Ireland procurement and align the findings with existing literature.

A three-stage approach was employed, namely, first, a review of innovation and SRP literature; second, a survey of 50 Northern Ireland construction organisations to extract perceptions of SRP in practice; and third, qualitative analysis of the literature with the empirical insights.

Findings show that SRP is being driven by social legislation and being delivered by contractors as part of their contractual obligations. SRP represents a significant shift from standard construction practice which makes it challenging to implement using traditional processes and systems. It is found that SRP is generating social benefits through employment creation and the feedback from employees is largely positive. However, it is proposed that contractors need to adopt a more person-centric approach to the implementation of SRP to sustain the benefits being currently evidenced.

The study suggests that there is an urgent need for more holistic measurement of impacts and outcomes of SRP to ensure social targets are appropriate for the communities in which projects are being constructed.