Assessing the challenges affecting blockchain adoption in the Jordanian construction industry: PESTEL framework approach

Purpose This study aims to examine the challenges that the construction industry (CI) practitioners face in adopting blockchain technology (BCT) in the Jordanian CI. Design/methodology/approach Exploratory research perspective is applied to identify the challenges of BCT in the CI by conducting a bibliometric analysis. Challenges are clustered via the political, economic, sociocultural, technological, environmental and legal (PESTEL) framework and to investigate the inter-linkages between the challenges, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is applied. Convenience sampling is used with only first-grade classification to rank the challenges based on their importance index from the perspective of three Jordanian construction stakeholders; architects, consulting engineers and civil engineers. Findings The study identified that the primary challenges facing CI practitioners in adopting BCT are associated with the technological cluster. These include lack of information technology (IT) infrastructure, data validation, data privacy, scalability risks, data security and hesitation to integrate the new systems. Originality/value This paper presents a novel PESTEL framework tailored for the adoption of BCT in the CI. This paper aims to address a research gap by systematically identifying and ranking 16 key challenges based on the PESTEL framework. Moreover, it offers insights and practical guidance for overcoming the challenges.