Christine Räisänen

Technologizing discourse to standardize projects in multi-project organizations: Hegemony by consensus

A project-management model is a powerful, but little researched, discursive tool in the ‘new’ bureaucratization process of multi-project organizations. It is a means of creating hegemony by consensus and can be seen as an example of the process of technologization of discourse. Through this process, discourse technologists redesign organizational discourses and work processes, turning them into representations of consensual praxis. This article traces this redesign process in a major telecom organization and shows how the ‘new’ practices are disseminated within the organization.

What tensions obstruct an alignment between project and environmental management practices

Purpose – Using an activity theory lens, this paper aims to examine the interrelationships between project practice and environmental management. It also aims to focus on tensions that occur between human agents and material objects within a motive‐directed, historically‐situated activity system, namely that of managing environmental issues in projects.Design/methodology/approach – Case studies of two large infrastructure projects were conducted 2003‐2004 and 2008. The studies comprised on‐site observations, text analyses, 20 semi‐structured interviews and one group interview. Time was spent on the construction site to become familiarized with the context and the practices of the project community. A total of 15 weekly environmental site inspections were monitored and photo‐documented.Findings – The findings show how new and emergent environmental management practices and routines were inherently contradictory to the situated and established culture within the projects. In fact project practices seemed to...

Editorial: informality and emergence in construction

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.

‘Playing back-spin balls’: narrating organizational change in construction

What does change mean for organizational members? Although researchers have attempted to capture its intrinsic complexities, there remains uncertainty as to what change really is and how it happens. Drawing on a longitudinal interpretative case study of change in a large Swedish construction company, a narrative approach is used to elicit middle managers’ stories of change episodes over the past two decades. These stories have then been compared with the narratives of the same episodes in governing documents. We found that the lived and the formal narratives, respectively, depicted two very different interpretations and enactments of change: the former described a discontinuous process of discrete contingencies demanding immediate short-term responses whereas the latter described a proactive incremental strategic plan. A narrative approach to the study of organizational change contributes to deeper insights into the ramifications of an organization’s socio-cultural system by enabling the capture of significant variations, contradictions and tensions, both for organizational members and for the researchers who study change.

Social identity in construction: enactments and outcomes

A social identity lens and theories of self-reinforcement are used to explore identity work and processes of identification at the micro-level in a large construction company. Rich data from a qualitative case study show that a strong collective identification is self-defining for the vast majority of managers in the organization, regardless of their role and function. This collective identification revolved around the trade of ‘being a construction worker’, associated with the traits of being practically oriented and of having a long professional background in construction. This collective identification seems to reinforce itself by a combination of pulling and pushing movements and/or ‘being blind’ vis-à-vis those that stand outside its self-defining core, content, and behaviours. The results of the study suggest that self-defining at the individual and group levels has implications for organizational performance and outcomes. It is also suggested that the use of a social identity lens can help increase understanding of interpersonal relations, collaboration, and change initiatives in the construction industry.

Stakes and struggles in liminal spaces: construction practitioners interacting with management-consultants

Although external consultant interventions are usual in construction organizations to mediate strategic change, micro-level analyses of these interactions remain scarce. We draw on rich data from a qualitative case study and focus on observations of a set of three management-consultant strategy workshop interventions, aka away-days, with top, middle and project managers, respectively, in a large construction company in Sweden. Our analysis uses the conceptual construct ‘liminality’ to frame the intervention practice and elements of Bourdieus theory of practice to examine the unfolding of the interaction at the boundary interface. The consultants failed to achieve take-up of their novel ideas, and the workshops became sites of contention in which power struggles were played out between two very different fields of expertise. Using an integrated framework provides better understanding of power struggles at intra- and inter-organizational boundary interfaces.

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.

Measuring malevolent character: Data using the Swedish version of Jonason's Dark Triad Dirty Dozen

The data include responses to the Swedish version of a brief questionnaire used to operationalize the Dark Triad of malevolent character: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. The data was collected among 342 Swedish university students and white-collar workers (see Garcia et al. (2017) [1]). In this article, we include the Swedish version of Jonasons Dark Triad Dirty Dozen questionnaire. The data is available, SPSS and cvs file, as supplementary material in this article. Additionally, we also provide the scoring key as SPSS syntax file.

The Interpretative "Green" in the Building: Diachronic and Synchronic

The aim of this paper is to link the historical development of green building on a national level to current actions and interpretations on an organizational level, addressing this issue from two perspectives: a diachronic perspective and a synchronic perspective. Using a social constructivist model as a theoretical framework, we analyzed the interplay between green discourse and green action in the management of the environment. We explore the interpretative flexibility of “green building” as it has been constructed, communicated, and interpreted through time and across institutional and organizational boundaries. The empirical basis consists of a literature review and a qualitative study of three municipal housing companies in western Sweden. We found that the plurality of meanings of “green building” allows competing ideologies and special interests to gain rhetorical prominence and to influence decision-makers’ views of what is to be prioritized. To conclude, there seem to be strong incentives to make use of ambiguity rather than clarity in relation to green building.

The social construction of ‘green building’ in the Swedish context

Abstract To understand how ‘environmental consideration’ and related concepts are defined and translated into physical artifacts in contemporary green building projects, we need to be aware of the existing streams of ideas that have contributed to the present understanding of green building. Depending on ideological stance and power distribution, ‘green building’ may have different meanings and values ranging from a techno-centric positioning to an eco-sensitive one, yet the same language is often used. This article reviews the development of green ideas in the Swedish building sector, taking its point of departure in the 1960s. The focus of the article is the ways in which translations of ‘green building’ have been used historically to mobilize different groups of actors. The aim of this journey is to provide insight into the environmental discourse in the Swedish building sector today and to generate a discussion on the role of discourse in environmental policy making. Furthermore, a better understanding of the environmental problem from a historical perspective may lead to more comprehensive solutions to current and future environmental problems.