Swedish lean construction practices identified in the last decade of research

Despite years of promotion, there is a limited practical adoption of lean construction (LC) in Sweden. The industry still suffers from many issues which LC appeared to solve, partly due to processes and flows in the organizational and project levels being tailored to fit into a given LC framework, rather than tailoring LC tenets to fit actual needs. To inform a more requirements-driven adoption of LC in Sweden, this contribution aims at analysing the scope of LC conceptual variants documented in the rich Swedish-based research on LC concepts in operation. Methodologically, a systematic literature review, utilizing the augmented concept-centric review framework, and adopting the abductive method of qualitative analysis, captures the studies featuring empirical data on Swedish LC concepts in operation. This method is furtherly strengthened by using the references-of-references and “snowballing” techniques. Then, the review outcomes are analysed regarding their scopes. It is shown that LC adoption scopes are characterised by the focus on individual LC aspects and/or the integration of LC with other frameworks, leading to a customization of LC to fit certain purposes. Furthermore, through the years, there has been a heavy focus on industrialized, rather than “conventional”, construction; but while the study on the former has been precise and extensive, the needs of conventional construction (i.e. when a large part of production takes place on-site) have not been adequately addressed. This becomes even more critical due to industrialized construction having a well-defined, but also consistently small market share in the Swedish context. Moreover, within the emerged scopes (pertaining to design, production, partnering and stakeholder collaboration, planning, strategy, and supply chain), LC is being increasingly integrated with IT – however, these scopes are scattered, with limited knowledge accumulation. This may entail that more theoretical and empirical work is needed for a stronger requirements-driven adoption of LC in Sweden.