ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Companies in the construction industry have tended to manage the risks of operating in the built environment (BE) through risk transfer moderated by contracts. However, these strategies do not in themselves reduce risk and more recently there has been an increasing tendency to consider construction and its products more holistically, with trends such as partnering, including public-private partnerships and through-life management, coming to the fore. The increased onus on players to consider the
consequences of their actions in a wider sphere leads inevitably to a greater consideration of the complexity entailed in the design, construction and maintenance of the built environment. Moreover, these trends imply that we think not simply in terms of built environment products, but of the services (such as education, healthcare and communications) that buildings and civil engineering projects support, in terms of a product-service paradigm in the built environment. This paper seeks to explore how complexity theory may help to resolve the problems of organization thus presented.
