Molad, C B (1996) Mobilizing an industry towards change: The construction industry's effort to introduce electronic commerce for the twenty-first century and beyond. PhD thesis, Union Institute, USA.
Abstract
The Project Demonstrating Excellence is centered around a personal journal kept by the learner while attending the Union program. The journal pertains to her personal experience as a change agent in the construction industry in the years 1992-1995. It chronicles the establishment of two main grass roots organizations, the Construction Industry Action group (CIAG) and The Consortium for the Development of STEP Standards in the Process Industry (PlantSTEP). The learner was instrumental, together with many of her peers, in establishing these organizations and, through them, helping the US construction industry acquaint itself with a new information technology called Electronic Commerce. The PDE analyzes the events portrayed in the journal in the context of changes in American industry in the nineties that have focused on the use of information technology as a catalyst of change and re-engineering. It also charts the struggles of the learner, as a woman specializing in technical management, within the confines of a highly male-dominated industry, the construction industry. The learner uses personal experiences to create a basis for a new role model for women seeking to succeed as change agents in the corporate world while maintaining a reputation as a knowledge expert in a highly technical area. The PDE assumes it will lay the first layer of foundation for additional research and development work by people to be inspired by the personal accounts recorded in this work.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | standards; women; commerce; electronic commerce; information technology; consortium |
| Index terms: | electronic commerce, journal, research and development, program, information technology, agent, role model, consortium, commerce, women, construction industry |
| Subjects: | practitioner, computing systems, research dissemination and communication, digital commerce, software systems, industry analysis, partnership management, asset management, sociology, research management |
| Topics: | Stakeholder Management, Roles and Professions, Business Strategy, Research Practice, Digital Applications |
| Descriptive scope: | 3 PCT |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here