Paper Title
Breaking Contractors’ Socio-Cultural Barriers Inhibiting Adaptation to Environmentally Sustainable Construction
Abstract
Several barriers militate against adaptation to environmentally sustainable construction (ESC). Most of these barriers assume
global significance. However, socio-cultural barriers averting the practicing of ESC differ from culture to culture. Thus, the
approach for countering the action of such barriers cannot be universal in nature. The aim of this paper is to identify a
peculiar approach for disabling socio-cultural barriers that act against contractor‟s adaptation to environmentally sustainable
construction in an African setting. Taking a social constructivism ontological stance, qualitative strategy was adopted to
identify the socio-cultural barriers through interviews of twenty-four built environment professionals in large construction
companies in Ghana. Resilience Theory, Social Network theory, and Hofstede‟s Power Distance construct approach were
used to develop a system for disabling the action of identified socio-cultural barriers against efforts of contractors to adapt to
ESC. The findings of this study enrich the knowledge of international contractors insocio-cultural barriers that act against the
practice of ESC in an African setting. The findings also strengthen the organizational strategies of such contractors to
overpower such socio-cultural barriers.
Keywords - Contractors, Environmentally Sustainable Construction, Qualitative Strategy, Socio-Cultural Barriers, Sub-
Saharan Region.