Assessing the Influence of Cultural Issues on the Adoption of Life Cycle Management Tools

Among the industrial sectors, construction is probably the one with the highest ‘human density’, due to the great number of different actors involved in each phase of a project. It is acknowledged that cultural issues and cultural diversity impact considerably on the outcome of construction projects, due to the peculiar nature of contracting, procurement and collaborating with partners within the supply chain. In a traditional culture, the transfer and implementation of innovative philosophies and methods implies a radical modification of shared assumptions, values, and practices, which often results in a strong resistance to change. Life Cycle Management (LCM) tools (mainly Life Cycle Costing and Life Cycle Assessment) are an emblematic example of innovative approaches with a long tradition in theory but a rather complicated take-off in everyday practice. Literature has always reported on difficulties in finding suitable data, sharing standard methodologies, or choosing the most user-friendly tool. However, technical barriers cannot be overcome if culture within the organization hinders the decision process. This study adopted a structured and systematic research approach to analyze literature sources with the objective of understanding to what extent culture has an influence on the implementation of LCM tools. LCM literature has been studied by means of relational content analysis, performed with a multiple-software approach. The first phase, unsupervised concept mapping with Leximancer V4, was performed in order to enlarge the corpus, look for connections among concepts, and build the coding scheme of the following manual coding phase, performed with NVivo9. In the manual coding, four categories of actors (decision makers, clients, supply chain, and stakeholders), and four main categories of barriers (behavioral, organizational, financial, and technical) were identified as ‘nodes’. Cluster analyses and matrix coding queries were used to investigate the connections between actors and barriers, organized in sub-nodes. The analysis revealed that organizational culture was the most coded barrier, and professionals were the most relevant actors. A strong statistical correlation between clients and decision makers can be considered as an indicator that these traditionally detached groups of actors perceive the same problems on the topic, such as unreliability and uncertainty of the tools.