Editorial
Authors: R. MacGregor
Year: 2013

There are interesting differences in project governance in the construction sector between developed and developing countries. Lizarralde, Tomiyoshi, Bourgault, Cardosi and Malo undertook an identical assessment in each of the two contexts. Their paper will inform decision-making and project management for professionals and enterprises seeking to work abroad. They identify three categories of analysis: formal project structuring, informal communication and structuring and the role of project stakeholders. A comparative analysis of two case-studies confirmed the categories of analysis, an on-line survey assessed the participants’ perception of these categories, and ten semi-directed interviews provided qualitative data through the experts’ perception of project governance. The results reveal three main groups of differences. First, in leadership styles; in developing countries the client’s top management has greater enforcement capacity while in developed countries the procurement unit plays the most important role. In developing countries project management is less structured and formalized and architects tend to have greater influence. Second, in the reasons for and uses of informality; in developed countries informality mainly supports contractual relations, while in developing countries it favours flexibility of procedures and management mechanisms. Third, in the role of external stakeholders; in developed countries municipalities and users have more influence on projects, and regulations and professional standards are more often enforced. The findings suggest that these differences are natural responses to differences in the environments. Informality is useful in contexts of corruption, prevents complications caused by bureaucracy and facilitates flexibility in dynamic contexts. Strong leadership by top management in developing countries allows dealing with unclear rules, hierarchical structures and changing environments, and adaptive management helps in difficult business contexts. The generally low productivity of China’s construction industry is a reflection of the irrationality of its market structure. To optimize the market structure of the construction industry and to improve competitiveness, it is of practical importance to analyse both. Liu et al. propose the Panzar-Rosse model for China’s construction industry as a better alternative to the methods for measuring the construction industry market structure. The SCP (Structure–Conduct–Performance) paradigm posits that market structure determines market performance. For the construction industry, a structural approach is usually adopted to analyse market structure, while the structural approach only considers external factors, such as the quantity and scale of enterprises, and industry structures do not perfectly correspond to degrees of competition. The Panzar–Rosse model is the most typical and widely used non-structural method in the banking industry. Liu et al. compare the characteristics of the construction industry with those of the banking industry and establish a suitable indicator system for the based on the Panzar–Rosse model. According to the empirical data from CNinfo, they assess the market structure of 21 listed companies in China’s construction industry during the period 2009-11. They found that China’s construction industry operated under conditions of monopolistic competition with freeentry equilibrium and that this state was close to a perfect monopoly. These results are consistent with those obtained in an earlier analysis of the competitive conditions of China’s construction industry, which used absolute concentration and Lorenz curve analysis. The improvement is valuable because this new method overcomes the shortage of the traditional methods for measuring market structure and contributes to the advancement of theories and methods for analysing market structure of industries other than banking. Selection of the most appropriate contractor for a project is a crucial decision for clients, and the performance in a construction project is often associated with successful selection of the contractor. Although there have been numerous models for contractor prequalification, in fact they mostly focus on the contractors’ selection criteria. As a result, little research has been carried out into project objectives or the project owner’s requirements. Jafari has developed a new contractor pre-qualification model which employs the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method. This model considers both the project owner’s requirements and the contractors’ abilities. To show the application of the proposed model, the author uses an example case which was extracted from a real project contractor selection case study done by earlier researchers in Iran, with some additional assumptions. Construction Management and Economics, 2013 Vol. 31, No. 7, 709–710, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01446193.2013.832893