Construction managers aim to deliver successful construction projects; however it is unclear how they perceive construction project success and how they influence that success. Focusing on the construction phase of the project, a Systems Conceptual Framework is induced from the literature review. In-depth interviews undertaken by 10 construction managers, whose experience accounts for over 130 construction projects, provide data to derive categories which populate the Systems Conceptual Framework initially developed. By adopting an unstructured approach to the data collection, a holistic view of how construction managers impact the success of construction projects is acquired. The construction managers' influence on success is identified through the skills, competencies and characteristics which enable success of the construction phase (enablers). This inductive-deductive methodological approach allows the identification of categories and relations between them which, along with the Systems Conceptual Framework, form the Empirical Model. A Pareto analysis was carried out in order to determine the relative relevance categories have against each others. Overall, 56 relations were identified between the 37 categories derived from the data analysis. The results of the research show that the influence of construction managers on project success is determined by twenty enablers. According to the Pareto analysis, 6 enablers were most relevant; they are separated into two interrelated sets: Communication, Leadership and People Management, and Ability to Pull Back, Experience and Technical Skill. This suggests that construction managers consider mastering 'hard' and 'soft' aspects of the job are both equally relevant to the success of the project. The high interconnectivity between the categories is what allows the Empirical Model to be developed; making it the most important finding of this research. Evidence indicates that construction managers work with both a subjective (qualitative) and an objective (quantitative) concept of success. The quantitative concept of success can have between two and four success factors, which are prioritised according to the needs of the client; there is always one critical success factors that leads the project. The subjective concept of success incorporates aspects of the end user and personal satisfaction, and specific characteristics of the project. The results also show that the outcomes of construction projects can be three: success, failure, and a third outcome which is neither, an outcome between success and failure. Participants have identified this last outcome as being the most frequent.

William Fairbairn was a major engineer, active in many branches of mid-nineteenth-century engineering. From an apprenticeship as a colliery millwright, he went on to establish a world-class engineering business in Manchester, playing a major role in mill-building, experimental engineering, bridge construction and iron shipbuilding. Despite his importance there is no modern study which brings together the many diverse areas of his work, and the company he founded, nor does any study give adequate emphasis to the discrete and different chronological phases of Fairbairn’s career. The thesis aims to provide a composite study of Fairbairn’s life and work, answering three main questions. First, how is the rise of Fairbairn and his Company to positions of leadership and influence within the engineering industry accounted for? Secondly, in what respects were both Fairbairn and the Company he founded important and influential, and how was that influence spread? Thirdly what caused one of the most successful engineering companies, with a global reputation, to cease to trade within a year of its founder’s death? The opportunity is taken to re-assess the range and significance of Fairbairn’s contributions to nineteenth-century engineering. This thesis argues that Fairbairn was more an ‘innovator’ and optimiser than an inventor. Five areas stand out as particularly influential amongst the multiplicity of his achievements, as a builder of mills with their prime-movers, as the foremost experimental engineer of his time outside the universities, as a leading iron shipbuilder during iron shipbuilding’s most critical decade - 1835-1844, as a builder of tubular structures – bridges and cranes - during a two-decade window, and in connection with steam boilers. The thesis shows education to have been a lifelong commitment of Fairbairn, with his Ancoats works the successor to Maudslay’s ‘nursery’. It also poins to him as a transitional figure in a time of rapid change. However his career was unpredictable. No one model of technological innovation fits all Fairbairn’s work, and his investigations and experiments challenge the imposition of any uniform theory of technological change. Set-backs are identified, as well as Fairbairn’s successes. Reasons are argued for the dissolution of his partnership with Lillie, the closure of his shipyard, and his failure to obtain various bridge commissions. The ultimate demise of a great engineering firm, within a year of its founder’s death, is traced primarily to the matter of succession following Fairbairn’s retirement from a managerial role, and the contrasting approach of his successors.

L’objectif de cette thèse est de réaliser une biographie de l’ingénieur français Louis-Léger Vauthier, de sa jeunesse à sa postériorité mémorielle. Cet ingénieur fouriériste, qui, dans les années 1840, a dirigé d’importants travaux d’urbanisme au Pernambouc, est aujourd’hui un personnage reconnu par l’historiographie brésilienne, tant pour son rôle technique que culturel. Au-delà des années passées au Brésil, Vauthier a également participé activement à la vie sociale et politique de la France tout au long du XIXe siècle, sans pour autant avoir la même visibilité. Ainsi, à partir des deux entrées principales qui ressortent de la trajectoire de vie de Vauthier, c’est-à-dire sa carrière d’ingénieur et sa trajectoire politique et intellectuelle, l’objectif est de mettre en évidence son itinéraire à partir du rôle des acteurs et donc en soulignant le réseau personnel établi par l’ingénieur durant les différentes phases de sa vie. La démarche proposée ici n’a été possible que grâce au retour du genre biographique en histoire, qui a permis aux chercheurs de remplacer le récit traditionnel, linéaire et factuel, par une biographie devenue instrument de connaissance historique. Entre histoire et mémoire, l’itinéraire de cet individu met en lumière la complexité et les contradictions internes de chacun des deux pays concernés par cette recherche, mais également des échanges entre une France bourgeoise, exportant son modèle culturel de par le monde, et un Brésil, dont l’élite aspire à la modernité tout en restant traditionnelle et esclavagiste. / The purpose of this thesis is to construct a biography of the French engineer Louis Léger Vauthier from his youth until his memorial posteriority. This Fourierist engineer, who has led some major urban works in the state of Pernambuco during the 1840s, is a personage recognized by Brazilian historiography both by the technical and the cultural role he took. Beyond the years in Brazil, Vauthier was also actively involved in the social and political life of France throughout the nineteenth century, however not with the same visibility. Thus, based on those two main tracks that emerge from Vauthier’s life, i.e. his engineering career and his political and intellectual trajectory, the objective is to understand his itinerary based on the role of the actors within his personal network, established during the different phases of his life. The approach which is proposed here was only possible thanks to the return of the biographical genre in history which allows researchers to replace the traditional, linear, and factual narrative, by a biography as a historical knowledge instrument. Between history and memory, the itinerary of the individual brings some light to the complexity and to the internal contradictions of the two countries involved in this research, but also of the exchanges between a bourgeois France, exporting its cultural model to the world, and Brazil, whose elite where aspiring to modernity while remaining traditional and slaveholding.