Introduction: Societies under Construction

Working in a loosely coupled system: exploring practices and implications of coupling work on construction sites

“…A growing number of studies in the construction and project management literature have highlighted the need to further explore the micro-level work-life realities on construction sites (such as how people experience and cope with their daily work) in order to gain a more profound understanding of various macro-level characteristics of the construction industry (e.g. Dainty et al 2007, Geraldi and S€ oderlund 2018, Sage and Vitry 2018, L€ owstedt and Sandberg 2020. In line with these studies, we draw on rich empirical data from site managers' work lives in order to explore the micro foundations of the loose/tight duality as it is enacted in day-to-day "coupling work" on construction sites.…”

“…Studies that have examined coupling patterns on project and site-levels seem to have overlooked everyday work activities in their analyses. Indeed, in the traditional construction literature focussed on organization and project management studies, there has been a tendency to ignore the situated lived realities of people working in the industry, thus failing to make linkages between the macro-level and the micro-level (Dainty et al 2007, Sage and Vitry 2018, L€ owstedt and Sandberg 2020. In a similar vein, those studies that do engage with people and practices of everyday work seldom link findings to the coupling conditions of the industry (with a notable exception of Styhre 2012).…”

Standardizing the free and independent professional

“…While the wide range of studies concerned with standardization in construction come in eclectic forms and differ in terms of whether they focus foremost on the physical site of production, processes, materials and modules, or technologies, they can all be effectively summarized by how they foreground the notion that standardization in construction is mainly an engineering challenge. In other words, it is considered from a rational and instrumental perspective (Sage and Vitry, 2018), wherein the workforce is conceived a mere commodity that is easily malleable in accordance to any superior principles of manufacturing (Green and May, 2003).…”

“…To understand why a worker perspective, to date, has been overlooked in the standardization debate, it is useful to view it in the light of a general tendency to ignore the people-level in construction research (Green and May, 2003; Chan and Räisänen, 2009; Chan and Cooper, 2010; Sandberg et al , 2018; Paskins, 2018). Sage and Vitry (2018) portray the historical development of construction research as a field that has been discursively formed around a prevalent focus on instrumental knowledge, strongly governed by capitalist and managerial performance indicators, such as productivity and profitability. Furthermore, they note that the few early attempts to enquire “down” at the people level, tended to consider “the people” in terms of instrumental and rational resources (see Seymour and Rooke (1995) and the ensuing debates, as cited in Sage and Vitry (2018)).…”

“…Sage and Vitry (2018) portray the historical development of construction research as a field that has been discursively formed around a prevalent focus on instrumental knowledge, strongly governed by capitalist and managerial performance indicators, such as productivity and profitability. Furthermore, they note that the few early attempts to enquire “down” at the people level, tended to consider “the people” in terms of instrumental and rational resources (see Seymour and Rooke (1995) and the ensuing debates, as cited in Sage and Vitry (2018)). This rational view of the people working in the construction industry is peculiar, not least since groundbreaking research has established that people are far from rationally calibrated to the logics and expectancies of the organizations, industries, or institutions within which they reside (Tversky and Kahneman, 1986); rather, they have other, sometimes irrational, witty, peculiar, and human, reasons for their behaviors (Jackall, 1988).…”