Ani Raiden

Understanding employee resourcing in construction organizations

In recent years the literature on employee resourcing has consistently advocated the importance of adopting a holistic, strategic approach to employee deployment decision making rather than adopting a reactive needs‐based approach. This is particularly problematic in construction where the multi‐project environment leads to constantly changing resource requirements and to changing demands over a projects life cycle. This can lead to inappropriate decisions, which fail to meet the longer‐term needs of both construction organizations and their employees. A structured and comprehensive understanding of the current project team deployment practices within large construction organizations was developed. Project deployment practices were examined within seven case study contracting firms. The emergent themes that shaped the decision‐making processes were grouped into five broad clusters comprising human resource planning, performance/career management, team deployment, employee involvement and training and development. The research confirms that a reactive and ad hoc approach to the function prevails within the firms investigated. This suggests a weak relationship between the deployment process and human resource planning, team deployment, performance management, employee involvement and training and development activities. It is suggested that strategic HR–business partnering could engender more transparent and productive relationships in this crucial area.

Striving to achieve it all: men and work-family-life balance in Sweden and the UK

Although there is a vast literature on issues of work-life balance, most of the research is grounded on the traditional view of work-life balance as a female-oriented entitlement. So far little attention has been paid to how men balance their work-life situations, especially the ‘new men’ who are keen to share the family care. We contribute to filling this gap by critically examining how male academics in construction-related departments at universities in Sweden and the UK construct their relationships with family and work. Narrative analysis was applied on in-depth interviews with seven academics from each country, who were at different phases in their careers. Three core narratives emerged from the data: family connected with partner; work as key priority; and desire to pursue personal projects, all of which competed for the narrators’ sparse time. The narrative that by far received most space and most storylines in all the interviews was ‘work as priority’, implying that in spite of gender equality policies and campaigns, work-life balance remains a female-oriented concern. Both Swedish and British men in our sample found juggling family and life most challenging. This work-family-life triad left many feeling that they had no time to do a good job in any sphere and in Sweden in particular combination pressure was intense. Curiously, despite these tensions and increasing demands for many of our respondents work remains a positive construct, possibly because of the strong conceptual identification of ‘self’ as an academic.

Incorporating employee resourcing requirements into deployment decision making

Employee resourcing is the process of matching human resource capabilities to the strategic and operational needs of the organization. This is exceptionally problematic in project-based organizations due to the competing priorities of the project, the individual employee, and the wider succession needs of the organization. This article presents the findings of research examining the human resource management practices that form the key components of the resourcing process. These included, inter alia, human resource planning, recruitment and selection, team deployment, performance management, and human resource administration. Current practices were examined in seven leading construction firms, all of which faced dynamic resourcing priorities. Within an inductive methodology, semistructured interviews were carried out with senior executives, human resource management (HRM) specialists, senior operational managers, and project-based staff. Based on a synthesis of the promising practices extracted from the case-study organizations, an innovative approach to project resourcing was developed that aims to balance organizational, project, and individual employee requirements. Team deployment resides at the center of resourcing process for the project-based organization as it determines the success of the project, which in turn determines the competitiveness of the organization. Long-term planning and employee involvement enable team deployment to integrate with other elements of HRM effectively and thus help to balance the organizational strategic priorities, project requirements, and individual employee needs and preferences.

Harvesting and Managing Knowledge in Construction

of prescriptive models as a precursor to the more appropriate examination of challenges and alternatives to the planned approach! That leads to the discussion of several emergent models of change and how managers may, advisedly, endeavour to accommodate and deal with change. It might have been helpful to give more attention to the research of Harris and Ogbonna (e.g. 2002) who determine issues in organizational change yielding important (often unanticipated) outcomes. ‘Considering the development of strategic options’ constitutes Chapter 10. It begins with consideration of Ansoff’s matrix, progresses to brief consideration of Porter’s model, use of resources, according to Hamel and Prahalad (1994), the value chain, SWOT, RBV, and core competences. Criteria for judging strategy are discussed and use of scenarios is noted. A more extensive section concerns ‘the importance of context’ in which various bases for formulation and judging strategy are examined. Chapter 11 concerns ‘Implementing the strategy— issues, dilemmas and delivery of strategic outcomes’. The examination of differences between ‘intended’ and ‘realized’ strategy is useful and important. The latter sections address dealing with failure, causes of failure and recovery possibilities. However, the rather brief examination of turbulent markets belies the importance of such an environment for construction organizations. Finally, Chapter 12 ‘Turning theory into practice— some empirical examples of strategy in construction organizations’ is an assembly of perspectives from a wide variety of practitioners, drawn from a very broad spectrum of organizations. As such, the content is highly variable as, it seems, the authors present what they see as important for the topic, rather than following issues from a prescriptive template. The chapter is a nice ending to the volume. The strength of this volume is the discussions of construction—it is worth reading. What is refreshing is the sub-themes of continuous change requiring perspective of emergence due to knowledge limitation and uncertainty—after all, managing must be forward-looking. That leads to a desire to remove the blame and claim ‘culture’, so often a feature of construction; and to educate personnel towards a different mindset—a becoming ontology—in which uncertainty and variability are regarded as natural and normal while certainty and planned outcomes are not!

Horseplay, care and hands on hard work: gendered strategies of a project manager on a construction site

The discourse of managerial expertise favours rational analysis and masculine ideals but contemporary management literature also recognises the value of well-being and employee voice in the workplace. Drawing upon narrative analysis of interview data, we share unique insights into 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. Theoretically, the discussion adds to the development of a more nuanced understanding of management expertise as situated and person-specific knowledge that draws on both the explicit and tacit. Specifically, the centrality of gendered strategies beyond the masculine ideals to success on site is highlighted.

Liberating the Semantics: Embodied Work(Man)ship in Construction

Human bodies are under-researched in organisational theorising. This chapter brings out the perceived experiences and emotions of a physical body-in-context. Using a narrative approach and life-story analysis, the authors examine the interplay between strongly entrenched masculine corporeal inscriptions of an ideal (normal) body and the embodied performances of one female construction site manager as she makes active choices to appropriate and occupy viable subject positions made available by her engagement with deeply entrenched semantically gender-burdened meanings. To do this, she purposefully enacts multiple bodies, mobilising masculine and feminine gender strategies to craft her identity and subject position. The chapter shows that construction is a rich and fertile empirical site for challenging and expanding social science theorising of the body and of work.

Special Issue: Theorizing Expertise in Construction

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 constructionmanagement. 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 engag-

Conference issue: 30th Annual ARCOM Conference

The Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM) is 31 years old. It was founded early in 1984 by a group of researchers and academics in Edinburgh, UK. Every year since, ARCOM has organized and held a conference to promote and disseminate the growing body of research in construction management. By 2015, this global collective of academics and occasional industrialists consider all aspects of the delivery and management of the built environment. The research field has grown in maturity and significance and continues to draw from a vast range of disciplines, methodological approaches and theoretical backgrounds. The 30th Annual ARCOM Conference in Portsmouth was a true celebration of how research in our field has grown in depth, breadth and international context: 195 delegates from 28 different countries enjoyed a busy programme of research papers, keynotes, the Langford Lecture and a debate on method. The debate, ‘A method for construction management research?’ reflected a growing awareness within the research community of changes in trends and approaches to how construction research is conducted. Chan (2015, p. 5) asked: ‘Should there be a method that characterises construction management research in the same way ethnography dominates in anthropological research and experimental methods prevail in psychology?’ In other words, should we celebrate the breadth and diversity on display at our conferences or do we seek what we perceive to be the markers of much more mature fields and call for singularity? Professors Tim Broyd (University College London), Libby Schweber (University of Reading), Christine Räisänen (Chalmers University of Technology), Mark Addis (Birmingham City University) and Stuart Green (University of Reading) considered this and, with very pertinent audience input, the consensus was that construction management research and its community should not be defined by a single method. Calls for methodological pluralism (Dainty, 2008) and mixed methods research (e.g. Fellows, 2010; Zou et al., 2011) have received much support in construction management literature, and the debate panellists at the 30th Annual ARCOM Conference also gave their support: