Suchergebnisse

1. Introducing ethnographic research in the construction industry / Sarah Pink, Dylan Tutt and Andrew Dainty -- 2. The labour of refurbishment : the building and the body in space and time / Dawn Lyon -- 3. 'We've got our own language' : the communication practices of migrant workers in the UK construction industry / Dylan Tutt. [et al.] -- 4. 'On the tools' : the physical work of building and renovating houses in Perth, Western Australia / Philip Moore -- 5. Ethnography and flux : identity and epistemology in construction fieldwork / Darren Thiel -- 6. Building contacts : the trials, tribulations and translations of an ethnographic researcher in construction / Daniel J. Sage -- 7. Where's the action? : challenges of ethnographic research in construction / Nick Marshall and Mike Bresnen -- 8. Contributions of ethnographic practice to community-engaged research in construction management / Andreas Hartman -- 9. From interpretation to action : unique adequacy as a common standard for the evaluation of research in the built environment / John A. Rooke and Clementinah N. Rooke.

The construction industry as a workplace is commonly seen as problematic for a number of reasons, including its worrying health and safety record, the instability of its workforce, and the poorly regulated nature of the sector. It is surprising therefore, that the sector and its working practices remain so under-theorised. Now though, there is a growing interest in and awareness of the utility of an ethnographic approach to the construction industry. Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry draws together in one volume a set of expert contributions which dem.

Mobile and locative digital media are an inextricable part of everyday working environments, are part of everyday work practices in organizations, and are part of organizational infrastructures. Likewise occupational safety and health (OSH) in many ways underpins the ways that people work in organizations. Yet the relationship of OSH to media, and to the ways in which people are mobile while at work, has remained underexplored in academic scholarship. In this article we take the novel step of bringing together the fields of mobile media, phenomenological anthropology, and OSH to ask how they might mutually inform each other.

This article was published in the journal Environment and Planning A and is now available from SAGE Publications http://epn.sagepub.com/content/47/2/450.full.pdf+html ; The home visit—when professionals work in service users' homes—is a growing phenomenon. It changes the configuration of home—both for home living and for those who go to work in other people's homes. In this paper we advance recent discussions of the emotional and political geographies of home through a focus on the home visit worker and her or his experience of other people's homes as sites of uncertainty. For such workers the home visit is played out as an interface between the private and intimate and the regulatory occupational safety and health frameworks of policy and corporate interests. It disrupts existing academic definitions of home and defines the regulatory interests of institutions. An examination of the home visit, we propose, has implications for theories of home and the search for certainties that is embedded in regulatory guidelines.

Purpose
A number of severe weather events have influenced a shift in UK policy concerning how climate-induced hazards are managed. Whist this shift has encouraged improvements in emergency management and preparedness, the risk of climate change is increasingly becoming securitised within policy discourses, and enmeshed with broader agendas traditionally associated with human-induced threats. Climate change is seen as a security risk because it can impede development of a nation. The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of the securitisation of climate change, and interrogates how such framings influence a range of conceptual and policy focused approaches towards both security and climate change.


Design/methodology/approach
Drawing upon the UK context, the paper uses a novel methodological approach combining critical discourse analysis and focus groups with security experts and policymakers.


Findings
The resulting policy landscape appears inexorably skewed towards short-term decision cycles that do little to mitigate longer-term threats to the nation's assets. Whilst a prominent political action on a global level is required in order to mitigate the root causes (i.e. GHG emissions), national level efforts focus on adaptation (preparedness to the impacts of climate-induced hazards), and are forming part of the security agenda.


Originality/value
These issues are not restricted to the UK: understanding the role of security and its relationship to climate change becomes more pressing and urgent, as it informs the consequences of securitising climate change risks for development-disaster risk system.

This article was published in the journal, Environment and Planning D - Society & Space [© SAGE Publications]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d14154p ; 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 Foucault's 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.

This conference paper was presented at the 30th Annual ARCOM Conference held on the 1st-3rd September 2014, in Portsmouth. ; One of the defining characteristics of the modern era has been the ascendency and privileging of an instrumental version of reason at the expense of other, competing forms of rationality. Now deeply established and an integral component of Neoliberal discourse, it forms the dominant form of reasoning for many planners, policy-makers, academics and laypersons alike. Drawing on the works of Max Horkheimer and Max Weber, this paper considers the ways in which instrumental reason diminishes policy formulations and undermines democratic culture. It achieves this through a consideration of the exclusion of 'deep' green activists from policy formulation and an examination of the Capital approach to sustainability popularised by David Pearce. Recognising instrumental reason as a culturally specific value-laden ideal, this paper teases out the assumptions behind such thought and highlights the potential for alternatives. Such a realisation has important consequences, as the ability for built environment policy-makers to reimagine theory and practice becomes possible only when the veil of instrumental reason, cloaked and presented as a value-neutral ideal, is lifted. It is hoped that such a perspective will contribute to the growing theoretical and philosophical debate in Construction Management research.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Construction Management and Economics on 8th May 2014, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01446193.2014.909049 ; Attempts to drive change and reform of the UK construction industry have been an ongoing concern for numerous stakeholders, both in government and across industry, for years. The issue is a seemingly perennially topical one which shows little sign of abating. Scholarly analyses of the reform agenda have tended to adopt a Critical Theory perspective. Such an approach, however, lacks a certain nuance and perhaps only reveals one layer of social reality. What is arguably lacking is a more fundamental exposition concerning the historical, social and cultural explanatory forces at play. While it is illuminating to expose vested interests, ideology and power, what has led to the development of various views? How have they come to achieve such high accord in discussions? Drawing on the works of Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Barbara Adam, this paper seeks to develop a broader theoretical lens. It considers the wider socio-cultural structures and forces that influence behaviour, shape and constrain these views. This approach will contribute to a much needed broader philosophical and theoretical debate within the construction management community (and beyond) on the need to better engage with, and understand, the sources influencing the issue of policy formulation and diffusion. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

In project management, failure is often assumed to be evidence of deficient management: a problem that can be overcome by better management. Drawing on qualitative research within UK construction projects we examine how four different theoretical approaches (positivism, structural Marxism, interpretivism and actor–network theory) all challenge this managerial assumption. Each theoretical perspective enables a specific analysis of empirical data that critiques the notion that project failures are easily, simply, or largely, associated with the failure of project management. In so doing, our pluralist analysis reveals the social and political contextualization of performance in project management. We thus conclude by proposing that practitioner and scholarly concerns with project failure (and success), can actively contribute to attempts to reflect upon various matters of political concern as developed within the Making Projects Critical community, and by extension Critical Management Studies. Thus, we propose greater interaction between critical and mainstream project research communities.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of "product‐service" (P‐S) strategies in the aerospace sector. Despite the widespread perception that aerospace organisations are advanced in terms of P‐S integration, little is known about the realities of P‐S provision in the sector. Much of the existing literature is normative and prescriptive, focusing upon what organisations aspire to do, but offers little insights into how attempts to integrate products and services occur or the challenges organisations encounter.Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents an in‐depth case study of an international aerospace original equipment manufacturer, referred to as "JetCo". A total of 18 interviews were conducted with key actors involved in the operationalisation of P‐S strategy within defence aerospace and civil aerospace divisions. In addition, analysis of internal company documentation was also undertaken.FindingsThis paper reveals that current P‐S strategy, which builds upon a long history of service offerings, initially evolved separately in each division in response to the particular markets in which they operate. However, there was evidence of a corporate‐wide strategy for P‐S provision being developed across divisions to improve co‐ordination. This was founded on the recognition that P‐S delivery requires the development of a stronger customer orientation, better knowledge and information management strategies and the engagement of employees. A key challenge concerned integrating the product and service parts of the business to ensure consistent delivery of a seamless value offering to customers.Originality/valueThe paper offers fresh empirical evidence into the development of P‐S in an organisation drawn from a sector often flagged as an exemplar of P‐S provision, and provides insights into the complex realities of P‐S implementation and delivery. Notably, it highlights the challenge of attempting to embed an organisation‐wide "service culture" in pursuit of integrated P‐S delivery, and questions the nostrums and overly simplistic models which pervade the current solutions discourse.