Kuitert, L; Volker, L and Hermans, M H (2017) Public commissioning in a new era: Public value interests of construction clients. In: Chan, P W and Neilson, C J (eds.) Proceedings of 33rd Annual ARCOM Conference, 4-6 September 2017, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK.
Abstract
In the project-based construction industry public and semi-public clients increasingly withdraw from direct delivery of public services and programmes. They increasingly depend on private parties to achieve public values and project outcomes by subcontracting at least part of their responsibilities in respect to the built environment using integrated contract forms. Due to their social-political responsibilities, public bodies retain having a special role in ensuring public values, only operational responsibility for creating public values gets transferred to the private market party. Classifying which public values to pursue, at what moment, in which situation or by what type of service delivery is a core professional task of construction clients and gets reflected in governance and project mechanisms. Today's project leaders need new skills and conceptual frameworks to cope with emerging disputes, conflicting interests, evolving requirements, and changes in the external environment. In this paper we aim to systematically explore the embedding of public values in public and semi-public commissioning organisations, and identify the value conflicts experienced by construction clients at strategic and tactic decision making levels. As data collection is still ongoing, the paper will, next to a theoretical framework, present the preliminary results of both a document analysis, of publicly available organisational documents and communication channels, and a set of 20-30 semi-structured interviews, using an interview protocol with open-ended questions. The interviews will be audio taped, transcribed verbatim to ensure reliability and analysed in Atlas.ti. For both studies the members of 'het Opdrachtgeversforum in de Bouw' (the Dutch Construction Client Forum) - a group of public and semi-public clients that work in the built environment positioned differently on the public-private continuum – will be the units of analysis. Further research will look at governance mechanisms and frameworks to deal with the identified experienced sector-specific conflicts.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | public value; project-based construction industry; responsibility; public construction client; public service delivery |
| Index terms: | project outcome, construction client, programme, document analysis, subcontracting, dispute, public services, governance, service delivery, interview, public value, construction industry, public client, conceptual framework, built environment, documents, commissioning, decision-making, public construction, integrated contract |
| Subjects: | data science, contractual arrangements, dispute resolution, practitioner, business, organization, project completion, data collection methods, political science, completion, administrative law, industry analysis, infrastructure and transport systems, building construction, decision analysis, sociology, project controls, professional development, service delivery, theoretical framing |
| Topics: | Engineering Principles, Information Management, Project Management, Research Practice, Governance, Procurement, Roles and Professions, Stakeholder Management, Risk Management, Supply Chain Management, Quality Management, Urban Studies, Legal Issues, Time Control |
| 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