Skill Development: Role of Industry-Academia Dyadic Collaboration for Sustaining the Construction Supply Chain in Rural India

Abstract

Supply Chain Management (SCM) plays a significant role in today’s business practices, which indicates the management perspective of all the tiers of supplier’s, that is, warehouses, distribution centres, production and retailers, through which raw materials are acquired, transformed and delivered to customers through various stakeholders (Handfield and Nichols, Business and Economics, Prentice Hall, 1999). The main objective of this chapter is to examine the relationship between academics and industries and their collaboration effect to skill development to the rural Indian construction industry. The research mainly builds around the theoretical dimensions of the Henry Mintzberg (The Nature of Managerial Work, Harper and Row, 1973) role of management decisions involved for a dyadic collaboration with the supply chain stakeholders. Therefore, the paper is likely to be discursive and thus cover and revolve around the philosophical discussions of the Henry Mintzberg theory in the construction industry of Rural Indian context and thus identifies the various measures of challenges and opportunities of sustaining the construction supply chain. Its emphasis that an efficient Academia- Industry partnership is crucial for any construction industry, which influences the skills development needed for the next generation of construction skills, especially in a sustainability and rural context as recommended by Singh and Bhowmick (Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 807–815, 2015). The research contributes to both the theory and practice of construction industry and the rural context, in order to improve the labour productivity and social dimension aspects to sustainability.