Dr Adeyemi Akintola

This paper investigates the determinants of injury severities in pedestrian-motor vehicle accidents at signalised and unsignalised junctions, and at physically-controlled and human-controlled crossings in Scotland. The accident data were drawn from the official police crash report database of the UK spanning a period between 2010 and 2018. Correlated random parameter ordered probit models with heterogeneity in the means were developed in order to account for the multi-layered impact of unobserved heterogeneity on statistical estimation. The model estimation results showed that the severities of accident injuries are affected by roadway, location, weather, vehicle, and driver characteristics as well as temporal attributes (including time and day of the accident). Factors such as the urban context, lighting and weather conditions and road surface conditions were found to result in correlated random parameters, thus capturing the intricate, yet interactive effects of unobserved heterogeneity, and particularly the unobserved behavioural response of road users to different traffic control types at junctions and crossings. Vehicle type, driver’s gender and day-of-the-week were observed to influence the random parameters' distributions. Empirically, the results showcase variations in the determinants of injury severities at signalised and unsignalised junctions, and at physically-controlled and human-controlled crossings. Even though most of these variations were related to the magnitude of impact of the determinants, differences in the directional effects on injury severities were also identified, mainly for factors related to weather conditions, hazard presence on the road, and temporal characteristics of the accidents.

Purpose

This paper presents a review of research methodologies used in addressing problems in the financial management of property and construction journals from 2005 to 2020.

Design/methodology/approach

Content analysis of 258 research papers published in the Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction was carried out, enabling the exploration of research approaches, epistemology, strategies, data collection and data analysis methods used in addressing problems researched in the area of financial management of property and construction

Findings

The findings show that quantitative approaches and methods dominate, whereas qualitative and mixed methods were prominent in-depth understanding of a topics were needed. Interestingly, almost a third of the publications did not adopt quantitative approaches. In some journal issues, there was relatively high use of qualitative and multi-method approaches and up to 12% of the articles published over the past 16 years could be described as based on pragmatism.

Research limitations/implications

An important implication of this paper is that a conventionally number-based area of research does not preclude the use of qualitative and mixed approaches. The findings are only generalisable to the Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction.

Practical implications

Financial management researchers could benefit greatly by considering pluralistic approaches more in the design of their studies.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is an original synthesis of the articles published between 2005 and 2020. It provides new insight into the use of research methodologies by authors and how they have been combined to address their research problems. It further investigates an old issue or question about methodological choice-making using new evidence and original empirical work.

The relative low capital cost and contributions to mitigating global warming have favoured the continuous construction and operation of nuclear power plants across the world. One critical phase in the operation of nuclear plants for ensuring safety and security of radioactive products and by-products is decommissioning. With the advent of digital twinning in the building information modelling (BIM) methodology, efficiency and safety can be improved from context-focus access to regulations pertaining demolition of structures, and cleaning-up of radioactivity inherent in nuclear stations. A BIM-driven framework to achieve a more regulation-aware and safer decommissioning of nuclear plants is proposed.

Purpose. Critics of claims about BIM’s capability to revolutionise construction industry practices, describe it as overhyped, fallacious, and therefore suggest that there is need for a more critical examination of its’ change impacts. Others have posited that the changes BIM induces are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In this vein, a careful analysis of the nature of such changes was undertaken to distil actual changes that happened, and the type of agency that brings such changes about.

Design. Drawing from appropriate qualitative research strategies, data was collected through key informant interviews from consulting organisations in South Africa that have implemented BIM within their organisations and on projects. 

Findings.Changes in organisations’ work practices were evident in their workflows, formal/informal methods of interaction, norms, leadership and authority structures, remuneration, and the way work was conceived or conceptualised. Furthermore, changes in organisational work practices do not solely occur through the direct agency of the BIM tool’s implementation. Instead, BIM-induced change occurs by delegated, conditional and needs-based agency – which are not mutually exclusive.

Originality. The nature of changes in professional work practices could be misconstrued as being solely due to the actions of agents who actively participate in implementing BIM. The discussion in the literature has been advanced from general to specific theoretical understandings of BIM-induced change, that emphasise the need for construction stakeholders to actively participate in developing the innovations that drive change in the industry rather than hand the power to drive change to BIM authoring and management application developers who have less stake in the industry. 

Recent critiques of the BIM literature describe it as largely devoid of critical theoretical perspectives and theorisation capable of explaining the nature of change in work practices in a holistic manner. In response, the authors argue from a theoretical standpoint, that implementing BIM within professional work practices (as activity systems) induces their evolution through dysfunctions created within the systems and their resolution. Cases of professional organisations in South Africa that have implemented BIM within their organisation and in multi-organisational projects, helped to develop new theoretical insights into how professional work practices evolve using activity theory-based re-description of the data. Changes in professional work practices were analysed sequentially within the framework, confirming theoretical propositions and revealing the dynamics between and within the interconnected system of actors, their object, tools, rules guiding work, roles they assume, and the stakeholders. Essentially, the findings imply that the implementation ofBIM significantly changes work practices within organisations, but gradually and over time. This supports an evolutionary, rather than a radical or revolutionary, view ofBIM-induced change. This theoretical perspective could explain future dimensions of change in professional work practices involving BIM, and indeed similar work mediating tools. 

In response to the demands of implementing building information modeling (BIM), new roles and job titles have emerged. However, it can be argued that these roles fundamentally fall within the scope of the traditional functions of existing core professional service providers, although being carried out through different means and methods. This study examines the circumstances that have created the necessity for these new roles in the South African context and also questions the sustainability of their legitimacy. Data were collected using key informant interviews with construction professional service providers (CPSPs) in South Africa and analyzed through thematic content analysis. A deep conceptualization and new theoretical insight is developed on the phenomenon of new role creation and legitimation. It was established that new BIM role takers are legitimated to exercise authority within project teams and organizations mainly by leveraging superior knowledge as a strategic resource. By implication, they will remain legitimate only as long as the constraint prompting their creation subsists, i.e., core professionals’ BIM knowledge deficiencies, thereby affirming that the new BIM roles are transitory and unsustainable.

E-tendering is a veritable tool for increasing productivity and empowering construction industry professionals to take better control of the tendering process. However, despite the administrative and managerial benefits obtainable by the adoption of e-tendering, the challenges and associated risks are rife. Thus, this study set out to assess the state of the art of e-tendering in the Nigerian construction industry. Using a cross- sectional survey type of research design, data was sought from quantity surveyors, architects, engineers and contractors in the industry. The results of this survey report an elementary level of knowledge about e-tendering among Nigerian construction industry professionals. There is a general lack of basic facilities necessary for the process coupled with a low level of proficiency in its usage. Irregular power supply, financial implications of putting up e-tendering infrastructure and poor telecommunications infrastructure rank highest among factors Legal backing for electronic transactions in Nigeria is also deficient. Government effort at creation of better exchange portals and improvement of existing e-tendering portals was found to be inadequate. However, despite the ambivalent disposition of industry professionals towards e-tendering, the prospect of its adoption in the Nigerian construction industry by construction industry professionals is still high as evidenced by the results of this research.