Use of Document Management Systems - a Case Study of the Finnish Construction Industry

Triggered by the very quick proliferation of Internet connectivity, electronic document management (EDM) systems are now rapidly being adopted for managing the documentation that is produced and exchanged in construction projects. Nevertheless there are still substantial barriers to the efficient use of such systems, mainly of a psychological nature and related to insufficient training. This paper presents the results of empirical studies carried out during 2002 concerning the current usage of EDM systems in the Finnish construction industry. The studies employed three different methods in order to provide a multifaceted view of the problem area, both on the industry and individual project level. In order to provide an accurate measurement of overall usage volume in the industry as a whole telephone interviews with key personnel from 100 randomly chosen construction projects were conducted. The interviews showed that while around 1/3 of big projects already have adopted the use of EDM, very few small projects have adopted this technology. The barriers to introduction were investigated through interviews with representatives for half a dozen of providers of systems and ASP-services. These interviews shed a lot of light on the dynamics of the market for this type of services and illustrated the diversity of business strategies adopted by vendors. In the final study log files from a project which had used an EDM system were analysed in order to determine usage patterns. The results illustrated that use is yet incomplete in coverage and that only a part of the individuals involved in the project used the system efficiently, either as information producers or consumers. The study also provided feedback on the usefulness of the log files.

Where to Submit? Journal Choice by Construction Management Authors

Publishers of academic journals can be seen as service providers to authors, in addition to the traditional role of providers of research results to readers. The purpose of this study was to analyse how author choices of journal in construction management are affected by quality and service perceptions. Seven journals were identified and for each 2006 article, one author e-mail address was extracted. A web based questionnaire was sent to 397 authors and 35% responded. It was found that there were three journals regularly followed by at least half the respondents. Most of the other four journals have scopes broader than construction management and receive lower scores for characteristics such as impact on researchers. No open access journals were included, and authors in the field of construction management rarely post openly accessible copies of their manuscripts or publications on the web. Author ranking of journals for their next submission is found to be related to general criteria such as academic status, circulation figures and ISI indexation.

The Scholarly Journal Re-engineered: A Case Study of an Open Access Journal in Construction IT

Open access is a new model for the publishing of scientific journals enabled by the Internet, in which the published articles are freely available for anyone to read. During the 1990’s hundreds of individual open access journals were founded by groups of academics, supported by grants and unpaid voluntary work. During the last five years other types of open access journals, funded by author charges have started to emerge and also established publishers have started to experiment with different variations of open access. This article reports on the experiences of one open access journal (The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction, ITcon) over its ten year history. In addition to a straightforward account of the lessons learned the journal is also benchmarked against a number of competitors in the same research area and its development is put into the larger perspective of changes in scholarly publishing. The main findings are: That a journal publishing around 20-30 articles per year, equivalent to a typical quarterly journal, can sustainable be produced using an open source like production model. The journal outperforms its competitors in some respects, such as the speed of publication, availability of the results and balanced global distribution of authorship, and is on a par with them in most other respects. The key statistics for ITcon are: Acceptance rate 55 %. Average speed of publication 6-7 months. 801 subscribers to email alerts. Average number of downloads by human readers per paper per month 21.

CAD Standardization in Construction – a Process View

There has been a demand for uniform CAD standards in the construction industry ever since the large-scale introduction of computer aided design systems in the late 1980s. While some standards have been widely adopted without much formal effort, other standards have failed to gain support even though considerable resources have been allocated for the purpose. Establishing a standard concerning building information modeling has been one particularly active area of industry development and scientific interest within recent years. In this paper, four different standards are discussed as cases: the IGES and DXF/DWG standards for representing the graphics in 2D drawings, the ISO 13567 standard for the structuring of building information on layers, and the IFC standard for building product models. Based on a literature study combined with two qualitative interview studies with domain experts, a process model is proposed to describe and interpret the contrasting histories of past CAD standardisation processes.

How do Researchers Find and Retrieve Scientific Publications – A Case study of the Impact of the Internet on the Construction IT and Construction Management Research Communities

The World Wide Web provides the opportunity for a radically changed and much more efficient communication process for scientific results. A survey in the closely related domains of construction information technology and construction management was conducted in February 2000, aimed at measuring to what extent these opportunities are already changing the scientific information exchange and how researchers feel about the changes. The paper presents the results based on 236 replies to an extensive Web based questionnaire. 65% of the respondents stated their primary research interest as IT in A/E/C and 20% as construction management and economics. The questions dealt with how researchers find, access and read different sources; how much and what publications they read; how often and to which conferences they travel; how much they publish, and what are the criteria for where they eventually decide to publish. Some of the questions confronted traditional and electronic publishing with one final section dedicated to opinions about electronic publishing. According to the survey researchers already download half of the material that they read digitally from the Web. The most popular method for retrieving an interesting publication is downloading it for free from the author’s or publisher’s website. Researchers are not particularly willing to pay for electronic scientific publications. There is much support for a scenario of electronic journals available totally freely on the Web, where the costs could be covered by for instance professional societies or the publishing university. The shift that the Web is causing seems to be towards the "just in time" reading of literature. Also, frequent users of the Web rely less on scientific publications and tend to read fewer articles. If available with little effort, papers published in traditional journals are preferred; if not, the papers should be on the Web. In these circumstances, the role of paper-based journals published by established publishers is shifting from the core "information exchange" to the building of authors' prestige. The respondents feel they should build up their reputations by publishing in journals and relevant conferences, but then make their work freely available on the Web.

On the discursive construction of success/failure in narratives of post-merger integration

This article concentrates on the discursive constmction of success and failure in narratives of post-merger integration. Drawing on extensive interview material from eight Finnish-Swedish mergers and acquisitions, the empirical analysis leads to distinguishing four types of discourse — 'rationalistic', 'cultural', 'role-bound' and 'individualistic' — that narrators employ in recounting their experiences. In particular, the empirical material illustrates how the discursive frameworks enable specific (di.scursive) strategies and moves for (re)framing the success/failure, justification/legitimization of one's own actions, and (re)constniction of responsibility when dealing with socio-psychological pressures associated with success/failtire. The analysis also suggests that, as a result of making use of these discursive strategies and moves, success stories are likely to lead to overly optimistic or, in the case of failure stories, overly pessimistic views on the management's ability to control these change processes. Tliese findings imply that we should take the discursive elements that both constrain our descriptions and explanations seriously, and provide opportunities for more or less intentional (re)interpretations of postmerger integration or other organizational change processes.

Making sense of a transnational merger: Media texts and the (re)construction of power relations

In this study of symbolic power relations in a transnational merger, we suggest that the popular media can provide a significant arena for (re)constructing national identities and power in this kind of dramatic industrial restructuring, and are an under-utilized source of empirical data in research studies. Focusing on the press coverage of a recent Swedish-Finnish merger, we specify and illustrate a particular feature of discursive (re)construction of asymmetric power relations; superior (Swedish) and inferior (Finnish) national identities, which, we argue, are embedded in the history of colonization and domination between the two nations. The findings of the present study lead us to suggest that a lens taken from post-colonial theory is particularly useful in understanding the wider symbolic power implications of international industrial restructuring.

Being in between: An Ethnographic Study of Opera and Dialogical Identity Construction

The paradoxical co-existence of conflicting logics governs practices in cultural organizations. This requires ‘balancing acts’ between artistic and managerial efforts, which are often subjects to struggle among the organizational members. This ethnographic study aims to go beyond either-or thinking on the paradoxical organizational context by examining how the organizational members of an opera house construct views on their organization in dialogical meaning-making processes. Various professional groups, dozens of upcoming productions, increased international cooperation, and global competition combined with scarce financial resources make opera houses a complex though interesting context for organization studies. In order to provide a deeper knowledge of the internal dynamics of an opera organization this thesis takes an interpretative view to examine the ways organizational members construct and make sense of their organization. How is the opera organization constructed by the organizational members? How do the members draw on different logics when relating to their organization? Or what are the elements that characterize the relational processes of organizational identity construction in an opera organization? The thesis aims to answer these questions by providing a detailed description of the everyday life of an opera organization and a particular focus put on organizational identity construction. The processes of organizational identity construction are approached from a relational point of view. This may involve various relations between multiple positions, different professional groups, other organizations in the cultural field or between past and present understandings of an organization. The study shows that the construction of an opera organization involves not only the two conflicting logics of art and economy, but also the logic of a national institution. The study suggests also that organizational identities are constructed through processes related to the dialogics of positions, work and management practices. The dialogics involve various struggles through which the organizational members find themselves between the different organizational aspects such as visiting ‘stars’ and an ensemble or between ‘Finnishness’ of opera productions and internationalization. In addition, the study argues that a struggle between different elements is a general mode of relation in cultural organizations and therefore an inherent and enduring aspect in the organizational identity construction. However, the space of ‘being in between’ involves both the enabling and constraining elements in the dialogical identity construction in the context of cultural organizations, which present the struggle in a more generative light.

Time Dimension in Consumers’ Image Construction Processes: Introducing Image Heritage and Image-in-use

This paper focuses on the time dimension in consumers’ image construction processes. Two new concepts are introduced to cover past consumer experiences about the company – image heritage, and the present image construction process - image-in-use. Image heritage and image-in-use captures the dynamic, relational, social, and contextual features of corporate image construction processes. Qualitative data from a retailing context were collected and analysed following a grounded theory approach. The study demonstrates that consumers’ corporate images have long roots in past experiences. Understanding consumers’ image heritage provides opportunities for understanding how consumers might interpret management initiatives and branding activities in the present.

On the Narrative Construction of Multinational Corporations: An Antenarrative Analysis of Legitimation and Resistance in a Cross-Border Merger

Although extant research has highlighted the role of discourse in the cultural construction of organizations, there is a need to elucidate the use of narratives as central discursive resources in unfolding organizational change. Hence, the objective of this article is to develop a new kind of antenarrative approach for the cultural analysis of organizational change. We use merging multinational corporations (MNCs) as a case in point. Our empirical analysis focuses on a revelatory case: the financial services group Nordea, which was built by combining Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian corporations. We distinguish three types of antenarrative that provided alternatives for making sense of the merger: globalist, nationalist, and regionalist (Nordic) antenarratives. We focus on how these antenarratives were mobilized in intentional organizational storytelling to legitimate or resist change: globalist storytelling as a means to legitimate the merger and to create MNC identity, nationalist storytelling to relegitimate national identities and interests, Nordic storytelling to create regional identity, and the critical use of the globalist storytelling to challenge the Nordic identity. We conclude that organizational storytelling is characterized by polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, and architectonic dialogisms and by a dynamic between centering and decentering forces. This paper contributes to discourse-cultural studies of organizations by explaining how narrative constructions of identities and interests are used to legitimate or resist change. Furthermore, this analysis elucidates the dialogical dynamics of organizational storytelling and thereby opens up new avenues for the cultural analysis of organizations.

On the Discursive Construction of Corruption: A Critical Analysis of Media Texts

While extant studies have greatly advanced our understanding of corruption, we still know little of the processes through which specific practices or events come to be labeled as corruption. In a time when public attention devoted to corruption and other forms of corporate misbehavior has exploded, this thesis raises – and seeks to answer – crucial questions related to how the phenomenon is socially and discursively constructed. What kinds of struggles are manifested in public disputes about corruption? How do constructions of corruption relate with broader conceptions of (il)legitimacy in and around organizations? What are the discursive dynamics involved in the emergence and evolution of corruption scandals? The thesis consists of four essays that each employ different research designs and tackle these questions in slightly different theoretical and methodological ways. The empirical focus is on the media coverage of a number of significant and widely discussed scandals in Norway in the period 2003-2008. By illuminating crucial processes through which conceptions of corruption were constructed, reproduced, and transformed in these scandals, the thesis seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of corruption than what is currently offered in the literature. In particular, the thesis challenges traditional conceptions of corruption as a dysfunctional feature of organizations in and of itself by emphasizing the ambiguous, temporal, context-specific, and at times even contradictory features of corruption in public discussions.

Making Music, Making Muslims : A Case Study of Islamic Hip Hop and the Discursive Construction of Muslim Identities on the Internet

Hip-hopin juuret juontavat 1970-luvulle Yhdysvaltoihin, mutta hip-hop-kulttuuri ja musiikkityyli ovat sen jälkeen levinneet ympäri maailmaa osana globalisaatiokehitystä. Myös monet nuoret muslimit tekevät nykyään hip-hop-musiikkia, ja yhä useampi tuo myös sanoituksiinsa vaikutteita Islamista ja elämästään muslimina. Musiikin asema on islamissa varsin kiistelty, eikä sitä ole selvästi sallittu (halal) tai kielletty (haram) muslimeilta. Muslimien tekemää hip-hoppia on toistaiseksi tutkittu hyvin vähän. Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan diskurssianalyysin keinoin, miten tapaustutkimuksena toimivalla muslimhiphop.com-internetsivustolla argumentoidaan ja konstruoidaan käsityksiä muslimi-identiteetistä. Teoreettisena ja analyyttisenä viitekehyksenä toimii sosiaalikonstruktivistinen näkemys identiteetistä kontekstisidonnaisena sekä puheessa ja teksteissä diskursiivisesti rakentuvana. Tutkielma kyseenalaistaa aiempien tutkimusten oletuksen hip-hopista vaikutuksiltaan yksinomaan positiivisena muslimi-identiteetille sekä muslimeja yhdentävänä tekijänä. Aineisto on kerätty edellä mainitulta sivustolta syksyn 2010 ja kevään 2011 aikana, josta analyysiin on rajattu vain itse sivusto ja sen hip-hoppia käsittelevät osiot. Sivusto ja sen perustaja ovat yhdysvaltalaisia, mutta sivustolla esiteltävien artistien tausta on hyvin monikulttuurinen. Moni on myös maahanmuuttajana nykyisessä kotimaassaan. Aineistossa esiintyviä teemoja ja diskursseja eritellään ja analysoidaan tutkielmassa lainauksien avulla. Sivuston periaatteissa ja artistien esillepääsyn kriteereissä määritellään tarkasti asennoituminen Islamin ja musiikin yhdistämiseen: mikäli sanoitukset ja artistit noudattavat Islamin oppeja, on muslimin sallittua tehdä ja kuunnella tällaista musiikkia. Islam-aiheisen hip-hopin perustellaan olevan ennen kaikkea vaihtoehto valtavirran hip-hopille, jota konstruoidaan aineistossa moraalisesti arveluttavaksi. Hip-hopille sekä muslimeille sallittuja ja kiellettyjä elementtejä erottelevan halal-haram-diskurssin ohella aineistosta nousee esiin opetusdiskurssi. Muslimien tekemän hip-hopin perustellaan edistävän Islamin opettamista erityisesti nuorille muslimeille ja siten vahvistavan positiivista muslimi-identiteettiä. Myös positiivisen muutoksen diskurssia käytetään aineistossa runsaasti liittyen mm. muslimiyhteisöihin sekä muslimeihin kohdistuviin taloudellisiin ja sosiaalipoliittisiin epäkohtiin ja stereotypioihin; musiikin sisältöä ja sen tekemistä perustellaan sen voimalla muuttaa asioita parempaan suuntaan. Monet muslimiartistit kamppailevat yhdistääkseen toisaalta Islamin ja taiteellisen luovuuden ja ilmaisuvapauden, toisaalta menestyäkseen kaupallisesti unohtamatta uskonnollista vakaumustaan. Monilla heistä hip-hop on ollut vahvasti läsnä kasvuympäristössä, mutta sen yhdistäminen Islamin periaatteisiin aiheuttaa kysymyksiä ja kyseenalaistuksia oman musiikillisen ja uskonnollisen identiteetin muodosta ja sisällöstä. Aineiston perusteella monet muslimiartistit ja Islam-aiheista hip-hoppia kuuntelevat muslimit joutuvat jatkuvasti puolustamaan musiikkia siihen kielteisesti suhtautuville muslimeille sekä ei-muslimeille, jotka vierastavat sen uskonnollisuutta. Muslimi-identiteettiä neuvotellaan jatkuvasti, ja se näyttäytyy aineistossa moniulotteisena ja tilanteisesti rakentuvana. Avainsanat: Muslimit, Islam, hip-hop, identiteetti, Internet, diskurssi, diskurssianalyysi