Overview

This course is designed to equip its graduates with the economics and management skills to analyse the kinds of problems that will confront senior managers, policy advisers and decision-makers in any branch of the construction industry. It is also highly suitable for professional academic development of teachers and researchers in these subject areas.

The course works with a concept of the construction industry as the whole sector of activity concerned with the production of the built environment. Students therefore are drawn from, and go on to work in, all branches of this sector, from client organisations, research and consulting organisations through professional practices, to construction firms in the narrower sense of the term.

This distinctive approach not only means that students are challenged to step outside of the particular perspective implied by their professional training and experience to date; it also equips them to think flexibly and openly about the future roles of organisations in an industry that is becoming much more prone to change than hitherto.

Aims and Objectives

1] Our aim is to prepare and equip professionals for the transition into managerial careers, and develop the managerial competence of professionals moving into their first management position.

2] We aim to broaden the educational base of students whose previous education has taken the form of professional training, and to do this in two directions: to establish and deepen students knowledge and understanding of some of the social science disciplines; and to raise their awareness of the range of practical perspectives from which the construction industry and process can be viewed.

3] Our course philosophy is that the study of construction economics and management is an application of the more general study of economics and management, and not a self-contained intellectual field. At the same time we demonstrate ways of exploring and analysing the peculiarities of the construction industry, and of focusing and adapting the powerful analytic tools developed in those general disciplines to this particular context.

4] The course aims to provide a rigorous and theoretically informed approach to the study of construction economics and management which will serve the student throughout their subsequent career, and will equip them either for a senior management position or an academic career.

5] We aim to produce students capable of building upon and extending the research base of the two subject areas.

Learning Objectives

1] Develop students’ knowledge and understanding of the impact of economic factors on the management of a construction firm.

2] Develop students ability to apply management and economic theory to the analysis of a broad range of actual construction management problems.

3] Introduce students to the latest developments in research, in the fields of construction economics and management.

4] Introduce students to important recent and classic literature in the range of social sciences, wherever in our view that work has implications for construction research, and draw out what those implications are, for theory and method.

5] Develop the skills required for updating knowledge of the subjects and understanding of the construction industry over students’ subsequent careers.

6] Develop the skills required for interpreting and reacting to changes in the environment of construction firms, and for adapting and applying knowledge in new contexts.

7] Produce students capable of integrating their pre-existing professional knowledge and their knowledge of the two disciplines of management and economics in application to the analysis of real construction industry problems and issues and recommending action thereon.

8] Develop the ability, tested through the M.Sc. Report, to identify, design and execute an original piece of research on a well-defined problem, requiring empirical research. Reviews of secondary literature are not sufficient. One key aim of the core and module courses is to prepare students and develop the intellectual skills required for this task.

Teaching objectives

1] All core and option module teaching is of integrated groups of students from a wide range of countries and from all the built environment professions, and is designed to maximise opportunities for interprofessional learning and exchange of ideas, both in class and in study groups.

2] Teaching mainly is by interactive lectures. Lecturing is appropriate because students are new to the disciplines and there is a need to introduce students to a very large and diverse body of theory and literature; lectures are made interactive in order to benefit from the range of backgrounds of the student cohort, and in order to ensure that their relevance to a wide range of contexts is brought out.

3] The course uses some of its ex-students now embarked on PhDs in this department as student mentors, and we encourage formation of active study groups amongst our current students.

4] Students on the course are drawn from a wide range of countries, and it is therefore a teaching objective to ensure that all students can see the relevance of the ideas and examples used to their countries, and that they have plenty of chances to comment and reflect upon the application of the ideas taught to those contexts. It follows that material on the UK construction sector should be used in teaching only in an illustrative and not in a prescriptive way.

5] We believe that appropriate managerial policy and organisation is contingent upon the context. We therefore teach in a way which stresses the need for students to make judgements as to appropriateness to the proposed context of application of all they are taught.

6] There are three very different main modes of teaching and learning used in the course, respectively in the core courses, the option modules and the report.

a] The cores are taught through relatively formal lectures related to set texts, so as to establish students' initial grasp on the disciplines, their methods and theories. Assessment is by examination papers, designed to test students’ grasp of fundamentals across the whole syllabi.

b] In option modules, by contrast, the (more interactive, smaller class-size) lectures should introduce students to opportunities of self-directed programmes of specialist study, in a range of topics potentially of special interest to some students. The module topics should be problematic and areas of controversy, active research, etc. Assessment is by term paper, using briefs that should be broad enough to enable students to choose which aspects to explore in greatest depth. However, the term paper, and the option module teaching generally, should also serve to help the student build upon, deepen and practice or apply core skills and knowledge. It is central to our teaching objectives that students have an effective choice of modules in which to specialise.

c] The report is taught by one-to-one tutorials with supervisors. However, we try to ensure that students learn and benefit both from the work done by their predecessors on the course, and from exposure to the initial research proposals of their fellow students. We regard it as important that all such proposals are presented to and discussed by the whole student cohort as well as the course staff. We set up an interactive process of idea and staff response from an early point in the course, but we regard it as important that initial ideas for report topics come from the students, and that in the development of these ideas into a final proposal the student’s role is pro-active and the staffs’ role is responsive.

Structure

The course is divided into three equal parts:

1] core subject modules (60 credits)

2] elective or option modules (60 credits)

3] the research Report (60 credits)

The core subjects, which all students take, cover the basic knowledge areas, and develop the fundamental approach that characterises the course. The electives allow students to build up an individual specialisation based on their own interests and career objectives.

Each student takes at least four elective modules. At least three of these should be drawn from the set of ten optional Economics-based and Enterprise-based modules offered as an integrated part of their course. One of them can be drawn from among modules offered by other courses within the family of courses comprising the MSc in Built Environment, most particularly the Project-based modules offered by the MSc in Project and Enterprise Management (PEM).

Part-time students completing the course over two years take two core and two option modules each academic year.

Access
The course is available full-time over one calendar year, September to September, or part-time over 2, 3 or 4 calendar years.

Timetable
All lectures and seminars are grouped into two days per week, Tuesday and Thursday, to assist part-time students. Students taking the course over two years attend either on Tuesdays in their first year and Thursdays in their second year, or vice versa.

In total students have a minimum of 140 hours of delivered events, comprising: 80 hours of lectures in the compulsory core courses; 40 hours of lectures and seminars in the optional module courses; 20 hours of lectures and events in the non-assessed management skills course. In addition there are group tutorial events linked to the core courses, individual tutorials, and supervision of research reports.

Content

Assessment
Each student is assessed in three ways.

1] The Core Modules are assessed by written examinations. The examinations for modules CM01-Economics of Construction and PE01-Project Management take place in January. Examinations for modules CM02- Economic Institutions of the Construction Industry and PE08-Principles of Enterprise Management are in April/May. There are four two-hour exams in total.

2] The Option Modules are assessed by term papers, one for each of the four assessed Modules that a student must take, making four in all. Each paper is around 3,000 words long.

3] Each student presents at the end of the course a Report on a research question of their own choosing. This Report will be of 10,000 words.
The Additional Modules are not assessed.

Choice
1) In addition to their four assessed Option Modules, each student may, with the approval of the Course Director, attend up to two other Course Option Modules, on which they will not be assessed.
2) Not all modules may be offered in any one year. From year to year new modules may be offered and existing ones withdrawn.
3) It is an important principle of the course that each student chooses their own Report topic.

The following are examples of recent Report titles:

- Project success: an appraisal of award winning buildings
- Concession contracts in road maintenance: viability for English and Scottish trunk road networks
- How is e-trading helping to deliver transaction cost savings in the construction industry supply chain?: a quantitative assessment of e-trading initiatives at the Balfour Beatty Group
- The training and development of expatriate construction professionals
- The integrated construction firm in the fragmented construction industry
- Leverage of the consulting engineer: a strategic management issue
- Prefabricated steel planar and modular systems: an alternative to traditional house building? - a case study in innovative construction methods
- How to efficiently improve building stock for fast growing population in refugee camps
- From artefact to asset: how buildings add value for clients
- Initiating and managing innovation in road construction: the case of geosynthetics
- Cost saving and innovation in PFI bundled schools projects
- Future prospects for a Greek construction group: identification and analysis of the business options
- Industry structure in a construction context: a comparison of causes and effects in the UK and Germany
- Design Quality in PFI
- An investigation of the cause of cost overruns in highway construction projects in Thailand
- Transaction costs in PFI projects
- Examining whether diversified construction groups can achieve superior financial performance than autonomous business units, due to economies of scale and scope

Students are encouraged and assisted to undertake investigations in their Reports of topics of immediate concern to them or their sponsoring institutions, and to collect and use their own data.

Staff

John Kelsey
Programme Director View John's profile
Send John an email

Applying

Application procedures, fees, funding and scholarships

For information, please see the faculty admissions information here.

Opportunities

1] Graduation from the course implies competence in the ability to apply a wide range of theory appropriately to a wide range of construction industry problems and contexts.

2] Graduation at a good level implies possession of high level critical and research skills.

3] Some graduates will go on to become future innovators, leaders, senior managers, researchers and teachers in the fields of construction management and construction economics. Necessarily, not all our graduates will achieve careers of these kinds, but many will.

4] Students should be able critically to appraise and interpret the importance of trends and developments in the construction industry of the country in which they work.

5] Students should be able critically to appraise continuing developments in research and in the literature of construction economics and management.