ARCOM 2018: 34th Annual Conference – Belfast, UK
A Productive Relationship: Balancing Fragmentation and Integration
ARCOM 2018 returns to Belfast, drawing on the hospitality of Queen’s University in partnership with the Dublin Institute for Technology. Our research communities are coming together to achieve more than political rhetoric.
At a time when the modern world grapples with the challenges of divided nations, the need for greater collaboration to build communities of practice for resilience and sustainability seems paramount. Northern and Southern Ireland, not without their political challenges, are rich in communities and enterprise that surpass much of the divide. Important to this conference are the feats of great engineering borne from cultures that embrace technology and a willingness to explore. The progressive mobile have and continue to shape our built environment. Without such transient and powerful workforces, holding on passionately to their culture, would we achieve so much?
We invite paper submissions that address the central theme, ‘Balancing fragmentation and integration’. Fragmentation of the construction industry has often been highlighted as a problem, and as a reason to integrate. Yet, there is a need to deepen our understanding of fragmentation and to understand whether it is not only problematic, but also a productive force for good. Questions are raised around whether fragmentation is necessarily a bad thing, and whether integration is always the solution. Should we be striving for a balance between fragmentation and integration? What does this balance look like, and what implications will balancing fragmentation and integration have on policy, practice and research in construction?
The ARCOM Conference is an inclusive conference that covers a wide range of topics pertinent to construction work, including:
- Building information modelling
- Equality and diversity
- Human resources management
- Information management
- Infrastructure development
- Offsite construction
- Planning, productivity and quality
- Research and education
- Sustainability in the built environment
- Construction design & technology
- Disaster management
- Health, safety and well-being
- Law and contracts
- Other related themes considered
We invite the submission of 300-word abstracts, which should be uploaded via the MyARCOM portal on www.arcom.ac.uk before 2359hrs GMT on Friday 12 January 2018. Abstracts should be informative and contain a clear purpose statement and research question, and information about the methods and key findings. Abstracts that successfully pass through the double-blind peer-reviewed process will be invited for full paper development.
Since 2016, the ARCOM Conference has introduced thematic tracks to better steer more focussed conversations around the general theme of the conference. To build a productive relationship within and between academia and industry, and in finding a balance between fragmentation and integration, we invite authors to consider and respond to the following themes and tracks when developing the full papers.
Emerging themes include, though are not restricted to:
- Construction and the digital divide (unequal distribution of who has access, skills and competence): Practices in the construction industry have recently been transformed with the use of more digital technologies. This is arguably pursued at the relative neglect (and expense) of the analogue world. There are questions raised around the unequal distribution of who has access, skills and competence to digitalise construction. Moreover, how policy-makers, practitioners and researchers value the non-digital in order to build a stronger, more productive construction industry?
- Who counts as a stakeholder and how are they engaged: Who and what counts as a stakeholder and how do they count? Stakeholder engagement has been a longstanding matter of concern in managing construction. The call to balance integration and fragmentation has also, in recent times, been manifested in the tensions found between democratisation and privatisation of the built environment. Current scholarship on stakeholder engagement has also broadened to consider the influences of humans and non-humans alike. What do these developments mean for changing the ways in thinking about which stakeholders count and how stakeholder engagement is done?
- Construction Management Research: Construction management as a research field has developed over the past few years to engage with scholarship in the wider management and organisational studies, as well as theories from the social sciences. While this engagement has resulted in more rigorous, theoretically-informed studies in construction management, there is also a need to maintain the distinctiveness of the field. In our attempts to mainstream construction management, how can we engage more fruitfully with the other disciplines and fields such that we maintain a strong sector-based identity while contributing to the mainstream?