Swedish construction culture, quality management and collaborative practice

In many countries, the construction sector has adopted principles of quality management and introduced less adversarial, more durable market relations during the 1990s. The Swedish construction sector is investigated with emphasis on the implications of the local culture. Construction in a cold country on the periphery of Europe is affected by the merger of traditions of craftsmanship and military engineering. Centralized state control and weak professional identities have been influential. However, social and cultural traits reflected in a national management style (based on low power distance, loose control and low uncertainty avoidance) can be traced in the development of specific quality and collaboration practices in Swedish construction. Egalitarian distrust of both elitism and strong professions, expressed as a tendency for two parties to settle disputes without referring to neutral third parties, has also been identified. Some implications for adapting Sweden's construction culture of quality management and dispute resolution to a larger international framework are proposed.