Market structures in air conditioning maintenance activity

It is questionable whether activities like construction, including maintenance and repair, can be considered a single entity or industry – on the basis that different sectors of construction/maintenance use fundamentally distinct resource and skill bases. This creates a number of issues including the development of competition and reform policy. de Valence deployed the Structure-Conduct-Performance model (SCP) to delineate sectors of new/installation construction activity and, in doing so, proposes that there exists multiple market structures in a given project. The purpose of this paper is to apply the SCP model to a different sector of construction activity, that is air conditioning maintenance and test de Valence’s proposition concerning the existence of multiple market structures in a supply chain but this time to a built facility. The research method combines secondary data concerning the “Structure” component of the SCP model and primary data with regard to the “Conduct” and “Performance” parts of the SCP model. The results provide further support (beyond de Valance’s analysis of new/installation activity) that a sector system approach using the SCP model is a more effective way to analyse market structures in construction activity. This paper also supports de Valence’s proposition concerning the existence of multiple market structures in a supply chain to a project/facility.