This paper, co-authored by CCHPR researchers and researchers from the Cambridge Service Alliance at the University of Cambridge, looks at the complexities of the international construction sector and seeks to apply institutional theory to analyse the factors driving greater use of OSM to build housing.
The need to address housing supply deficits has driven global efforts to transform the construction industry and in particular to achieve greater use of offsite manufacturing (OSM). Countries like Japan, Germany and Sweden have been more successful than others in driving greater use of OSM to build new housing. How these countries achieved such success, and lessons for how others may reach such levels of using OSM to build new housing, are yet to be identified. To address this gap, in this paper we applied institutional theory to analyse the factors driving greater use of OSM to build new housing in seven selected countries. Qualitative content analysis of 95 documents enabled the identification of four typologies that have led countries to the greater use of OSM for new build housing. The four different typologies, characterised by various coercive, normative and mimetic institutional pressures, show that there is no one single strategy for guaranteeing success: an individual country cannot directly transfer specific aspects of policy and practice used in another country to their own in order to drive greater use of offsite manufacturing for building new housing.
Kwadwo Oti-Sarpong, Reyhaneh S. Shojaei, Zakaria Dakhli, Gemma Burgess, Mohamed Zaki (2021) How countries achieve greater use of offsite manufacturing to build new housing: identifying typologies through institutional theory. Sustainable Cities and Society, 2021,103403, ISSN 2210-6707, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.103403.