YONGJIAN KE (柯永建)

G'day

I am an Associate Professor in Project Management at the School of Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. This is why the domain name is "pm-professor.com".

My name is pronounced "yong-jyen ker". In Chinese, it is written as 柯永建.

This site is not a record of credentials. My full CV, university profile and publication databases already do that. This site offers a short narrative about my work and thinking, and a place for research briefs that I will continue to add over time.

A position

I approach projects as temporary governance arrangements rather than neutral delivery tasks. Even when projects are technically competent and economically justified, their outcomes depend on how authority, responsibility, and accountability are structured, and how these arrangements respond to social expectations over time.

In contemporary infrastructure and public service contexts, project success is judged not only by delivery performance but also by fairness, accountability, and long-term public value. When projects struggle under these conditions, the causes are rarely technical alone. They are often institutional and social, shaped by governance choices such as contracts, risk allocation, performance measures, and engagement practices.

This way of thinking guides how I study infrastructure and public service projects, and how I engage with practitioners, policy actors, and researchers.

Where this leads

From this position, my work turns to settings where governance choices are visible, contested, and difficult to reverse. Infrastructure and public service projects are such settings. They involve long time horizons, multiple actors, formal contracts, and continuing public scrutiny. In these conditions, questions of responsibility, legitimacy, and trust cannot be treated as secondary issues. They sit close to the centre of project performance.

One line of work examines public private partnerships and related contracting models. I study how risk allocation, performance criteria, and contractual flexibility shape behaviour across the project life cycle. I treat contracts not simply as technical instruments, but as governance arrangements that influence cooperation, opportunism, and adaptation under uncertainty.

Another line of work focuses on legitimacy, social licence, and public acceptance in infrastructure projects. I do not treat acceptance as a fixed attitude or a one-off consultation outcome. I approach it as an evolving condition shaped by how decisions are made, communicated, and experienced over time. This helps explain why projects that satisfy technical and regulatory requirements can still face continuing resistance.

A further line of work engages with digitalisation and artificial intelligence in project settings. Here, my interest is not in technological optimism for its own sake. It is in the institutional and organisational conditions that shape what data-driven tools can actually do in temporary and complex project environments, and where their limits begin to appear.

What I am working on now

At present, I am extending a theoretical framework of social licence for infrastructure. This work asks what social licence means in infrastructure settings, who grants it, how it changes across the project life cycle, and what governance levers can be used to maintain it. At this stage, the work is focused on conceptual refinement and framework development.

In parallel, my work on social procurement in China is developing an ontology of social value for this context. The purpose is to clarify what counts as social value, and then use that foundation to examine how social procurement is currently understood in policy and practice. The immediate task is conceptual clarification, with a view to supporting later empirical and policy analysis.

I am also developing a project-level view of AI readiness. This work asks what readiness means in temporary project organisations, how it differs from firm-level readiness, and what forms of governance are needed when data-driven tools begin to shape project decisions. The longer-term aim is to build a basis for assessing AI readiness at the level of individual projects.

Research briefs

I use research briefs to develop ideas in a more direct and accessible way. They are not summaries of journal papers. Each brief focuses on a core problem, clarifies how I think about it, and draws out implications for practice and policy. This section will continue to grow as new briefs are added.

Start here

A small set of entry points into my work. I keep this list short by design. For the complete publication record, please use Google Scholar.

Credibility, without the noise

My work includes more than 100 journal publications, 8,598 citations, and an h-index of 41, and has been recognised through repeated inclusion in the Stanford World Top 2% Scientist List. It has been published across leading journals in project management, construction management, and infrastructure governance.

I also serve on the editorial teams of several international journals, including Project Management Journal, Built Environment Project and Asset Management, and contribute to academic and professional communities through reviewing, editing, and standards work. These roles keep me close to how research fields evolve, how quality is judged, and how ideas travel from scholarship into practice.

For formal records of publications, metrics, and appointments, please refer to my full CV. This page focuses on how the work fits together.

Working with me

I work with researchers, practitioners, and policy actors who are interested in infrastructure governance, project delivery, and public value. My collaborations often involve framing problems, developing conceptual models, and translating empirical findings into guidance that can inform decisions.

I am open to research collaboration, doctoral supervision, and selected advisory or policy-related engagements where there is a clear analytical question and a shared commitment to careful thinking. I am less interested in short-term consulting or purely instrumental work.

If you would like to explore a potential collaboration, the best way to start is by email: Yongjian.Ke@uts.edu.au

Elsewhere online

For formal records, publication databases, and profile verification, my work can also be found at the following sites.