Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry

Sarah Pink, Dylan Tutt, Andrew Dainty, Sarah Pink, Dylan Tutt, Andrew Dainty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136851117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

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 demonstrate how social science perspectives, rooted in ethnographic research on construction sites and with construction workers themselves, can generate fresh insights into the social, cultural and material ways that the industry and conditions of work in it are experienced and played out.

Each chapter develops discussion on the basis of an ethnographic case study to examine how theoretically informed ethnographic research can help us understand industry problems, and can challenge common perceptions of the construction industry. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, geography and organization studies, as well as those from the built environment and related applied fields.

1 Introducing ethnographic research in the construction industry

Sarah Pink, Dylan Tutt and Andrew Dainty

Over forty years ago, A. J. M. Sykes (1969a, 1969b) spent five weeks living amongst men working on the construction of a hydroelectric plant in Scotland in order to examine patterns of group behaviour. He made ‘frequent visits during the study to the bars in two adjacent camps’ to check the representativeness of his observations in the camp he worked in, and supplemented his ethnographic observations by interviewing workers and other stakeholders (Sykes, 1969a: 21). Sykes’ participant observation ended when he was hospitalised following an accident. Although his work highlighted the importance of a close understanding of the social relations of men working in such transient circumstances, in the ensuing years similar ethnographic accounts were relatively rare. Yet, there is now a growing interest in and awareness of the utility of an ethnographic approach to the construction industry. This is a context where, as the following passage from Silvia Gherardi and Davide Nicolini’s work, describing Nicolini’s first-hand experience shows, similar themes emerge:

I was climbing down a very dangerous ladder which was used rather than provisional scaffolding to speed up the work. I banged my shin against the edge of a small cement wall that had just been poured. The edge was still rough, and it gave me a cut, not serious but painful, which started to bleed. An elderly bricklayer saw what had happened and muttered reprovingly ‘You should pay attention – you should be careful!’ I answered defensively ‘Right. . . yes. . . but I haven’t hurt myself, no. . . it’s nothing, just a scratch’. I limped for days afterwards.

(Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002: 204)

Ethnography is now emerging as part of the repertoire of approaches to understanding the construction industry. In this book we acknowledge and build on these developments. We draw together in one volume a set of contributions that demonstrate how construction ethnography as a field of practice can offer new routes to knowledge about and in the industry. In doing so we also showcase a set of chapters that in different ways can be said to be participating in an increasingly engaged form of scholarship – that attends to key societal issues through solid academic scholarship and that takes theory and methodology seriously for the purposes of seeking understandings which can inform our knowledge about applied research problems, cultures of practice, inequalities and other issues. In this spirit we see a move towards an ethnographic focus on the construction industry as a route towards creating new forms of engaged scholarship and informed interventions in this field. It is in this sense that we also urge researchers to attend to the types of knowledge that ethnography might offer.

Introduction

Although somewhat nebulous and difficult to define, construction undoubtedly represents one of the largest industrial sectors. Within the UK it employs over two million people and accounts for around 10 per cent of gross domestic product if a broad definition is adopted (Dainty et al., 2007). The industry’s output is extremely varied, and includes design, construction and maintenance services across all sectors of the economy, thereby drawing upon a complex mix of labour and skills (Chan et al., 2010). It may, in fact, be better defined as a set of related but relatively heterogeneous sub-industries (see Ive and Gruneberg, 2000). Much of the productive capacity of the industry is accounted for by small and micro-sized enterprises (Bosch and Philips, 2003; Green et al., 2004), with a high proportion of self-employed workers who operate under informal employment arrangements (Winch, 1998; Briscoe et al., 2000; Harvey, 2001; Harvey and Behling, 2008). The structural fragmentation which inevitably results from this arguably lies at the heart of the problems inherent in defining its scope and boundaries, as well as providing a difficult landscape within which to apply the established models of work and organisation developed elsewhere.

Given the construction industry’s size and socio-economic importance it could be reasonably expected that it would be well researched, understood and theorised, particularly by those within the construction and engineering management field. However, until recently there has been relatively little emphasis on theory generation around the actualities of construction practice. Rather, a defining characteristic of construction research, or at least that which originated from the construction research community, has been an apparent reluctance on the part of many researchers to embrace the interpretative paradigm and qualitative methods more generally. Seymour et al. (1997) were amongst the first to question the dominance of realist ontological and epistemological positions, given that the ‘object’ of most construction management research is people. However, there has been little sign of a paradigmatic shift since, with the mobilisation of social science perspectives on construction management problems remaining selective (Bresnen et al., 2005). Indeed, as Phelps and Horman (2010) have argued, the methods that have been applied thus far are arguably inadequate for elucidating the complex interactions which lie at the root of the industry’s pervasive problems. There is a need for greater experimentation with qualitative methods and interpretative research design to provide richer insights into industry practice (Dainty, 2008). Deeper understandings of the realities and lived experiences of those within the industry would enable problems to be reframed in ways which account for both the specificities of the contexts to which they relate and the socialities, materialities and experiences through which they unfold.

This book is predicated on the view that ethnographic practice provides a powerful way of providing the kinds of insights necessary for theoretically informing our understanding of construction practice. The contributions within this book reveal how ethnographers from fields such as anthropology, sociology, geography and organisation studies have generated nuanced and variegated theoretical insights into construction practice which help to better position our understanding of this complex sector. In doing so it acts as a challenge to those within the construction research community who view ethnography with suspicion (see Rooke et al., 2004).

Recently, calls for a greater use of ethnographic methods have been provided with new emphasis by the emerging acceptance of the value of ‘practice’ perspectives. This ‘practice-turn’ in organisation studies (see Bresnen, 2007, 2009), with its implications for situated learning and knowing in practice (see Gherardi and Nicolini, 2002), has the potential to illuminate construction practice in new ways if informed by ‘thick’ ethnographic description. However, it is also important to recognise that ethnographic practice is more than just an end in itself; as many of the chapters in this book reveal, it also offers a route for both coproduction research (cf. Green et al., 2010) where researchers and practitioners generate new knowledge together, and interdisciplinary research (such as Pink et al., 2010) which involved inputs from social sciences and engineering at all stages.

This brings us to the need for a text that promotes the rigorous application of ethnographic practice to the construction sector. Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry outlines how social science perspectives, rooted in ethnographic research on construction sites and with construction workers themselves, can generate fresh insights into the social, cultural and material ways that the industry and conditions of work in it are experienced and played out. In doing so it responds to a contemporary context of emergent research in this area and increasing recognition in engineering and management disciplines that social science analysis brings an important contribution to understanding industry ‘problems’ (cf. Bresnen et al., 2005), especially through the use of ethnographic methods (Chan and Raisanen, 2009). In particular, common perceptions of the industry might be challenged through an attendant focus on local contexts, practices and differences that ethnographic research brings to the fore. The work presented in this book provides an indication of the trajectories along which future work could travel.

Understanding ethnography in the context of the construction industry

Ethnography is an established research methodology, used in multiple field-sites and to respond to diverse questions. It is a methodology that develops in practice (see Pink, 2009) and is perhaps best defined through a consideration of how it is practised. A good number of texts have focused on ethnographic practice over the last twenty or so years, in ways that re-interpret it in relation to new theoretical ‘turns’ (such as the practice turn discussed above) and waves of reflexivity. One definition that stands out in this wide literature as particularly appropriate for the agenda of this volume is Karen O’Reilly’s characterisation of it as:

iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods, involving direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions, and producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the researcher’s own role and that views humans as part object/part subject.

(O’Reilly, 2005: 3)

Indeed here, like O’Reilly it is not our intention to redefine ethnography as having to be informed by a single methodological approach, or as necessarily producing one particular type of scholarly or applied knowledge. Rather we engage with the point that, as the chapters in this volume show, approaching the construction industry ethnographically from different theoretical, methodological and practical standpoints and through different types of ethnographic encounter, brings to the fore different ways of knowing about the social, material, spatial and power relations through which it is constituted and experienced.

Some of the ethnographers who have contributed to this volume vary from those who have taken what we might call ‘classic’ approaches (e.g. as discussed by Atkinson et al., 2007) by which ethnographers spend extended periods of time (perhaps one or two years) with the people they are researching. This would involve observing behaviours, participating in activities, writing extensive notes, interviewing and reflecting on one’s own role in this research process. Long-term ethnography, which has conventionally been associated with anthropological approaches indeed yields in-depth results, as is evidenced by Philip Moore’s contribution to this volume. Moore’s ethnographic fieldwork involved him actually participating as a labourer and then a subbie in the Australian construction industry and lasted almost 18 months. Yet even for anthropologists such long-term engagements with a research context are often difficult to arrange since they are costly in researcher time (for fieldwork and analysis). Indeed for applied research the time-scales demanded by this approach are often not viable (Pink, 2005) necessitating the re-thinking of how ethnography might be done in ways that still achieve something of the richness of knowledge that it produces but in less time. Recent innovative approaches to doing ethnography have sought alternative routes to understanding, in response not simply to the need to do research within shorter timescales, but also in the context of theoretical and technological developments. They employ participatory and collaborative photographic, video-based and other techniques. One of the ways such approaches differ from long-term ethnography is that the nature of the participation involved changes. Thus they permit less learning about the experiential, social and material worlds of others over long periods of time through actually engaging in activities with them, and instead invite more intense and intensive encounters, which might be focused on the coproduction of knowledge. These new ethnographic approaches do not of course produce the same type of knowledge that emerges from long-term fieldwork engagements. Yet they can be highly effective ways to produce detailed understandings in research contexts that exhibit the constraints of the construction industry. Moreover they are designed to enable ethnographers to ‘share’ or better understand other people’s experiences, and to generate closer and empathetic understandings of these experiences in contexts of analysis and dissemination (see Pink, 2007, 2009). Newer ethnographic approaches also recognise that long-term fieldwork in one location for extended periods might not be viable in research that investigates the relatedness of things and people in different localities or movements between and within places (consider the limitations of, for example, the temporal nature of construction projects and the involvement of their actors). These approaches are likewise more accommodating of project timescales that are limited by industry deadlines and/or budgets. In such contexts ethnographic techniques are tailored to the possibilities and limitations of such frames. Indeed, as we discuss, these limitations of the industry along with innovative ethnographic methods can take researchers beyond adhering to a traditional ethnographic approach to instead offer new opportunities in terms of experimentation in forms of knowledge production. Yet, while it is important that ethnographers embrace the new, in terms of theory, approaches and the possibilities afforded by new technologies for research, we should also ensure that we take on board some of the lessons from the past.

As Pink has pointed out elsewhere (2009) since the 1980s ethnography has been re-thought through a series of different ‘turns’, inspired by an initial turn to reflexivity (e.g. Clifford and Marcus, 1986). These turns, which once incorporated into ethnographic practice have tended to maintain their presence in subsequent methodological debate, are also relevant to the framing of this volume. Of particular relevance to our discussions here is the related focus on gender and embodiment that emerged during the 1990s. The gendered nature of the construction industry is abundantly obvious to even the most casual observer (Dainty et al., 2000). It is in fact one of the most gender-segregated sectors, with men comprising over 99 per cent of those working in the building trades (Ness, 2011). It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the contributors to this volume are also predominantly men. Women who have done construction ethnography are few and far between, but these works are very revealing of the working cultures of construction sites for ethnographer and worker. For example, Charlotte Baarts’ (2009) ethnographic research involved working for seven months as an apprentice in a gang of thirty construction workers. Using the concept of collective individua...