To the open possibility
of steel against sky
we weld, bolt and strap
wide staircases of marble, arched
skylights, commanding views
serviced by windowless corridors
where ceilings hang low, as though
the ones who will push carts and carry trays
are unusually small or,
prefer to scurry like mice
in closed dark spaces
or, as though
extra headroom might give them
ideas.
Following the Blueprints, used with permission © 2006 Susan Eisenberg (Eisenberg 1998a, p. 3).
When walking through most large urban landscapes, the ubiquity of building construction is highly visible, from skylines intersected with tower cranes to streets darted by trucks carrying building materials and waste, hoardings diverting pedestrians, buildings surrounded by scaffolds of stainless steel or bamboo, and the noise of shouted instructions and pneumatic drills. Construction is neither an inconspicuous, unusual, nor insignificant presence in urbanizing societies. Yet in many ways its ubiquity presages its elision: building sites readily become a taken-for-granted part of the urban landscape, a source of curiosity for some perhaps, of annoyance and disruption for others and simply unnoticed by many more. As Glasser (2008) recognizes: ‘For pedestrians and residents, they mean noise, dirt and dust – usually over a period of months. We often pass them holding our breath with our eyes averted, hoping that this apparition will soon be exorcised’ (p. 16). While it is surely a truism that societies are made possible by building (Clarke 1992; Gieryn 2002), society is also not readily given to be captivated by such processes. That is, the transformative social role of building work is partly premised on eliding its capacity to bring about such profound changes. Architectural plans and usable buildings are fully intended to inspire, distract and transform a complex milieu of meanings, feelings and behaviours in users, cultural critics, artists, thinkers, publics and so on (Beauregard 2015; Lees 2001; Whyte 2006); yet, whether for good or ill, the transformative, often unruly role of what is usually termed ‘construction’, ‘building’ or ‘building construction’,1 appears intended to proceed with little social attention and cultural register.
Underpinning the everyday elision of processes of construction is a set of corresponding intellectual characterizations. For centuries, building work has been readily been mobilized in Western intellectual thought to define means/ends thinking, or ‘instrumental rationality’, wherein thought is reduced to the ‘rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to the secondary consequences, and finally of the relative importance of different possible ends’ (Weber 1978, p. 26). Plato , in The Stateman (circa 360 BCE), offers the earliest recorded example of this proclivity when he discusses building work to define ‘directive’ knowledge contrasted with the nobler ‘calculative’ knowledge within fields such as philosophy, rhetoric and mathematics, concerned with evaluative verdicts on such work (Plato 1961, p. 127). For Plato, the knowledge of the ‘master builder’ is limited to giving ‘the appropriate directions to each of the workmen and see that they complete the work assigned’ (Plato 1961, p. 126). The legacy of the Platonic treatment of building work to define instrumental knowledge appears profound. It readily inflects the cleavage of architectural thinking from ‘more physical’ building work (Pont 2005), and by extension the classed division of labour between those professions involved in undertaking building design and the building trades (Clarke et al. 2013; Thiel 2007, 2010, 2013). Defined in terms of the instrumental application of ‘higher’ knowledge, and serving mostly managerial, financial and technical ends, building construction is readily debased as a place to develop novel understandings of human societies, histories and geographies.
It is set against the shadow of such historical framings that contemporary ways of knowing building construction have emerged. And unsurprisingly, knowledge which promises to be easily instrumentalized to achieve pre-given managerial, financial and technical ends, as that from positivistic-predictive academic fields, such as engineering and management science, and commensurate social science fields, such as economics and psychology, has served as the primary basis for the emergence of distinct academic sub-disciplines, departments and research centres, such as construction engineering and management (Dainty 2008; Seymour and Rooke 1995). Over recent decades, the narrowness of such disciplinary framings has not passed without some critical redress, particularly in terms of the limitations it presents in understanding complex social relations (Seymour et al. 1997). Since the turn of millennium, Anglophone construction management research (CMR) has evidenced a growing interest in perspectives from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities (Harty and Leiringer 2017; Schweber 2015). However, such wider disciplinary engagements often themselves remain framed in decidedly instrumentalist terms: theories from social science and humanities disciplines, such as geography, sociology and history, are commonly applied to address challenges stemming from the construction industry and its stakeholders, such as technological innovation (Harty 2008), employee discrimination (Smith 2013) and occupational health and safety (Sherratt 2015). Reciprocally, relative to other aspects of the built environment scholarship, such as that related to architectural design or building use, building construction remains a comparably seldom visited object of analysis for academics based within social science and humanities departments and research groups. Equally, social science and humanities studies that do theorize with building construction (e.g. Hayes 2002; Kraftl et al. 2013; Thiel 2010) often remain overlooked within the fields of construction engineering and management. These disciplinary disconnections have not entirely passed without notice, as witness recent calls by prominent construction management researchers to contribute to wider debates in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. Bresnen 2017; Harty and Leiringer 2017; Leiringer and Dainty 2017; Styhre 2017). However, by and large, such calls serve mostly to evidence the unharnessed potential of building construction to inspire new ways of understanding, and perhaps radically changing, societies.
The purpose of this collection is to offer a sustained acknowledgement, understanding and challenge to the marginalization of construction as a place to develop novel understanding of society. In so doing, we seek to unpack and disavow everyday and intellectual characterizations that demarcate construction work as socially and culturally unremarkable. This book brings together authors that are concerned with theorizing human societies with construction across three disciplinary fields: sociology, human geography and history. These disciplines have been chosen as scholars working within them have long been concerned with the intersection of society and the built environment and are also typically more inclined to suspend the instrumentalist framing of knowledge that typifies engineering and positivistic social and management sciences (Fournier and Grey 2000; Lyotard 2002). By setting up the rationale for this volume in this way we also recognize the potential for exacerbating rifts between scholarly communities. For this reason, our collection includes scholars working from across the social sciences and humanities, and within construction management and engineering departments. Our aim here being to both encourage scholars within construction management and engineering research groups, departments and schools to contribute to the wider development of theories in social science and humanities disciplines, such as sociology, human geography and history, and to encourage scholars within the latter disciplines to theorize with construction. We also anticipate such contributions to theory development with construction in the social sciences and humanities may indirectly lead to substantive reframings of more managerial research concerns and agendas within construction management and engineering communities. After all, as will be discussed shortly, the history of intellectual framings and reframings of construction as a particular object of knowledge, from Plato onwards, have influenced many of the most pressing concerns facing the construction industry today.
Our introduction to this collection develops across four sections. First, we elaborate how construction has been historically formed as a largely instrumentalist object of knowledge across relatively enduring discourses spanning Western intellectual thought. The purpose of this discussion is to uncover how this framing endures to circumscribe construction as an object of knowledge in instrumental terms serving technical, managerial, physical and financial ends. Then, second, we explore the ‘social turn’ in Anglophone CMR as a potentially welcome response to this situation and the limitations it presents in understanding social relations within and around building construction. Emerging across the last two decades or so, authors working within this ‘social turn’ have argued for more sustained engagements between construction scholarship and social science and humanities disciplines. However, while seemingly disrupting the disavowal of construction as an object of scholarly interest for the social sciences and humanities, the predominantly applied nature of such engagements, where social theories are mostly applied not developed, limits its potential to challenge long-standing framings of building construction as socially unremarkable. Third, we turn to studies of the built environment in human geography, sociology and history, to explore the increasing, if still marginal and fragmented, receptivity to considering the places, people and politics of building construction within those disciplines. Finally, we reflect back on the specific rationale for this interdisciplinary volume and elaborate on the range of ways constru...