Examining international technology transfer on construction projects in developing countries through a social construction of technology (SCOT) lens

Abstract

The existence of technology gaps between developed and developing countries is well-known. Within the construction context, the latter have, for decades, embarked on project-based international technology transfer (ITT) to improve their construction industries. However, attempts consistently fall short in yielding the desired outcomes, and foreign contractors dominate in the delivery of vital projects in these countries. Technology is commonly viewed as embodied in physical technical artefacts or foreign experts. Transfer is expected to take place once local parties work with foreigners using new technology on a project. The process of ITT is therefore reduced to a linear transaction between parties pervasively categorised into ‘transferors’ and ‘transferees’. These views about ITT and the components involved conflict with the intrinsically complex sociotechnical process of construction project delivery and neglect dynamic micro-processes entailed. Consequently, such perspectives generate inaccurate understandings that misrepresent what ITT entails. Construction project-based ITT involves complicated and dynamic interactions involving actors and technical artefacts of technology in a specific environment. To unpack the intricacies, this research examines what happens when new technology is introduced and used in a new environment as part of a project-based ITT attempt. The study, inspired by the social construction of technology (SCOT) approach, rejects reductionist views about ITT and its components. Instead, the process is conceptualised as comprising series of sociotechnical interactions involving a dynamic composition of technology and ‘free’ actors. The study used the constructs of SCOT to explore the case of what happened in an attempt to transfer a monolithic formwork (MF) technology on a mass housing project in Ghana. The inquiry followed the journey of the technology, capturing its development, the involvement of actors, and the impacts on the construction project. Using a mix of qualitative research techniques data were collected through semi-structured interviews and from archival documents related to the case. The findings underscore how a construction project-based ITT attempt is complicated and better understood from a sociotechnical perspective. Findings further show that technology on construction projects is location-specific, emergent and constantly evolving. This contrasts the idea that in ITT one party brings a complete technology to the recipient. Actors involved in ITT are free agents who contribute to the processes that shape the formation of technology: they are not constrained by any binary categorisation labelling them as transferors or transferees. Another key finding shows that the environment hosting ITT goes beyond a mere geographical locus: it is strongly woven into and shapes the sociotechnical interactions. Indeed, the project-specific and wider environment influenced actors’ proximity to and interpretation of the technology, alongside other interactions that had implications for the ITT attempt. The insights raise fundamental questions about the suitability of the ‘technology transfer’ concept in project-based settings. An argument positing that ‘technology transfer’ is a misnomer follows, leading to a proposition. That is: project-based attempts to technologically improve a construction industry are more precisely captured as the introduction of new technical artefacts in a new environment to initiate the emergence and evolution of a localised technology.