An Intercultural Study of an International Construction Project

An Intercultural Study of an International Construction Project
Name
Institution
Bouygues UK
Background
Bouyguess was founded by Francis Bouygues in 1952 in France as a construction company. It is a company owned by one family; the Bouyguess family. The company specializes mainly in real estate construction and development projects, media and telecommunication. The company is located in Paris France, but operates in 80 countries including America, Asia and Africa with a total of 130,000 employees. Its large volumes of operation Bouyguess earn the company annual sales of approximately £33 billion (Bouyguess Construction, 2015). Owing to its multi-national operational nature, the company faces various intercultural issues pertaining to cultural diversity, safety and financial obligations in host countries. While working on the Maputo-Durban highway project in South Africa, the firm demonstrated its competence in adjusting to the new intercultural environment, dictated by different laws and social beliefs.
Work Volume
The company specializes in innovative, infrastructure, as it comes up with new unique buildings reaching out to wide range of clients. It combines inspirational designs with reputable construction project, offering excellent and reputable work. Their work volume ranges from building hospitals, schools, luxurious apartments, hotels among others. Some of its work includes the signature building of Mary Rose museums. Most of it construction work are in the home country, France, including the Parc des Princes, the Tour First built of 1986, the Ile de Re Bridge among other famous work. Some of it construction work in Asia, America and Africa includes the Hassan II Mosque, the Henri Konan Bedie Bridge in Abidjan, The port of Miami tunnel and Singapore sports hub. What makes the company stand out is that it embeds social responsibility in everything they do to promote social values of the countries in which they operate (Financial Times, 2005).
Challenges
Having been a major player in the construction industry, Bouygues works in around 150 sites at once in different distance locations from London to Wales and in their home county, France. One of the biggest challenges that affect their project completion duration is the shortage of skilled professional available to work in the innovative environment. Worldwide, the construction industries suffer from shortage of specific personnel including bricklayers, surveyor among others. Besides, social values of communities in host countries sometimes impact the ways of company operations. For instance, in South Africa, the society believes that women position lies at home, and therefore, getting more employees of the female gender to work in the construction firm was a bit challenging. This impacted heavily on the company project delivery, besides affecting the growth of the construction industry in the country (The Construction Index, 2015).
Other challenges include lawsuits that the company has to deal with from construction sites to other divisions, which have affected the construction division, resulting to a small profit margin (Grant, 2015). For instant, the laws guiding the construction industry in South Africa are different from those in the compan...