Servitization in construction: Towards a focus on transitional routines

Construction firms are increasingly compelled to take into account the through-life performance of the buildings they create. In this article, we examine these trends in relation to the Product-Service literature (commonly referred to as ÔservitizationÕ) to explore the implications of new business models within the construction industry. It was found that while the range of promising opportunities and problems of greater servitization in the construction industry have been widely explored, there remains a limited understanding of the conditions and consequences of transitional practices involved in greater servitization. Therefore, through the review of the servitization literature, we identify the need to refocus research attention on organizational routines and practices as the unit of analysis to better understand how organisations can make the transition towards more servitized offerings. Rather than taking servitization as the starting point for overhauling existing routines, we argue for the need to study routines as they evolve, to see how a servitization culture is gradually incorporated in everyday management in construction. Thus, the contribution of this article is to propose a shift away from viewing servitization simply as the imposition of a new business model, but rather by mash-ups of existing, complementary and contradictory routines that organisations realise as they make sense of servitization in practice rather than in theory.