Interfirm relationships within the construction industry towards the emergence of networks? a comparative study between France and the UK (BL)

The principal aim of the study was to show that the current state of the industry is the result of a strategy pursued by the main contractors. The Industry's fragmentation, generated by their merchanting role (Ball, 1988) and their positions of power, and by the changing market conditions over the past 20 years, created vicious circles in the Industry's systemic production system that damaged, in turn, production conditions. Multiple dysfunctions appeared in the Industry due to the disappearance of traditional regulation procedures between the players in the construction process, contributing to its discredited image, as a result of spiralling costs and client dissatisfaction. An historical overview of the Industry, both in France and in the UK, revealed similarities in the developments of their respective national industries with variations related to the players' influence and structural roles in their construction processes. Over the past 10 years, the main contractors have pursued various integrative techniques. Labelled project management, production management or quality management, all attempting to reform some aspects of interfirm relationships without targeting them as the principal problem. The latest organisational form to emerge: partnering, adopted by isolated French construction companies in the 80s and by a few pioneers in the UK since 1994, provides the basis for an overall assessment of the relationships between clients, designers, engineers, main contractors and subcontractors.

Different case studies were used to explore the determinants of partnering implementation or, in the case of the French study, the reasons for its failure. This qualitative research, based on longitudinal field research methods (Huber and Van de Ven, 1995) and other qualitative methodologies (Miles and Huberman, 1994, Yin, 1989), highlighted the main organisational features of project partnering and its performance. It also retraced the logical path towards long-term partnering - in other words networks - that some British firms are already pursuing and it also studied the conditions for network diffusion in the Construction Industry.

In conclusion, the three theoretical approaches have been applied in order to determine the one that best explains the situation encountered in the Construction Industry. Among these, the evolutionary approaches provide some particularly interesting concepts to help understand the UK and French Construction Industry's situation and the reasons for network emergence in the UK.