Building Industry Studies
Summary
The building industry encompasses the conception, design, construction and maintenance of structures ranging from individual dwellings to major infrastructure. Research in this area brings together architecture, civil and structural engineering, project management, materials science and digital technologies. Key themes include enhancing productivity through lean construction methods and building information modelling, reducing embodied carbon and operational emissions via sustainable materials and circular-economy approaches, and strengthening supply-chain resilience against global disruptions. Studies of international market entry explore the adoption of technical standards and the influence of institutional and cultural contexts on contractor competitiveness. Parallel work on risk management examines methods to anticipate and mitigate uncertainties in cost, schedule and quality. Emerging fields exploit data analytics, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things sensors to monitor site operations in real time and optimise asset performance over whole-life cycles. By integrating theoretical modelling with empirical case studies from diverse regulatory environments, current research seeks to establish practical frameworks for delivering sustainable, resilient and cost-effective built environments on a global scale.
Research from Nature Portfolio
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Building Industry Studies publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in building industry studies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) principles: A framework of criteria assessing a company’s sustainability practices and ethical performance across environmental, social and governance dimensions.
Fuzzy Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA-F): A multi-criteria decision-making method that applies fuzzy logic to rank and weight qualitative and quantitative factors when information is imprecise.
Institutional distance: The extent of difference between home and host country regulatory, cultural and normative systems influencing international operations.
International Construction Standards (ICS): Agreed technical guidelines and specifications that ensure consistent quality, safety and performance across cross-border building projects.
Structural Equation Modelling (SEM): A statistical technique for evaluating complex relationships between observed measures and underlying latent constructs.
References
- How Do International Contractors Choose Target Market Based on Environmental, Social and Governance Principles? A Fuzzy Ordinal Priority Approach Model. Sustainability (2024).
- The impact of the international construction standard application capability on contractors’ competitiveness: Chinese contractors’ experience. Journal of Civil Engineering and Management (2020).
- Institutional Factors Impacting on International Construction Market Selection: Evidence from Chinese Contractors. Buildings (2022).
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