Towards a new theory of construction innovation: a socio-material analysis of classification work

Abstract

There has been a longstanding concern among construction scholars and practitioners in classifying construction innovations, whether as "incremental" or "radical," "technological" or "organizational," "product" or "process". In this paper we extend this interest in classification to examine what classification work accomplishes within construction innovation practices. Instead of addressing the validity of innovation categories as objective representations we explore how innovations are classified within everyday interactions that shape how they proliferate. Our approach is informed by socio-material theories of classification, communication and innovation, particularly those from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Ventriloquial Analysis (VA). Empirically, our approach is developed through an analysis of how a single innovationa large format concrete blockwas classified within a single warranty approval meeting as it entered the UK housing market. Our analysis explains how such classification work is dynamically constituted by formal and informal classificatory acts that involve displacements of human agency that shape how construction innovations proliferate. Classification work is thus shown to make a vital difference to how construction innovation is accomplished and can be understood.

Differences in dialogue : the voices we hear in interorganizational collaboration

“…The framework provides a novel analytical tool that can facilitate the systematic inquiry of multivoicedness. Thereby, it can aid in decentering analyses beyond present humans and can contribute to more complete, relational, and dynamic understandings of the many voices that collectively and communicatively constitute organization and organizing (for applications beyond this dissertation, see, e.g., Clifton et al, 2021or Sage et al, 2021.…”

“…This framework is useful for generating decentered, relational, and more complete accounts of all the things and beings-of all the voices-that act and make a difference in the studied situations (as illustrated in Chapters IV and V). The framework can, of course, be applied to processes beyond interorganizational collaboration (e.g., Clifton et al, 2021;Sage et al, 2021). However, instead of listing these other processes here as potential pathways for future research, I seek to focus on the framework's continued development.…”