Daniel J. Sage

Who reads the project file? Exploring the power effects of knowledge tools in construction project management

Various critical authors have questioned the salience, efficacy and power effects of formal project management bodies of knowledge (PMBoKs). As a result project management knowledge tools are increasingly being conceptualized along more flexible, adaptable, reflexive, democratic and informal terms. A central driver for this shift is that PM knowledge will be more relevant and useful for practitioners if it can be reflexively tailored to fit local project scenarios, emergent problems and different communities of practice, rather than projects being structured to fit generic ‘best practice’ ideals. Hence new knowledge tools increasingly would appear critical to alleviate various detrimental power effects associated with bureaucratic knowledge practices within project‐based industries, not least construction. This assumption is examined through a study of a formal and codified project management knowledge tool—a project file—within a small team of project practitioners in a large civil engineering consultancy. Various concepts of power related to actor‐network theory (ANT) are mobilized to understand how non‐human artefacts can enact power and knowledge in nuanced ways within organizations. This theoretically informed study will aid both researchers and practitioners interested in the consequences of developing prescriptive or reflexive project management knowledge within construction contexts and beyond.

How actor‐network theories can help in understanding project complexities

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to question why current thinking towards project complexity ignores the role of objects in achieving social order and transformation. An alternative, but complementary, approach to address project complexities, drawing upon actor‐network theory (ANT), is offered to redress this concern.Design/methodology/approach – Current thinking towards project complexity is briefly reviewed in the first section to illustrate the reasons why nonhumans are downplayed. An historical case study, the Skye road bridge project, is mobilized to explain, and develop, an ANT perspective on project complexities, and responses to such complexities.Findings – ANT develops accounts of project complexity by highlighting the role of nonhumans in influencing how practitioners register, respond and stabilize project complexities. Front‐end planning and stakeholder analysis is shown to be only one narrow element of four moments through which actors apprehend and stabilize project complexities.Resea...

‘Danger building site—keep out!?’: a critical agenda for geographical engagement with contemporary construction industries

In this paper, I seek to develop a more direct, sustained and critical engagement between social and cultural geography and contemporary construction industries. In setting out this agenda, I focus on the UK construction industry and a body of work outside of geography describing how the UK construction industry evidences and maintains a problematic array of working practices that are socially consequential. However, despite such potent critiques, recent geographical work on architectural practices, including that focused on the UK, has remained rather detached from the people, places, politics, and indeed problems, of contemporary construction industries. Nevertheless, recent geographical studies of architectural practice possess a significant potential to directly inform critical analysis of construction industries. It is only through such direct engagement with the contemporary lives of building practitioners that I argue geographical studies of architecture, and especially architectural practices, can recognize and realize its political and ethical contribution.

A ‘Strategy-as-Practice’ exploration of lean construction strategizing

A growing body of work emerging from the management and organizational studies literature is the ‘Strategy-as-Practice’ (SaP) perspective, which focuses on the ways in which strategy is actually enacted within organizational settings. This perspective is used to examine the diffusion of lean construction. In recent years lean construction has grown in prominence to become one of the primary performative improvement recipes for the construction sector. However, rather than providing a stable strategy around which more collaborative, intelligent and efficient project-based organizations develop, this research reveals how the lean concept transforms during its journey with unintended organizational consequences. An ethnographic case study, informed by SaP, demonstrates how a lean strategy and its effects on organizational practice and culture cannot be understood separately from material and embodied practices and power effects. As well as contributing to the examination of lean construction practice, the findings show how strategy is enacted within construction organizations and the ensuing effects of social power. A new trajectory is opened for research into strategizing within construction organizations, which provides ways to explore actual practices and spaces where strategizing occurs.

Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space

This paper examines how ‘ways of seeing’ landscape, as practised within the little-known American astronomical art community, can be used to examine the popular geopolitical scripting of an American manifest destiny in outer space. A significant body of work in critical geopolitics has sought to recognise the way in which culturally manifest representations of space and place, together with embedded visual practices, can reproduce and elucidate the construction of geographical imaginations. Despite this, cultural representations of outer space have frequently been overlooked in readings of American popular, geopolitical discourse and associated geographical understandings. As a response to this lacuna, this paper interrogates how visual motifs of an American manifest destiny, developed in nineteenth-century American romanticism, have been mobilised through American astronomical art to explain and popularise conceptions of outer space that invite American human space exploration. By way of conclusion, the paper stresses how the inscription of outer space under the rubric of an American manifest destiny continues to frame the way in which the American space programme, and by extension American geopolitical and geographical imaginations, can be understood today.

Understanding power within project work: the neglected role of material and embodied registers

In this paper, we seek to contribute to debates into new modalities of power within project-based organizations (PBOs), and specifically architectural practices. Using a targeted ethnography, we explore specific episodes within the workflow of an architectural practice. Here, we explore how imperatives for creativity and collaboration are reconciled alongside those for control and authority through specific relations of power. In contrast with other critical accounts of power in PBOs, we explicitly examine the influence of embodied and material registers of practice. This approach draws inspiration from studies across the social sciences, not least those of architectural practice, which have revealed how embodied and material practices shape organizational life. Our research reveals that despite an overt attempt to play down hierarchical modes of organization, management control and authority is still apparent, albeit it in a form that is highly embodied and intertwined with material relations. Thus, powe...

Organizing space and time through relational human–animal boundary work: Exclusion, invitation and disturbance

In this article, we examine the role that animals play within human organizational boundary work. In so doing, we challenge the latent anthropocentricism in many, if not most, theories of organization that locate animal agencies outside the boundary work that is said to constitute organizing. In developing this argument, we draw together diverse strands of work mobilizing Actor–Network Theory that engage the entanglement of human/nonhuman agencies. In bringing this work together, we suggest humans may organize, even manage, by conducting relational boundary work with animal agencies, spacings and timings. Our argument is empirically illustrated and theoretically developed across two cases of the spacings and timings of construction project organizations—an infrastructure project in the United Kingdom and a housing development in Scandinavia. Construction projects are well-known for their tightly managed linear timings and for producing the built spaces that separate humans and animals. Three concepts—Invitation, Exclusion and Disturbance—are offered to help apprehend how such organizings of space and time are themselves dependent upon entanglements between human and animal agencies. We conclude by suggesting that animals should not be negatively constituted as an ‘Other’ to human organizing, or indeed management, but rather acknowledged as sometimes constituting human capacities to organize, even managerially control, space and time.

Securing and scaling resilient futures: : neoliberalization, infrastructure, and topologies of power

In this paper we explore the scaling of resilience policy and practice not as an effect upon infrastructure but as enacted through infrastructure. Drawing on Foucaults topological analyses of governmental power, especially his elaboration of its coeval centripetal and centrifugal flows, we argue that understanding the scaling of resilience policy and practice involves acknowledging its infrastructural composition. We examine this infrastructural scaling through an empirical analysis of UK resilience policy and practice, as recounted by those working across multiple organizations involved in planning for, and coping with, aleatory events. This reveals how the neoliberal decentralizing refrain, expressed in resilience policy and its critique, is both sustained and displaced by interwoven circulatory mechanisms of obstruction, filtration, and acceleration. Together these infrastructural flows amount to ‘fractionally coherent’ scalings that not only centralize governmental power but are constitutive of governmental centres. Our analyses of infrastructural scaling suggest that resiliency policy and practice is far less decentralized, or localized, than others have suggested, with both centripetal and centrifugal flows of power resulting from a composite of infrastructural circulatory mechanisms that can variously scale political agency in relation to aleatory events.

Building with wildlife: project geographies and cosmopolitics in infrastructure construction

Across many construction projects, and especially infrastructure projects, efforts to mitigate potential loss of biodiversity and habitat are significant concerns, and at times politically controversial. And yet, thus far, very little research has addressed the interplay of humans and animals within construction projects. Instead those interested in the politics and ethics of human–animal relations, or animal studies, have arguably focused far more on more stable and contained sites, whether organizations like zoos, farms or laboratories, or other places like homes and parks. These largely ethnographic studies inevitably perhaps downplay the unplanned, unexpected and highly politically and ethically charged, collision of hitherto rather separate human and animal geographies. Yet it is often within such colliding spaces, where animal geographies are unexpectedly found at the heart of human projects, that we formulate our respect and response to both animals and indeed other humans. We develop an examination of such encounters, with conceptual reference to actor-network theory, and documented empirically through case studies of two infrastructure projects; the findings of our research are relevant to both construction project management and future animal studies.

Giant leaps and forgotten steps: NASA and the performance of gender

Popular portrayals of American spaceflight regularly propose that the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration epitomizes the masculinist organization of American post-WWII modernity. Films such as Philip Kaufmans The Right Stuff (and earlier book), or Ron Howards Apollo 13 (see Llinares, this volume), seemingly correlate the success of NASA, and by extension America and/or humanity, around the fortunes of strong, stoical, active and resourceful men. Meanwhile, women, such as the astronauts’ wives, seemingly feature as rather passive, marginalized and abjected. Manly bodies are shown here capable of ‘risk taking’, ‘frontier exploration’, ‘technical decision making’, ‘competition’ and ‘attention to detail’, all qualities which Connell (1995) suggested typified ‘hegemonic’ masculinities and legitimated patriarchies.1 Popular examples of NASAs articulation of masculinist social power are complemented by various scholarly accounts explaining how NASA has historically subjugated women (Ackmann, 2004; Kevles, 2003; Moule and Shayler, 2003; Penley, 1997; Weitekamp, 2004). This chapter takes the underlying claim found within such studies – NASA articulated a gendered binary – as its starting point. Rather than foregrounding the stories of women in NASA as a revisionist counterpoint, as many of these studies have, I will go further and critically assess the dis/organization of underlying binary oppositions which often frames explanations of the relationship between NASA and gender.