Professor Will Hughes

Will Hughes is Emeritus Professor of Construction Management and Economics at the University of Reading. His career began as a joiner. Part-time study gave him the qualifications needed for university entry, after which he studied full time for a degree in Building Technology at UMIST, followed by a research assistantship and subsequently a PhD in Organisational Analysis of Building Projects (1989).

Research interests span construction procurement and contract management, organisational analysis of construction projects, management of design, professionalism and commercialism in the built environment, construction industry development in emerging economies, and bibliometric analysis and metadata cataloguing of construction management research.

The textbook Construction Contracts: Law and Management, co-authored with John Murdoch and (in its fifth edition) Ronan Champion, has been in continuous print since 1992 and is the set text on construction degree programmes at universities worldwide.

A leading contributor to international standards for construction procurement over two decades, serving on BSI Committee CB/500 from around 2005 and as its Chair 2019–2025, his standards work produced BS 8534:2011, the ISO 10845 series, BS ISO 22058:2022, and BS ISO 6082:2025.

Editor-in-Chief of Construction Management and Economics (1992–2015), Chairman of ARCOM (1998–2000), and co-founder of the West Africa Built Environment Research (WABER) conference series, he held a Visiting Professorship at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden (2011–2018). He continues to develop the ARCOM Construction Management Abstracts, a metadata catalogue indexing over 20,000 journal papers and 7,600 doctoral theses, with a structured taxonomy reflecting the published landscape of construction management research.