In construction, it is unlikely that a client will be an individual; most clients are organizations or groups of people. Thus the client needs to be seen as a plurals and involving a set of stakeholders with different viewpoints and different needs(Newcombe 1994, cited Boyd and Chinyo, 2006 ).
Construction clients can be private individual, private corporate or public sector (Blackmore 1990).Boyd and Chinyio (2006) recognize that clients differ in their internal organization, objectives, drivers and values, particularly between public and private sector clients.Although achieving a profit still defines the private sector, there are now not-for profit organizations, such as housing associations, that provide social services.
Thus most common identification of the client in terms of two categories as private sector client and the public sector client. Mbachu (2002) define another advanced categorizations of the construction client in figure 2.1. The categorization started with the profit oriented clients and the non profit oriented clients. There are some deviations with the classification as public sector and private sector categorization and this classification is more comprehensive. Further figure 2.1 illustrate there are several types of profit oriented clients while only few types of non profit oriented clients.
Seely ( 1997 ) found that Before 1980 the public sector accounted 55 percent of the total construction , but next two decades as private sector accounted 60 percent of the construction. In addition to that Boyd and Chinyo( 2006) explained that invention of most of the government reports has been driven by only two groups of powerful clients : in the period1944-1980this world have been the powerful public clients; while the period 1980-2000 become the era dominated by powerful private clients. Thus, even though detail classifications are available for the types of clients as figure 2.1, the general identification as private sector and private sector is more discussed and the general analysis on clients’ behaviors mostly done based on this classification.