Editorial: informality and emergence in construction

Background

Much writing about the construction sector has focused on the formal and technical aspects of construction work, ranging from organizational structures and their impacts on performance to the routines and tools associated with project planning. The dominant discourse in the construction management and economics literature has been that of technical rationalism often resulting in deterministic and prescriptive recommendations to practitioners and academic researchers (see Seymour and Rooke, 1995).

There is growing concern among researchers as well as practitioners as to the practical value of such acontextual prescriptions since they often fail to take account of the situated lived realities of those working in the sector (see Dainty et al., 2007; Rooke and Kagioglou, 2007). Rather, there is increasing recognition of the importance of informal and emergent practices and processes of construction work (e.g. Chan and Kaka, 2007; Räisänen and Gunnarson, 2007), covering such concepts as organizational learning, strategic management and the management of complexity in construction projects. Furthermore, critics of the reductionism associated with formal mechanisms argue that there is a need to capture the entirety of the construction process, of which informal and emergent processes form a large part. This special issue is therefore dedicated to papers that present theoretical and methodological positions on, and empirical accounts of, informal and emergent aspects in construction.

Recognizing informality and emergence in construction

Over the last decade, the importance of informal and emergent practices, activities and discourses has become increasingly prominent in construction management research. Most notably, there is a great deal of interest found in accounts of the informal sector, which often remain hidden thus escaping official statistics. For example, Briscoe (2006) suggested that formal, statistical records do little to explain what goes on in the informal economy. Cremers and Janssen (2006) pointed out that the informal sector is potentially sizeable and that much work is being undertaken by undeclared labour, many of whom are not formally organized (see also Lizarralde and Root, 2008).

Informality in construction also extends beyond the informal sector. Research has identified the informal aspects that occur in a variety of business processes in construction organizations. For example, Fellini et al. (2007) and Lockyer and Scholarios (2007) noted the prevalence of informality dominance in recruitment practices in construction, especially in the form of word‐of‐mouth and personal networks. Kheni et al. (2008) reported that construction firms, especially construction SMEs, are typified by informal management styles when it comes to managing health and safety. Dey et al. (2008) considered informal interpersonal relationships and the building of personal trust between individuals to be far more critical in governing construction supply chains than are contract laws. Chan and Kaka (2007) also observed that whereas construction workers are mostly transient and mobile, relationships with co‐workers are often developed informally over a long period of time in what is informally termed as the ‘incestuous world’ of construction work. Furthermore, Senaratne and Sexton (2008), in a study of how change is managed in construction projects, highlighted the importance of informal communities of practice in effectuating changes.

So, there is no shortage of research identifying the occurrence of informal practices in construction. According to Wells (2007), informality occurs across four dimensions, including informal labour, informal enterprise, informal construction systems and informal building. However, corresponding to these dimensions, she argued that more sophisticated analytical tools would have to be developed and deployed to examine informal aspects as they manifest respectively in employment relations, within the construction firm and across its supply chains, along the construction process and in the final building product that is produced. Indeed, much construction management research has hitherto merely scraped the surface by recognizing the existence of informal and emergent aspects; there remains much work to be done to refine viable analytical approaches and devise novel tools to make informal and emergent practices visible as well as to add to and enrich existing theories. If Wells' (2007) suggestions were to be adhered to, there is a need for construction management researchers to re‐present informal and emergent aspects beyond simplistic exhortations of the importance of informal conversations and relationships in the workplace. We need to apply critical awareness (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000) and view the informal as it relates to the formal e.g. affordances and constraints, relationships of power, identity conflicts, just to name a few under‐researched areas.

Instead, there is a tendency for researchers to suggest that informal and emergent practices in construction can be problematic and that what is needed is for practice to move towards a more systematized, formal approach. For instance, Haas et al. (2001) argued for a need to improve the use of formal human‐resource management information systems in order to implement a multi‐skilled workforce in construction. Fellini et al. (2007) associated the use of informal recruitment practices with a degree of illegality, maintaining that ‘companies can use informal (sometimes illegal) strategies to reduce labour costs’ (p. 282). Kheni et al. (2008) also suggested that ‘informal management styles […] that form key characteristics of SMEs all militate against the formal and transparent processes required by health and safety management systems’ (p. 1160).

The formalization of practices in itself seems to be viewed as unproblematic. Yet systematization requiring codification of practices and activities inherently reduces (even ignores) tacit aspects of knowledge that are a part of informal and emergent practices. Senaratne and Sexton (2008), for instance, warned that ‘project documentation that codified the change event generally included details of the final change decisions, but not the details of the whole change experience’ (p. 1309; emphasis added). These documents highlight the knowing that and maybe the knowing how, but not the knowing why! In other words, much learning that can be gained through the nurturing of informal and emergent aspects can become lost in the oft‐expedient pursuit of formalizing procedures.

Furthermore, there is the problem of identifying whose perspective gets legitimized (see Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Alvesson, 2002) in the researcher's collusion with management's imperative to effectivize through systematization and generic documentation in an environment which is inherently and by tradition heterogeneous. This problem was identified earlier by Seymour and Rooke (1995) in the construction management research community as they asserted,

[…] the objective of practitioners, for example, quality, efficiency, productivity or profits, cannot be taken to be self‐evident by the researcher. An essential purpose of research is to establish what participants in the situation under study, managers, engineers or steel‐fixers, mean by these terms and what values and beliefs underlie such meanings. Researchers may well share some of the understandings of some of the participants, but it is imperative that they suspend their own understandings. Only by doing so can they allow practitioners to speak for themselves (p. 522).

Moreover, there is the prevalently ignored issue of how categories are formulated in the codification process, and the limitations associated with rationalization efforts (e.g. Bowker and Star, 2000). In a qualitative study of project managers' perspectives of what creates successful projects, Baiden et al. (2006) explained the need for adopted methods to ‘[…] create typologies, find associations, and seek explanations for the emerging phenomena. It also allows the sifting, charting and sorting of data into key issues and themes and enables rapid comparison of research findings across cases investigated’ (p. 16; emphasis added). Without further articulation of how analytical categories are formulated and, given the push towards research expediency resulting from inter alia the pressures from funding agencies and the drive towards commercialization of academic work with research collaborators, it remains questionable how valid the analysis can be for practitioners or for researchers.

The formulation of categories often requires a degree of rationality on the part of the researcher. The philosopher Edmund Husserl (1970) warned against adopting the rationalistic (positivistic) paradigm in the study of humans,

[…] to be human at all is essentially to be a human being in a socially and generatively united civilisation; and if man is a rational being […] it is only insofar as his whole civilisation is a rational civilisation, that is, one with a latent orientation toward reason or one openly oriented toward the entelechy which has come to itself, become manifest to itself, and which now of necessity consciously directs human becoming (p. 15).

In other words, the dominant rationalistic paradigm is only rational insofar as the whole construction research and practitioner community is a rational community; and the essence of this supposition is what Seymour and Rooke (1995) urged the construction management research community to critically reflect upon.

After all, what is the point of systematizing every aspect of practice if what one can merely emphasize, as Seymour et al. (1998) indicated, is the localised relevance in their accounts? Deep ethnographic studies in the field of construction management are relatively rare. Most notably, the seminal work of LeMasters (1975) in exposing the personal lives of construction workers by covertly observing the behaviours and capturing the conversations of patrons at a working‐class American tavern over a five‐year period remains a pioneering example in the field of construction management research. In other fields, Michael Burawoy's own involvement as a worker in industrial workplaces across Zambia, the US, Hungary and Russia provided fruitful insights on the changing nature of workplace organization, particularly focusing on post‐colonialism and the transition from state socialism to capitalism (see Burawoy, 1998). It is interesting to note here that the examples of LeMasters (1975) and Burawoy (1998) sought to provide a ‘thick description’—i.e. a detailed or micro understanding (Geertz, 1977) of the state of affairs within the environments studied. Conversely, in studies that examine social phenomena in construction the purpose or a priori assumption is to propose prescriptive, often untested and sometimes even speculative, recommendations for firms, governments or corporate policy‐makers.

Key themes in this special issue

This special issue seeks to bring the informal and emergent nature of construction to the fore. The objective has been to gather theoretical and empirical papers that focus on the implicit knowledge and the informal and emergent activities of construction and related work processes, which go beyond the study of the development of organizational tools and routines. At the heart of this special issue is a call for methodological and theoretical discussions and reflections as to how academics and practitioners may engage with (Van de Ven, 2007), make sense of (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996) and maintain reflexivity (Alvesson and Koldberg, 2000) concerning their research on informality and emergence in construction. A number of questions were posed in our call for papers:

•	How can academic researchers and practitioners conceptualize (and operationalize) informality in construction?
•	What are the methodological challenges of capturing tacit knowledge, and informality in work places?
•	How do the informal practices and discourses interact or conflict with the formal practices and discourses of construction?
•	What are the affordances and constraints associated with this kind of research?

This special issue contains nine papers all of which address one or more of these questions. A brief summary of the highlights of each paper follows below.

Rooke, Koskela and Kaglioglou set the tone of the special issue by challenging conventional approaches to research in construction management and by questioning the evaluation criteria of such research. The paper critiques formal theorizing, arguing that formal organizing in itself is basically grounded in social practices. The authors examine the usefulness of some alternative perspectives and suggest an approach that could capture both formal and informal practices. They contend that their proposal offers a practical research approach that enables researchers to combine a prescriptive management theory with a management practice that is sensitive to informal and emergent phenomena.

Bresnen draws attention to ways in which established definitions, categories and taxonomies constrain and regulate research on, and understanding of, dynamic and often heterogeneous practices using partnering as an illustrative example. Preconceived definitions and categories function as blinkers that may effectively help researchers and practitioners to focus, but chances are they will neglect to see critical social and discursive interactions that take place ‘off‐stage’ and which implicate understanding of the practice being studied. Bresnen advocates a shift toward a ‘practice turn’ perspective (Schatzki et al., 2001) of partnering, viewing it more as an emergent, ongoing and varying social accomplishment from project to project in which meanings need to be constantly negotiated and made sense of between contractual partners. A practice‐based perspective emphasizes the situated nature of knowing and learning and the importance, for both researcher and practitioner, of understanding the social construction and localized enactment of a phenomenon such as partnering.

Although ‘case study’ has become somewhat of a household word in qualitative construction‐management research, it tends to be rather loosely interpreted (and described) as interview studies. Without a clear description of the methodology design and the data analysis process, it is difficult to evaluate the appropriateness of the method and the applicability of the results. How do we capture what we do not know we are looking for? How do we avoid imposing our researcher biases, beliefs, understandings and theoretical proclivities on our methodological design and analysis? Barrett and Sutrisna offer a comprehensive grounded approach based on multiple data sources analysed using different techniques to minimize data reduction. These research tools are applied to the study of briefing processes across several capital arts projects. The authors show how their research design enables them to progressively identify emergent general themes and reveal informal characteristics that challenge best practice ideas of strict control to deal with e.g. risk issues.

Baarts' paper describes a fascinating ethnographic exploration of the actual practice of safety on a construction site. Through a selection from her copious field notes, she offers us glimpses of how actors on a construction site navigate between collective and individualistic preferences in dyadic and triadic relationships. Using ethnography, Baarts is able to show how seemingly immutable safety laws and regulations become elastic and adjustable to particular local circumstances, and then, she argues, become established norms that determine the nature and scope of permissible action on site. This paper is a welcome contribution, demonstrating the richness and complexity of human interaction. Although ethnographic research is common to many disciplines in the social sciences, it remains scarce in construction research. Thus, Baarts provides inspiration and novel examples of researcher–practitioner interaction and how research may be documented and written up.

Like Baarts, Gluch has spent time on site. For example, she tramped around in a muddy tunnel construction site talking with practitioners, observing and photo‐documenting how environmental work was practised in the project. In her paper, she lets the practitioners talk to us, and what we hear are stories wrought with contradiction and conflict; contradictions between espoused and ‘real’ practice, and conflicts of identity and roles experienced by the environmental professionals. World‐views, time perspectives and communication cultures clash as environmental work practices and project practices are negotiated. To handle these contradictions, the environmental professionals develop alternative identities and roles to accommodate the different situations, i.e. formal roles in accordance with their job descriptions and informal roles to adapt to the project practices. However, this strategy, as Gluch shows, is detrimental; it hinders effective environmental work in projects and seems to increase fragmentation of practices by creating more barriers between professions. The contribution of the paper is to highlight how emergent roles both challenge and are challenged by existing power bases. The paper also underlines the need for research that links local and situational practices and discourses to the prevalent politico‐social discourses.

Georg and Tryggestad's paper also deals with shifting roles; here the focus being on the role of project management as an aggregate of roles. Using a case study approach and drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT) as an analytical and explanatory tool, the authors have followed the ‘actors or actants’, humans as well as non‐humans. The construction project in question is that of the controversial ‘Turning Torso’ skyscraper in Malmö, Sweden, which is a spectacular, but also notorious construction. In accordance with the ANT lens, non‐human agency may be as important for an outcome as is that of human agency. The authors show how an entity such as the budget assumes an important role in the negotiation of professional roles and of the building's emergent properties. The paper also highlights the hybrid role of project management: sometimes mediating qualitative aspects of the projects, at other times taking on the more passive role of intermediary merely passing on the concerns of other actors. This paper demonstrates yet another lens, ANT, which may be used with advantage to capture complex and often hidden interactions and negotiations. It is also a powerful lens to reveal the invisible, yet important, work done by non‐humans in these interactions.

Gorse and Emmitt focus on construction progress meetings using a quantitative approach to identify interaction patterns and a qualitative approach to explore interpersonal behaviour. Despite the prevalence and importance of meetings in the lives of professionals, these sites remain under‐researched in construction. The ways in which participants conduct their relationships were found to be important in managing task‐based decisions. This process consists of subtle negotiations involving discourse and body language. To capture these interactions requires a combination of methods: video recording of the meetings and a robust analytical tool. An interesting finding is the interplay between task‐based and socio‐emotional interaction and how communication that has emotional content is enmeshed in the decision‐making process. The relatively unstructured and informal aspects of relationship management are interwoven with group decision‐making. This study offers a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to study how different modalities are used by team and project members in decision‐making meetings, which enhances our understanding of communication processes.

Over the last decade, knowledge management has awakened much interest among researchers as well as practitioners. The most difficult problem to solve in this context is how to share knowledge across disciplines, especially tacit knowledge. But what is tacit knowledge? Styhre theorizes on the nature of the term as it applies to rock construction and concludes that it is wanting since the assumptions underpinning the literature on tacit knowledge are logocentric, i.e. grounded on the notion that language precedes and is constitutive of knowledge. Styhre argues that skills and operative vocabularies are only partially interdependent. There is another aspect of skills that is separated from language; rather it is dependent on the interplay between material practices and a person's sensory system, e.g. emotions and aesthetic senses. Styhre's study of rock construction shows that workers may carry out procedures without cognizance of the applied operative vocabulary. These workers, Styhre suggests, are using aesthetic knowledge, which is an emergent competence inherent in everyday practices and therefore transcends operative vocabularies. Thus, through the senses and through practice, it is possible to appropriate or acquire, or even create, an operative vocabulary proceeding rather than preceding thought. Therefore, says Styhre, the term ‘tacit knowledge’ should be abandoned and replaced by the non‐logocentric term ‘aesthetic knowledge’ which better captures the emergent and fluid nature of everyday knowledge‐in‐the‐making.

Kao, Green and Larsen close this special issue with a presentation of two case studies that show how senior managers within regional construction firms conceptualize and enact competitiveness. They review existing formal discourses of construction competitiveness, including the discourse of ‘best practice’ and the various theories of competitiveness mobilized within the academic literature. The case studies provide new insights into the emergent discourses of construction competitiveness. An alternative discourse is outlined based on the concepts of localized learning and embeddedness. The case studies demonstrate that regional construction firms de‐centralize business structure in order to enable multiple business units to become embedded within localized markets. It is further demonstrated that a significant degree of autonomy is essential to facilitate local entrepreneurial behaviour. An important finding is that construction firms' unique capabilities are not rooted solely within the company, but are spread across networks of relational ties. The notions of localized learning and embeddedness provide important new avenues for research into the competitiveness of construction firms.

Where next for informality and emergence in construction?

Notwithstanding the efforts made through the contributions in this special issue in articulating informal and emergent aspects in construction, there are a number of areas that require further attention. First, there is a need for more careful analysis of discursive practices. For example, whereas Gorse and Emmitt's (this issue) suggestion of how forms of communication potentially evolve over time from a more task‐oriented approach towards a more informal, socio‐emotional approach remains interesting, there is a need for complementary deeper and more textured analysis of the dialogues that take place between the research participants, much of which would remain elusive with solely quantitative research methods. Indeed, researchers should constantly strive to be sensitive, through the research methods employed, towards the interplay and dynamics that typify informal and emergent practices. A corollary of this is that researchers' interpretations and the assumptions underlying formulated categories must be clearly articulated. The object, therefore, is less about explaining a phenomenon, and more about critically justifying why just these particular analytical categories should be valid and paid attention to (see Bresnen's paper). Moreover, the researcher's ethical position ought to be made transparent, which, and maybe paradoxically, increases the validity of the research (see Baarts' paper).

The papers presented in this special issue have all focused on particular aspects of the working lives of those researched. Yet, we are still none the wiser in terms of the personal lives of the research subjects, both individually and collectively, through the stories re‐presented by the researchers. How do the personal lives of those researched intertwine with their working lives, and how do these influence one another? Investigating these questions may yield further insights into the world of construction work and benefit our understanding of human relations in construction. It must be said that the personal lives of those researched have been of interest to construction management researchers in recent times. Lingard and Francis (2008), for instance, interviewed the domestic partners of seven interview participants to explore adaptive strategies of working families in the Australian construction industry context. However, studies of this nature remain rare in the field.

Finally, the reliance on the interviewing technique as the dominant form of qualitative research in construction can certainly be seen in the papers presented here. However, the interviewing technique runs the risk of participants offering an idealized account, thereby hiding the details that matter in reality (Alvesson, 2002). Interrogating the validity and reliability of accounts provided by participants remains critical. Researchers should always maintain reflexivity (which we have mentioned several times in this editorial); otherwise, we end up simply reproducing what our informants tell us in an uncritical manner. Furthermore, researchers should try to maintain a wider long‐term view of the issues facing the industry and not be consumed by short‐term, quick fixes. There is a need for more engaged scholarship (see Van de Ven, 2007) through slower, but richer and deeper ethnographic methods in construction research. There is also a need to do away with the qualitative–quantitative dichotomy in which implicitly the quantitative is marked as the strong. Quantitative and qualitative research approaches need to be ‘in dialogue’ with each other; each one may be a powerful resource to the other (see Dainty, 2008).

To conclude this editorial, we hope that you will find this special issue as stimulating to read, as we did compiling it.