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Conference Issue: ARCOM 29th Annual Conference

The Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM) is 30 years old, having been formed early in 1984 by a group of researchers and academics during a small conference at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Each year since then it has organized and held a conference to promote and disseminate the growing body of research in the relatively new field of construction management (CM). By 2014 this field of CM, this global collective of academics and occasional industrialists, that consider all aspects of the delivery and management of the built environment, work in a field that has grown in maturity and significance yet continues to draw from a vast range of disciplines, methodological approaches and theoretical backgrounds. ARCOM’s relationship with this journal, Construction Management and Economics (CM&E) is a close one. The two institutions share the same scope of subject area andoverlap significantlywith authorship and readership. ARCOM was formed only 1 year after CM&E first started publishing and its Editor-in-Chief, ProfessorWill Hughes, was an ARCOM committee member for 20 years. The journal and the conference have served the same community for 30 years and have grown together. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that the first journal issue of selected ARCOM conference papers should be in Construction Management and Economics. Considering the respect, esteem and impact that this journal has gained over these years, the recognition of quality and review rigour that it has earned, for the editors to invite ARCOM to propose papers for consideration in a Conference Issue is not only a great honour for ARCOM but a recognition and acknowledgement of the status and quality the ARCOM conference has gained since its first at London’s SouthBankPolytechnic (nowUniversity) in 1984. ARCOM and Construction Management and Economics represent a field that is a synergistic combination of many different disciplines. Authors and delegates traditionally derive from academic departments that are broadly-based in the ‘built environment’ yet their backgrounds can be extremely diverse. We have architects and engineers; we have anthropologists; we have building physicists, environmental chemists and material scientists; sociologists rub shoulders with numerical modellers and economists collaborate with institutional theorists. From the inside we find this not unusual and regular readers of the journal and attenders of the conference take for granted this cornucopia of theories and disciplines and we understand that the complex demands and problems of the built environment need appropriately interwoven approaches. From the outside this is often far from the case. Do institutional views of our academic domain understand the problems we choose to study and the nature of the approaches we take to understand them? Or is there a reductionist view that CM is merely a collective of different academic disciplines? The papers in this conference issue, while being the best research that ARCOM has to offer, show a typical snapshot of the breadth of diversity currently being undertaken in CM research. We can have, for instance, ensemble modelling sitting alongside community empowerment, and arguments against Utopian views of reality and homogenous discourses of construction. My belief is that narrow-minded institutional views do not allow such work to flourish and in the mainstream scientific and social scientific worlds dissemination platforms such as ours are often viewed with skepticism. The first paper in this conference issue highlights the danger of an unwillingness to understand problems in one domain by venturing in to the accomplishments of other domains. Olde Scholtenhuis and Dorée argue that boundary debates may stifle new theories and notions that struggle for adoption. They suggest that theories held at the boundary of the CM domain may be caught in reductionist classification debates rather