The Need for a New Systemic Approach to Study Collaboration in the Construction Industry

Abstract

An important particularity of the construction industry lies in its fragmentation and the fact that the various actors involved in construction projects come from different organizations and have to work together temporarily in order to achieve a common objective. Thus, a good collaboration is critical for the projects’ success but remain challenging in the industry despite much research effort. The rise of Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach is full of promises but to fully benefit from such disruptive technology, it is necessary to understand how it impacts all the aspects of the construction industry. Unfortunately, the traditional analytical modeling approaches only present a static and mono-perspective image of a highly dynamic industry where many perspectives of the same situations cohabit, and mutual adjustment remains important. This article proposes a discussion on the need for a new systemic approach to complement the current analytic approaches in order to better understand the complexity of collaboration in the construction industry. It uses a systemic triangulation according to different levels of study (industry, project, firm and activity levels) in order to derivate the main relevant components to consider in the study of the construction industry as a complex system.