This special issue on theorizing expertise explores how various philosophical perspectives on expertise could shape the practice research agenda by providing the theoretical rigour necessary to advance both conceptual understanding and the nature of practice. Excellent performance is underpinned by expertise so the latter has a central role in the undertaking and explanation of successful construction practice. Expertise is difficult to theorize as it spans reason and intuition, knowledge and learning, and thinking and action as well as being both an individual and collective attribute. However, such theorization is valuable as clear conceptual articulation of these diverse aspects of expertise is an essential part of the process of providing more informative and useful conceptions of practice. Improvements in the conceptualizations of practice are an essential element in addressing the demand for improved construction management. Although construction research must continually meet the requirement of ensuring that theory is relevant to practice much existing work contains unwarranted assumptions about the nature of practice. Failure to suitably conceptualize the diversity of practice leads to inadequately reflective or misguided theorizing. Without better theory reliably identifying desirable changes in practice, like those related to the appropriate use of different types of knowledge management, can be hard so philosophically grounded research into expertise has a crucial role to play in this process. Theorizing expertise also has significant implications for educational and professional development particularly in construction, such as extending and refining work on experiential learning, and so can add value in these areas as well.
Research on expertise varies methodologically and thematically depending upon the academic field it emanates from. Within construction management work on expertise tends to be pragmatically oriented towards the improvement of practice with an emphasis upon seeking and implementing solutions to practical difficulties. In philosophy expertise research has a more reflective character with an emphasis upon the formulation and in depth discussion of problems. Philosophical inquiry about the nature of knowledge and skills has a foundational role to play in the practical and academic exploration of the nature of expertise, the appropriate methods for studying it and its role in construction practice. The extent to which construction researchers are examining the concept of expertise and its ability to further effective practice means that sustained examination of its philosophical dimensions is both merited and long overdue. This special issue contributes to the process of developing dialogue and interchange between philosophy and construction thereby enriching expertise theory in construction.
A significant motivation for the special issue was a wish to challenge the prejudice that construction management lacks appropriate academic rigour and gravitas. Research in practice based disciplines more widely struggles to achieve the parity of esteem accorded to more traditional academic subjects and the difficulties facing construction management are not unique in this respect. Seeking this parity of academic esteem for construction management involves clearly articulating what has been achieved within the field but more importantly engaging in critical reflection about the nature and definition of the discipline itself. Such reflection involves contesting well established assumptions about what research in the area is or should be like, introducing new ideas into the research agenda and examining what could usefully be drawn from other disciplines with a view to developing research that meets the demands of critical scrutiny both within and outside the discipline. Explicitly engaging with philosophically informed concerns about the nature of expertise was seen as valuable way of starting the process of redefining how the construction management research agenda might be taken forward. By undertaking this kind of inquiry the papers here have individually and collectively sought to move away from the idea that much construction management research is essentially industry driven and/or reacting to policy. Achieving a better understanding of some fundamental issues about knowledge and expertise which underpin successful construction management practice provides the grounds for developing new research agendas which are internal to the discipline itself rather than being reactive to external pressures.
To engage in redefining the discipline in this way required encompassing a wider audience than the usual construction management community, a specific selection of topics, setting expectations for interdisciplinary and boundary crossing papers. This meant that the process of delivery for the special issue differed from the usual Construction Management and Economics in a number of respects. The inclusion in the editorial team of Professor Mark Addis who came from outside the discipline was part of this difference. Addis is a philosopher whose interests include the philosophy of practice in a range of vocational areas. Colleagues from his fields of research provided a range of reviewers which helped to achieve broader critical insight into and improvements to the papers under consideration. The call for papers also took the form of actively seeking papers from colleagues within and outside the discipline. Management of the whole process of the special issue from initial expressions of interest to putting together the final version of the issue greatly benefited from the strong support given by Professor Will Hughes.
Given the difficulty and novelty of working in an under theorized and explored area in construction management, on occasion, the refereeing process was extensive and involved review of several iterations of a paper. This was to ensure that papers with good and interesting ideas received the necessary feedback from referees to become high quality publications, and the editors are most grateful to the referees for all the work they put in. The complex and contested nature of many of the topics and ideas discussed in the special issue meant that there were sometimes conflicting decisions amongst referees which required the editorial team to make appropriate judgement calls on occasion. It is hoped that the robustness of the debates around both themes and methodology will help in the process of reshaping the construction management research agenda in terms of both what this new agenda might look like and the ways in which researchers in the community could collaborate to achieve it. This aim of contributing to the reshaping of the disciplinary research agenda is an ambitious one and as such it will inevitably be controversial in a considerable number of respects. However, it is to be hoped that whatever criticism there is of the papers in this special issue the eventual outcome will be a clearer sense of what construction management research is or could be. The extent to which the special issue contributes to the reshaping of the construction management research agenda should be judged by the diverse range of papers ranging from the purely theoretical to those reflecting on new sorts of engagement with practice.
The 13 papers in this special issue are organized in three groups to consider (i) the nature of expertise and practice, (ii) enacting expertise, and (iii) development of expertise in construction management, research and education.
The nature of expertise and practice
In construction better practice has been sought through the employment of knowledge management with interest in tacit knowledge growing due to its importance for raising performance at all organizational levels. Addis considers aspects of the limits which tacit knowledge places on knowledge management approaches in construction with the focus being upon the broad categories of objectivist and practice based knowledge management. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that coupled with examination of whether the main mode of knowing is tacit or explicit is used to analyse the relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge in construction. Addis argues that there are significant general theoretical difficulties with incorporating tacit knowledge into the objectivist knowledge management approaches which predominate in construction. In particular this is difficult because methods for converting tacit to explicit knowledge contain a number of problematic assumptions about the very nature of knowledge itself. Improving performance requires appreciating the limitations which the practice of construction management places on objectivist and practice based knowledge management. This includes understanding the extent to which tacit knowledge constrains the identification and dissemination of best practice and that as a consequence the latter should be regarded as a family resemblance concept.
In his contribution Sage challenges the idea that the development of construction expertise is a process solely constituted by humans. Four strands of post-human philosophy are drawn upon to consider the different ways in which humans and non-humans entangle to create forms of expertise. Sage’s purpose is to draw greater attention to how all manner of nonhumans, including technologies, paperwork, and materials, shape, develop and constrain human construction expertise. This line of argument challenges the idea that humans can ever fully own their expertise independent of the materials they enter into relation with. Sage draws upon fictional examples, inspired by research in the UK construction industry, to illustrate his argument. Four different potential lines of thinking on post-human expertise are offered for scholars and reflexive practitioners to rethink how they might understand expertise differently. These strands include arguments to: understand how objects on building sites are drawn upon politically by practitioners to set boundaries on their expertise especially when working within ‘failing’ projects; consider how nonhumans such as reports, guides, codes and manuals circulate standards through which expertise is defined, valued and constructed.
Where logical positivism potentially leads to abstraction, social constructivism potentially leads to relativism. Newton argues that neither perspective does full justice to the study of construction management expertise. Social realism aims to recover declarative knowledge (theory) as an integral component of expertise without denying a place for deliberate practice. The issue is how to bridge between explicit and implicit forms of knowledge. Returning to the account of tacit knowing proposed by Polanyi, the nature of expertise is characterized in both declarative and personal knowledge terms. This is a limited characterization of expertise, but the social realism enterprise raises a number of critical issues: the body of knowledge; human agency; and deliberate practice. From a social realism perspective the production of theory is critical to the exercise of expertise, but theory is meaningless in the context of professional practice unless and until it is embodied and enacted. It is the being of construction management that gives purpose and value to the theory.
Expertise is commonly emphasized in construction management as a categorical thing that marks out skilful and superior performance in a particular domain. A corollary of this dominant view is that much effort is put by researchers and professional institutions to articulate the attributes needed to develop expertise as the end-game. In the paper, Expert knowledge in the making, Chan questions the categorical treatment of expertise in construction management by taking a process philosophical standpoint. Drawing on the writings of process philosophers like Henri Bergson, he argues for the need not to take expertise as a done deal, but also to consider expertise as effortful accomplishments in constant flux. Chan illustrates the argument through a vignette of how environmental expertise is negotiated in an airport infrastructure development context. In this vignette, he emphasizes expertise in the making by showing how expertise becomes relevant or irrelevant through intuition and ongoing reply to everyday situations in interactions with others. By seeing expertise as interactional, intuitive and incidental, a process philosophical position will prompt us to ask not how one becomes an expert, but to attend to the multiple and even infinite ways in which expertise is continually in the making in everyday organizational life.
Enacting expertise
Applying different forms of expertise when and where it counts is an important issue in construction management. In her contribution, Mogendorff introduces a non-traditional conceptualization and perspective on expertise in construction management informed by the performative turn in the social sciences. Central to the perspective propagated is partners in construction projects need to treat the expertise that is evoked as relevant to the business at hand before it may be deployed in construction work. Expertise that is not acknowledged or treated as relevant by team members is unlikely to be utilized for the benefit of construction work. The notion that expertise does not only constitute knowledge and competences individuals may acquire and apply, is, of course, not new. In construction research the social and performative nature of expertise is, however, rarely accommodated. Expertise is still very much treated as something professionals may deploy unproblematically in a wide variety of settings - provided that they possess all the relevant expertise. A reason for the lack of research attention for how and when expertise ends up being deployed in multi-party settings or not may be that construction management research privileges the discovery of general principles and the construction of models that may be applied across cases and settings. In the later part of her contribution Mogendorff provides some generic guidelines for researching construction expertise. Analysis of the social and performative nature of construction expertise may prove to be particularly useful when different forms of expertise relevant to the process or end product contradict one another or serve opposing stakes and interests. The analysis of how expertise ends up being treated as relevant in construction requires the recording of real-life meetings and the deployment of various forms of interaction or conversation analysis.
In construction, like other domains, project management is preceded by sensemaking, the initial stage of information processing that impacts judgment and decision-making. Gacasan, Wiggins, and Searle undertook a two-stage research approach to investigate how project managers engaged in sensemaking. In the first of two studies, nine peer-recommended successful project managers – 5 from Australia and 4 from the Philippines - were interviewed using a critical incident technique in which they were asked to identify critical incidents that occurred during project implementation. Through content analysis, key operational cues converged into three distinct categories: feedback, context cues, and tacit knowledge. The companion study tested the validity of these categories by situating them at different project phases and levels of project complexity. Twenty-three experienced project managers and 78 naïve participants participated in the online study. Differences in patterns of cue utilization were evident between the two cohorts suggesting the situatedness of the cues according to the temporal nature and situational demands of the project. In combination, Gacasan, Wiggins, and Searle established the role of cues in identifying and responding to changes in the project state. Further, they provided basis for further research to systematically improve project manager capabilities through training and development.
The discourse of managerial expertise favours rational analysis and masculine ideals but contemporary management literature also recognizes the value of well-being and employee voice in the workplace. Raiden develops narrative analysis of the lived experiences of Laura, one female project manager who recently managed a construction site in the Midlands in the UK. In contrast to previous research which indicates that female managers tend to conform to quite a traditional set of gender behaviours, Laura embraces a range of workplace appropriate gendered strategies, such as hard work and horseplay, together with sensitivity and caring. She draws from this mix of gendered strategies in negotiating between two different discourses of construction: one professional and one tough and practical. Her behaviour both reproduces the masculine ideals (through horseplay and heroic management) and opens up possibilities for modernizing construction management (by caring). It is this combination of strategies that is at the heart of tacit expertise for Laura. The analysis of Laura’s account features a theory–practice divide. While gender may be theorized at the level of sophistication offered by Butler’s multiple and coexisting identifications of gender, in practice it is often the individualistic view and relatively fixed categories of male–female or masculine–feminine that drive thinking and behaviour. Theorizing of gender has advanced to a level where nuanced and sophisticated analysis is possible and commonplace. However, in the ‘everyday’ how we perform gender is not a matter of free choice but always rooted in time and place and culturally and socially constructed ideas on gender and the norms that prevail. Thus, the challenge that remains has transfer of knowledge to inform practice on site at the core.
In their conceptual paper, Gluch and Bosch-Sijtsema seek to create an understanding how experts within the AEC industry adopt various types of agency to influence institutional change in relation to construction project practice. Building on the theoretical lens of institutional work Gluch and Bosch-Sijtsema develop a dynamic model that envisions tensions between various forms of institutional work processes, which have not been addressed in current literature on institutional work. Besides illustrating tensions, the model helps to envision locked-in maintaining of institutions performed by iterative and practical-evaluative agency and exclusion of projective agency. To support the conceptual discussion, Gluch and Bosch-Sijtsema use example stories of environmental experts in Sweden to illustrate institutional work practices. A narrative inquiry method is used to understand the real-life experiences of these experts. The narrative method uncovers how individuals construct themselves as central characters of a story told, meaning that the researcher can gain an insight in how an individual looks upon one’s expertise role and tasks. The authors’ conceptual discussion shows that by identifying types of institutions and tensions in between, it is possible to create an awareness of which agencies experts can perform within the situated practice they work in.
Development of expertise
Engaged scholarship aims to develop knowledge that advances both science and practice through engagement of scholars with practice. However, a clear picture of the added value of engaged scholarship for construction management research does not exist. Therefore, Voordijk and Adriaanse explore what engaged scholarship could mean for this field of research in facilitating interactions between practice and theory to develop scientific as well as practical knowledge. The relevance of engaged scholarship in facilitating these interactions is clarified through elaborating on a research program on the adoption of ICT in construction projects. Three kinds of engaged scholarship are explained through their different knowledge–action relations: action theories or “knowledge about action”, design research or “knowledge for action”, and action research or “knowledge through action”. These different kinds of engaged scholarship can also be found in construction management research. It is argued that the different kinds of engaged scholarship presuppose each other and are all needed to facilitate interactions between practice and theory in construction management research.
Scott addresses the education of the construction professional and argues that although there has been discourse around the theoretical underpinnings of construction education, a philosophical position has not always been to the forefront of the construction education community, with a more ‘systems thinking’ positioning predominating. Scott argues that while progress has been achieved in this respect, it is now time to offer a possible further step forward. Using an analysis of and a link to other disciplines, the case is made in this paper, that a pragmatic philosophical position, as one that offers freedom to work and the opportunity to accept diversity, can draw together some of the thoughts that challenge the role and position of theory in construction education. In particular, the education discipline is drawn on as a case study, in which the work of Biesta and others argues for the intelligent use of theory and philosophy and where pragmatism, as a positioning in regard to discourse, is advocated. Scott links the principles and positions in epistemological orientations of pragmatism to construction and argues that, because of the richness in philosophical problems, it fits well with those key characteristics. The case is made that as pragmatism’s highest ideal is action, this corresponds closely with the typically intuitive attitude of the AEC community. Scott concludes that embedding a pragmatic framework offers the freedom to gain control over what construction education constitutes as it offers a way of thinking that allows the educationalist in the discipline the freedom to challenge. In construction, pragmatism offers researchers and educators the opportunity to take a more contextual view and link that focus to the reality in which they practice - a constant challenge to ensure advancement but stay true to the roots of the discipline.
Kanjanabootra and Corbitt investigated the development of expertise in senior construction professionals (engineers, architects, owners, and builders), both Thai and ex-patriot, working in the Thai construction industry. Each of these professionals has experience in construction projects in multi-nation settings, both Asian and European. Using stories gathered from those professionals and a self analysis by one of the researchers who has construction project experience, Kanjanabootra and Corbitt explore how they think both about the development of their expertise and how they learn in construction contexts in an attempt to offer issues for further discussion and extension by other construction professionals, rather than the creation of un-debatable facts. Kanjanabootra and Corbitt analysed the stories in a construction sociological framework seeking to better understand what affects the way construction professionals learn and how they develop their expertise. The stories highlight that learning and expertise development in construction professionals emerges incrementally from the multiple contexts in which they work, from the people they interact with and their inherent cultural practices, from the controls imposed by professional associations and accreditation bodies, from the parameters imposed by law and regulation, from the controls imposed by the economic constraints of project budgets, and from the various and variable project demands of owners. The stories demonstrated that the development of expertise in construction relies more on practice and the process of one project followed by another, rather than on initial learning prior to employment. The immediacy effects of continual sequencing of projects limit practitioner’s ability to reflect on their learning and expertise development. Key applications of this study are the need to better inform students in the initial learning and training process in universities about the possible impacts of controls, professional, economic, social and legal, inherent in construction projects, and the need to frequently reflect on learning along their professional journey.
Implementing new practices within a collaborative process in temporary context is challenging. Kokkonen and Alin investigated a case where BIM implementation caused changes in the traditional project practices. To implement new technology or new processes, management often provides guidelines and structures. However, the practitioners often need to learn how the guidelines and structures can be followed in their daily practices within the context of a specific project. To understand how practitioners learn within a project when implementing building information modelling, Kokkonen and Alin qualitatively investigated a large construction project in the US. Their main data consisted of interviews from which two types of reflective learning that practitioners actively performed were found: deconstruction and reconstruction. These types were analysed with Derrida’s and Dewey’s ideas. The first type - deconstruction - occurs when the new requirements cause practitioners to change their ideas of performing the practices. The second type – reconstruction – refers to practitioners actively learning how to improve the practices. Kokkonen and Alin’ findings suggest that it is useful to understand practitioners as actively involved in the implementation processes and to consider the reflective work needed by practitioners. The findings also suggest that construction managers should think how to enable practitioners to reflective learn new ways of performing practices when implementing new technologies or new processes.
Ingirige investigates theorizing construction industry practice within a disaster management setting. Ingirige argues that quantitative performance measures and the overly commercial focus within construction industry affect its wider remit in terms of the different customers that it serves. Given that communities and their built and natural environments are increasingly affected by natural hazard events, the construction industry tends to perform its duties within a disaster management environment on a more regular basis serving many affected communities. Such scenarios demand a wider social remit considering not just physical reconstruction, meeting cost targets, improving labour productivity, but going further towards improving resilience of communities and getting them better prepared to face up to any future hazard events. The current theoretical developments in construction industry often ignore this wider social remit and the competitive advantage that such contexts present to the construction industry stakeholders. Through a literature review and synthesis and analysing two documented case histories, Ingirige presents how events in the past show the under developed advantage of the construction industry and that a carefully coordinated approach in theorizing construction industry practice customized into a disaster management setting could benefit the construction industry. Such an approach will involve building of capacity within the construction education system to enable both grassroots capabilities and capacities to develop as well as to sustain the process to make it a panacea rather than an illusion. The modified expertise development model will be the key in benefiting both practitioners and policy makers in understanding, and then reinforcing the importance of disaster management being mainstreamed within the construction industry education.