مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

In the past decade, building information modelling (BIM) has been increasingly regarded as one of the most promising innovations to address performance problems that have long plagued the construction industry (Eastman et al., 2011; Froese, 2010). Despite its great potential, the advancement of BIM in many countries is still in a relatively infant stage, with a relatively high percentage of construction projects still sitting on the sidelines of BIM implementation (Aibinu and Venkatesh, 2014; CCIA, 2013; Jensen and Jóhannesson, 2013; Samuelson and Björk, 2014). In order to leverage the potential of BIM to reshape the laggard construction industry, therefore, it is clearly important to develop a robust understanding of how project participants make BIM implementation decisions and how such decisions are impacted by related contextual factors.

Prior research on other innovations in the construction industry has already empirically probed the question of how construction organisations make innovation implementation decisions, but related research findings regarding the motivations or reasons for adopting and implementing innovations have been relatively discordant. While some studies (e.g., Toole, 1998) reveal that innovation implementation decisions are often accompanied by gathering information from external entities such as trade partners and industry professionals, a stream of other research (e.g., Kale and Arditi, 2005; Esmaeili and Hallowell, 2012) suggests that innovation implementations are primarily driven by imitative motivations but less influenced by external requirements or suggestions, and still another (e.g., Nikas et al., 2007) controversially indicates that innovation usage has no significant association with environmental factors including the practices of peer organisations but is proactively driven by internal economic motivations such as seeking communication improvement and achieving cost reduction. Such discordance in the research results, together with the complexity of the BIM implementation decision-making process which may be caused by the unique characteristics of BIM as a relatively complex and influential innovation, will increase the difficulty in generalising extant research findings on other construction innovations to develop a theoretically rigorous understanding of how construction organisations are catalysed to implement BIM in construction projects.

Rogers’s (1995) innovation diffusion model claims that perceived innovation characteristics, such as relative advantage and technological complexity, are important elements in the innovation diffusion process that impact whether an innovation is to be implemented. Consistent with this claim, much of extant BIM research has focused on exploring or validating how BIM could be beneficially implemented from a technical perspective (Cao et al., 2015), partly assuming that utilising related technological advantages of BIM to gain economic benefits will act as an important motivation for BIM implementation. In spite of its potential advantages, however, the implementation of BIM frequently involves a variety of process and organisational barriers (Dossick and Neff, 2010; Taylor, 2007) which may significantly influence organisational intentions to use BIM purely based on technical or economic motivations. Drawing on institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), recent studies claim that BIM implementation decisions could also be impacted by isomorphic pressures in external institutional environments and, therefore, potentially indicate that seeking social legitimacy is also an important motivation for construction organisations to engage in BIM initiatives (Cao et al., 2014; Succar and Kassem, 2015). However, while environmental pressures are seldom the only factors influencing innovation adoption and organisations may have complex and multi-dimensional motivations to implement innovations under the interplay of different contextual factors (Kennedy and Fiss, 2009; Martinez and Dacin, 1999), scant scholarly attention has been devoted to directly identifying the motivations for construction organisations to implement BIM in construction projects, and relatively little empirical evidence has been provided to explain how BIM implementation motivations might be impacted by related contextual factors such as organisational capability and project characteristics