Discovering Stakeholder Values for Axiology-Based Value Analysis of Building Projects

There has been an increasing demand for maximizing the environmental, social, and economic value of built infrastructure. However, a major gap still exists in the area of value analysis; there is no formal model to conceptualize, represent, and reason about value and valuation of built infrastructure. This paper presents the authors' work in the area of formal axiology-based value analysis of building projects. Axiology is a theory of value and worth. The formal axiology is a theory-based, semantic model for analyzing and assessing the value (worth) of building projects based on the environmental, social, and economic values of stakeholders (e.g., energy conservation, safety, economic growth). The first step towards developing the formal axiology is discovering stakeholder values in the context of building projects. Value discovery is the process of identifying the values that are relevant to a particular system. In this paper, the authors focus on presenting their value-discovery work for residential, commercial, and educational building projects. Stakeholder values were discovered from project documents, value literature, and a stakeholder survey. The paper discusses the survey design, implementation, and results. Overall, the results show that, on average, all values are at least moderately important to all stakeholders. The results also show that although there is a general agreement on the importance ranking of values among stakeholders, there are significant differences in the ranks across different stakeholder groups and across different project types. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing both theoretical and empirical knowledge on stakeholder value discovery; it could facilitate value-sensitive decision-making by embodying stakeholder values into project planning and design towards better synergy between human values and the built environment.