Kuitert, Lizet (2021) The balancing act: How public construction clients safeguard public values in a changing construction industry. PhD thesis, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
Abstract
Public bodies acting in the construction industry have to deal with major transitional issues, such as globalization and urbanization, population ageing, climate change and digitalization. Moreover, the public domain, private parties and society are becoming increasingly interdependent. As a result, safeguarding public values in the built environment has become ever more complex. Public bodies face the challenge to adhere to collective public values while confronted with private and societal values of external partners. This means that they have to deal with value pluralism and value-conflicts. In research, scarce attention has been paid to providing guidance to practitioners for dealing with multi-value trade-offs in operational processes. Hence, this research provides a construction-sector specific operationalization and a network perspective to the field of public value research. This research highlights the important role to be played by public commissioning in terms of safeguarding public values. It consists of three qualitative studies that utilize a range of different methods, including interviews, observations and document analysis. By this the research provides a contemporary perspective through which to study and execute the safeguarding of public values by public clients in the transition towards network governance in the construction industry. The dynamics of the sector-specific value interests of public construction clients, the occurrence of value conflicts in commissioning, and the safeguarding processes within both internal and external commissioning are studied. The practical implications derived from the research were translated into a value dialogue tool that can be used by public construction clients to professionalize safeguarding in their daily practice.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Hermans, M H and Volker, L |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | public commissioning; public values; construction industry; governance; value management; procurement |
| Index terms: | face, interview, digitalization, society, climate change, population, commissioning, globalization, practitioner, qualitative study, document analysis, urbanization, becoming, governance, public value, construction industry, public client, public construction, dynamics, built environment, value management |
| Subjects: | management, sociology, political science, systems engineering, economic factors, industry analysis, infrastructure and transport systems, research design and methodology, business, data collection methods, data science, building construction, demography, completion, philosophical process, communities and social development, practitioner, climate science, digital technology, urban planning, psychology |
| Topics: | Organizational Design, International Construction, Digital Applications, Urban Studies, Governance, Roles and Professions, Stakeholder Management, Research Practice, Value Management, Quality Management, Sustainability, Engineering Principles |
| Descriptive scope: | 5 PCTEA |
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