Perceptions of stakeholders in project procurement for road construction

Abstract

Planning transport system, building, operating and maintaining public roads and railways is typically performed by public institutions in collaboration with other stakeholders, such as manufacturers, suppliers and distributors. In many cases, this collaboration is done with a procurement process. Despite the formal nature of such process, stakeholders can have different worldviews or perceptions leading to adverse effects on the final procurement result. This article is focused on how to find perceptions of stakeholders related to roadwork-related procurement processes using Q methodology. This methodology uses data from the stakeholders and searches for factors or groups within the data of participants who have similar opinions. A specific case of road procurement in Sweden is used to test the methodology. As a result, three clusters of perceptions are found. These clusters and their interpretation can be applied to many tasks that are related to complex adaptive systems such as policy-making, strategy generation, solution testing, training and others.

Keywords

• project sector procurement
• q methodology
• complex systems
• road construction