On the right to disagree, healthy debates and moving forward

In our inaugural editorial (Leiringer and Dainty, 2017) we expressed our intention to encourage considered rejoinders to articles published in the journal in the hope that, over time, such debates might build to act as important staging points in the evolution of thinking in the field. Over the past 35 years, the journal has seen a number of such debates (perhaps the most notable of which was that sparked by Seymour and Rooke (1995)), and some of our most downloaded papers e.g. Ellis et al. (2005) have been part of them. They have, however, been few and far between and this is disappointing given the maturing nature of the community and the special managerial challenges that construction activity provides. We see such debates and discussions as an opportunity to expose construction management and economics research to wider debates within the management sciences, but also to explore where the theoretical and empirical insights that we publish challenge orthodoxy or convention within the fields from which we draw.

In attempting to revive the spirit of debate triggered by Seymour and colleagues in the mid 1990s, we have in this issue what we hope is the first of many rejoinders to the more thought-provoking work that we have published in the Journal. Here, Chris Ivory reflects on Lauri Koskela’s (2017) critique of contemporary management research and how much of it can be considered “irrelevant”. It would be rather presumptuous of us to try and recapitulate Koskela’s paper here, but in essence his argument can be summarized into two key points, both of which are highly pertinent for construction management research. First, much management research is not relevant in terms of having any lasting impact on anything outside the university walls. Research problems and research methods are simply not aligned with developments in industry. Second, production has been neglected as the unit of analysis and as a research object, and the prevailing epistemological and ontological assumptions regarding production in management research are flawed. Both of these shortcomings, he argues, can be explained through the evolution of business schools (and by continuation management research) after 1959, where significant reports on American business education set a direction in which production was rejected as an integral aspect of organization.

In response, Ivory (this issue) concedes that any attempt of knowledge building in management should reflect and support practice and there is a need to reconsider, or perhaps rejuvenate, the relevance vs. rigour debate. He also makes a clear case for theory building and problem-solving to be co-productive. Where he questions Koskela’s argument is in its trajectory and the core underlying reasons shaping it. For example, the demise of production he sees as stemming from the post-war economic boom rather than the 1959 reports and argues that it has had an important place in management research for quite some time, albeit under different guises. He also sees production re-emerging as a research topic with a bright future ahead of it. However, the central plank of his rejoinder is that the remedy for the perceived (or real) irrelevance of management research is not to focus on production. Instead he argues that coherent bodies of knowledge are neither possible to generate nor desirable. Divergence, in Ivory’s view, is better than convergence, and any move to reduce the eclecticism of management research would be counterproductive.

These are not trivial issues in which we can quickly come to a consensus. For example, Winch (2015) puts forward a very different perspective than that proposed by Koskela, in which he presents construction as a problem of information, rather than as a problem of production. These authors have of course debated in the past (as acknowledged by Koskela 2017, p. 14) and the arguments put forward on both sides cannot easily be dismissed. The crucial point, therefore, is the need to open up for further debate and to expose CM research to the wider debates of the management sciences. As a community, we should be more aware of these debates and hopefully also start contributing to them. In our opening issue of the year, we had two papers that deal with such issues at length. Bresnen (2017) discusses how CM research can more fruitfully engage with broader management research, and especially institutional theory which has been so dominant in shaping debates in the management sciences. In a related vein, Styre (2017) shows how the CM field can usefully contribute to broader bodies of knowledge around materiality. The obvious presence of non-human objects within the built environment are all too often subjugated by the research community in favour of a focus on human agency. Again this is surprising given the socio-material emphasis of so much research within the mainstream fields to which we arguably draw.

These contributions raise really important questions as to the role of our field moving forward. Why have so many of the key debates from leading management journals failed to resonate with the majority of researchers in the CM field? Should we seek to draw upon or challenge theoretical perspectives from mainstream fields? Are we best served by parallel debates or converging discourses? How can we ensure that our research outputs are not “irrelevant”? Issues such as these will likely shape the trajectories the CM community might take in the future.

We welcome critical responses to all recent and future contributions within the pages of the journal.

Roine Leiringer and Andy Dainty
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Construction Management and Economics