Stakeholder engagement is an undertheorized area of construction project management research. Often simplified as an act of corporate social responsibility, the complexity of the engagement concept means its processes and consequences evade closer scrutiny and analysis. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of stakeholder engagement to reveal its theoretical and practical complexity; two complimentary models of stakeholder engagement are mobilized to analyze empirical data from a hospital case-study project. The result is a retheorization of stakeholder engagement as a complex entwined process of responsibility, organizational action, and work package requirements where stakeholder engagement and agency (i.e., ethical treatment of stakeholders) are understood as separate variables that result in shifts among responsible, paternalistic, neoclassic, and strategic behaviors. The contribution lies in a more sophisticated understanding of stakeholder engagement being attained: shifts between stakeholder engagement and agency define relations between parties in corporate social responsibility (CSR) terms; the ethical aspirations of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) organizations are impacted by daily project activities; and the unique characteristics of stakeholder engagement in construction (e.g., binding of party interests, effect of subcontractor entry, and collective blame/praise) are brought into focus. Resulting recommendations include periodic review of engagement activity to ensure the CSR strategic objectives of organizations are aligned to stakeholder engagement work.

A pronounced gap often exists between expected and actual safety performance in the construction industry. The multifaceted causes of this performance gap are resulting from the misalignment between design assumptions and actual construction processes that take place on-site. In general, critical factors are rooted in the lack of interoperability around the building and work-environment information due to its heterogeneous nature. To overcome the interoperability challenge in safety management, this paper represents the development of an ontological model consisting of terms and relationships between these terms, creating a conceptual information model for construction safety management and linking that ontology to IfcOWL. The developed ontology, named Safety and Health Exchange (SHE), comprises eight concepts and their relationships required to identify and manage safety risks in the design and planning stages. The main concepts of the developed ontology are identified based on reviewing accident cases from 165 Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) and 31 Press Releases from the database of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the United Kingdom. Consequently, a semantic mapping between the developed ontology and IfcOWL (the most popular ontology and schema for interoperability in the AEC sector) is proposed. Then several SPARQL queries were developed and implemented to evaluate the semantic consistency of the developed ontology and the cross-mapping. The proposed ontology and cross-mapping gained recognition for its innovation in utilising OpenBIM and won the BuildingSMART professional research award 2020. This work could facilitate developing a knowledge-based system in the BIM environment to assist designers in addressing health and safety issues during the design and planning phases in the construction sector.

This paper investigates the emergence of collaboration on a UK construction project pioneering a novel form of project procurement (Integrated Project Insurance: IPI). Using a projects-as-practice lens and an action research approach, examination of linked episodes of project activity chart the unfolding of collaboration praxis in an IPI context through the frequent interplays of praxis (situated doings), practice (rules, values, policies) and practitioners working together. The analysis focuses on important requirements in IPI: that project practitioners, supported by a facilitator, collaborate to develop joint solutions to project requirements and share responsibility for them. Findings show how practitioners understood how to collaborate through the progressive enactment of working together rather than by developing a prior agreement about what collaboration would involve. Thus, the doing of collaboration mattered more than sayings about it in how practitioners created meaning in developing new collaboration praxis. Through this enactment the facilitator role is understood more as a practitioner in the development of collaboration praxis than solely as a convenor of collaboration. Findings also show how the micro-activities of practitioners may be illuminated using a projects-as-practice lens combined with a focus on interconnected episodes of project life to understand the emergence of praxis on construction projects.

A continuing need to improve health, safety and wellbeing in construction has led to multiple research projects and technological innovations. One such innovation is the Safety Risk Library: a repository of data that functions in BIM environments to assist designers and contractors in identifying health and safety risk scenarios and offer suitable validated treatments to mitigate their effects. This paper reports on the deployment of this library in several construction projects across the United Kingdom and reviews expert and practitioner opinions of such digital solutions for improving health and safety in the future. This paper makes several contributions. The description of an effective process for knowledge base creation, including the data extraction workflow, the anonymization of data and the definition of communication channels aligned to project working practices, is instructive for innovation developers, providing informative guidance through lessons learned. The discussion of expert and practitioner opinions of the functional knowledge base to improve health and safety performance could inform further technological developments in the field and provide empirical insights for developers. Additionally, the alignment of the Safety Risk Library to existing industry standards (PAS1192:6) for better sharing and use of structured health and safety information illustrates how digital solutions can connect directly with industry standards to facilitate improvements to working practices whilst also changing perceptions of how risks may be visualised, understood and actioned by duty holders engaged in construction projects.

An information architecture is a high-level, conceptual design for a system which describes the fundamental requirements and principles of a system, and details its essential elements and characteristics. I conducted a comprehensive review of published literature on telecare, including government reports and case study papers. This enabled a complete picture to be constructed of telecare system components. The components can be divided into four separate categories: human components, ICT components, telecare operational units and supportive elements. The system requirements cover functional, non-functional and informational requirements. Telecare holds great potential for all sectors of society. Its true value may only be realised when the nature of information within the telecare system is fully understood. The thorough analysis, manipulation and usage of system data are the key to the future success of telecare services.