Social Network Analysis of Collaborative Ventures for Overseas Construction Projects
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 137, Issue 5
Abstract
As the world construction market becomes more globalized, an increasing number of construction companies, including both large companies (LCs) and small and medium-sized companies (SMCs), have extended their business to the global market. During this process, the number of collaborative ventures to mitigate the burden of entry risks has greatly increased. This study aims to investigate the formation of construction firms’ collaborative networks for performing international projects from both the LC and SMC network perspectives. To this end, 389 real cases of overseas projects executed by Korean firms over the last two decades that involved collaboration were analyzed using social network analysis (SNA) approach. The result showed that LCs and SMCs have different perspectives when pursuing collaborative ventures for overseas construction projects; LCs have a tendency to form large and dense networks, whereas SMCs prefer to maintain long-term and targeted relationships. Moreover, this study showed a series of apparent tendencies in the development of collaboration networks to realize better profit performance under risky project conditions. Through analysis based on real cases, this study validated the applicability of SNA in analyzing the collaboration in the construction domain. More importantly, this study is useful as an aid for developing collaboration strategies to achieve better outcomes while considering the relevant network patterns and their different levels of performance under the assorted network attributes.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), a grant funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (KMST2009-0081326).
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 137 • Issue 5 • May 2011
Pages: 344 - 355
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 12, 2009
Accepted: Oct 12, 2010
Published online: Oct 14, 2010
Published in print: May 1, 2011
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