Martin Löwstedt

‘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.

‘Taking off my glasses in order to see’: exploring practice on a building site using self-reflexive ethnography

There has recently been a growing interest for ethnographic studies in construction, predicated upon the belief that ethnographic research in the construction industry can provide a powerful way of illuminating construction practices in new ways. Focusing on the ethnographic method, it is demonstrated how a self-reflexive ethnography can contribute to a deeper understanding of the variations, contradictions and tensions underlying practices on a building site, thereby serving as a complement to other qualitative approaches. A short four-week ethnographic study illustrates how the subjective ‘I’ of the ethnographer can be used as an active producer of knowledge, by reflecting on how insights from an individual’s role, both as an observer and as a worker, can account for the complex interplay between socialities and materialities on a building site. The results also contribute to the discussion regarding the length of ethnographic studies, by showing how valuable insights can be drawn from shorter ‘ethnographic episodes’, studied through a self-reflexive lens.

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.