Search results

Design‐build project delivery will likely yield benefits when it is a rational choice by a program director or owner's construction manager. It is not well understood whether those benefits translate to construction programs where design‐build is mandated for the vast majority of project types. Such a determination for military construction (MILCON) is the purpose of this paper.

The methodology for the research involved a comparison of mean performance metrics for design‐build and design‐bid‐build MILCON projects. Once an appropriate sample of projects was identified, project data were corrected for project location, size and time‐value‐of‐money.

Military design‐build projects did experience a lower total cost of change orders as well as a reduced change order cost associated with field changes. Also, statistical analysis demonstrated no significant difference in project performance metrics based on facility type. These results indicate that design‐build project delivery method can work equally well on all types of MILCON projects and is an effective system for cost and scope control, but that some of the expected schedule performance gains underlying the decision to use design‐build will be difficult to achieve on all MILCON projects.

The paper presents advantages and disadvantages of utilising design‐build to MILCON projects by facility types.

Early contractor involvement (ECI) faces many barriers because it differs from traditional business practices. Public owners, especially, face a major challenge because they must comply with international and national legislation. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework that illustrates the various approaches that public project owners can take to implement ECI.

In addition to a literature review, three groups of case studies were carried out. The case studies were based on 54 semi-structured in-depth interviews with key personnel from 21 Norwegian public projects and document study.

In all, 25 approaches to ECI were identified during the research. Twelve of these were used in the cases studied.

There are several approaches to ECI that are suitable for public owners. However, the contractor’s contribution depends on which approach is implemented and how it is implemented.

As original contribution, this study presents a novel framework that defines options for implementing ECI in public projects. Furthermore, this paper provides insights on how ECI can be implemented in public projects based on Norwegian experiences. Although the empirical data of the study is limited to Norwegian public projects, this study contributes to knowledge about how to implement ECI internationally.

At a time when governmental corruption seems rife and administrations grow ever more secretive, the whistleblower is a crucial resource in journalism’s attempts to make accountable those who wield power. Yet despite legislation that is meant to protect employees and officials who expose wrongdoing, a governmental “war on whistleblowers” has made the hazards faced by many whistleblowers increasingly grim. This chapter explores the role of the journalist/whistleblower collaboration in disclosing important, but sensitive, information involving national security. In discussing case studies of those who have braved the government’s anger, we examine not only the circumstances of these breaches, but also their political and legal repercussions.

This paper assesses the ability of the minimally verbal child with autism to recognise their own voice. The rationale for this study rests in recent advances in technology aimed at making the voice of speech generating devices (SGDs) sound more like the child using them (van Santen and Black, 2009). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the child’s ability to actually recognise the sound of their own voice in a series of short experiments using computer-based methodology.

Using a voice-face matching computerised paradigm, the performance of 33 children with autism was compared to that of 27 children with developmental delay (DD), and 33 typically developing (TD) children. The children were matched for verbal and non-verbal ability and a training period was conducted prior to the main test to ensure children’s understanding of what was expected of them.

The findings of this study suggest that the child with autism recognise the sound of their own voice at test, but with much greater difficulty than age-and-ability matched comparison groups. The implications of this finding are useful for researchers in the field of speech mimicry technology and manufacturers of SGD software packages. The paper also provides empirical insights about how the child with autism may process voice in their everyday social interactions.

Some limitations to this study exist, for instance, there were only a small number of presentations involving self-voice in this task. This may have over simplified the process for the young TD children and the children with DD. Nevertheless, it is striking that despite being matched for non-verbal mental age, the children with autism performed significantly less well than either of the other two groups of children. However, future studies would benefit from adjusting the number of presentations of voice and face accordingly. It is also important to note that for some children with autism the simultaneous presentation of faces and voices may act more as an interference effect (Cook and Wilding, 1997; Joassin et al., 2004) than a facilitation effect (Molholm et al., 2002). Future studies may wish to test a subgroup on voice recognition without the aid of visual prompts.

The paper includes implications for the type of voice children with autism may prefer to use when communicating via a SGD. The authors suggest that if the child does not recognise or prefer the sound of their own natural voice on such devices, partial or complete abandonment of the SGD may occur.

This paper fulfils an identified need to research how children’s abilities and preferences can be taken into account at the point of decision making for particular communication tools.

Facility design standardization strategy has considerable advantages, highlighted by its widespread and consistent use in the shipbuilding and manufacturing industries. However, capital projects have failed to realize these benefits. The primary rationale behind this problem is the lack of proper understanding of design standardization, more specifically the benefits and equally importantly, the trade-offs of design standardization in capital projects. Therefore, this study highlights 13 benefits and six trade-offs of standardization in connection to design standardization, along with specific examples.

To achieve the study objectives, the researchers identified the most impactful benefits and trade-offs in terms of economic impact by surveying prominent players in the industry. Furthermore, the researchers examined 43 actual case projects (a case study) executed with the standardization strategy to evaluate the industry's status in terms of the levels of advantage achievement and disadvantage incurrence.

The results of this survey show that design once, reuse multiple times and design and procurement in advance are the most impactful benefits. Similarly, susceptible to changes in the market conditions is one of the top trade-offs that can be incurred in capital projects when implementing standardization. The results also highlight that design once, reuse multiple times is one of the most achieved benefits in standardized capital projects today, while cost of establishing the design standard is the most incurred trade-off.

This study provides important insight into how standardization strategy can be advantageous while also enriching the literature about pitfalls expected from standardization. Moreover, this study's results will help the industrial sector achieve higher levels of design standardization by providing a better understanding of the benefits and trade-offs of design standardization.

This paper aims to explore the impact of the joint operation of affordability policies and whether their impact is meaningful relative to the size of the affordability crisis. Its purpose is to construct the features of a comprehensive policy package linked to a measurable outcome: solving the affordability crisis in Auckland. This study investigates the scale and nature of an affordability package that responds to three research and policy questions: What should the rate of annual growth of affordable housing be to solve the affordability crisis? Consequently, how long would it take to solve it? And how much would that policy package cost?

In this paper, the authors argue that the disjoint operation of affordability policies is one of the reasons why their impacts relative to the size of the affordability crisis has been small or negligible. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that affordability is as much about raising households’ incomes as it is about lowering housing prices. This study uses a modelling-based framework to simulate some of the levers that local and central governments have to affect housing prices and affordability: direct intervention on the supply-side and subsidies. Specifically, this simulates retention-and-targeting (RT) programs and subsidies to raise deposits via shared ownership (SO) schemes.

This study finds that solving the affordability crisis would take a decade if the supply of affordable housing increases by at least 45% annually. With the introduction of RT and SO programs, it could still be solved within a decade, where the required growth rate decreases to 35%. However, for growth rates between 5% and 10%, the policy goal is met in approximately 40 years, and the SO program becomes exceedingly expensive.

Housing affordability is one of the hottest policy issues in New Zealand and the developed world. In the past decade, a number of affordability policies have been introduced with limited success due to their lack of interoperability and siloed efforts. Results in this paper should be interpreted as the boundaries of what is feasible and realistic in the realm of affordability policies. Therefore, its contribution relies on investigating the multiple effects if the financial, administrative and political barriers to RT and SO programs could be overcome. Its scope is a blueprint for the design of policies in other cities where unaffordability has become extreme.

The authors probe the relationships between country institutional support for entrepreneurship and new venture survival. Specifically, the authors unpack the nuanced influences of entrepreneurs' perceived environmental uncertainty and their subsequent entrepreneurial behavioral profiles and how this particularly bolsters venture survival in contexts with underdeveloped institutions for entrepreneurship.

Coleman (1990) ‘bathtub’ framework is applied to develop a model and propositions surrounding how and when emerging market entrepreneur's perceptions of their countries institutional support toward entrepreneurship can ultimately enhance new venture survival.

Entrepreneurs' interpretations of regulatory, cognitive and normative institutional support for private enterprise helps them embrace uncertainties more accurately reflective of “on the ground” realities and stimulates constructive entrepreneurial behaviors. These are critical for increasing survival prospects in characteristically turbulent, emerging market contexts that typically lack reliable formal resources for cultivating nascent ventures.

This paper has implications for international policymakers seeking to stimulate and sustain entrepreneurial ventures in emerging markets. The authors shed light on the practical importance of understanding the social realities and interpretations of entrepreneurs in a given country relating to their actual perceptions of support for venturing—cautioning a tendency for outsiders to over-rely on aggregated econometric indices and various national ‘doing business' rankings.

This study is the first to create a conceptual framework on the mechanisms of how entrepreneurs in emerging economies affect new venture survival. Drawing on Coleman's bathtub (1990), the authors develop propositional arguments for a multilevel sequential framework that considers how developing economies' country institutional profiles (CIP) influence entrepreneurs' perceptions of environmental uncertainty. Subsequently, this cultivates associated entrepreneurial behavior profiles, which ultimately enhance (inhibit) venture survival rates. Further, the authors discuss the boundary conditions of this regarding how the national culture serves to moderate each of these key relationships in both positive and negative ways.