Andrew Dainty

Manchester Metropolitan University | MMU

Despite sustained focus in recent years on understanding the experiences of underrepresented groups in construction, there has been a paucity of work that has explored the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers. Research has shown homophobia is commonplace in the construction industry and very few gay employees feel ab...

Ethnography offers a route to knowing about the everyday activities of construction workers, but its long duration is not always suited to the site environment or the researcher’s resources and the workers themselves are constantly changing. Short-term ethnography is an alternative to the traditional format that permits a shorter length of fieldwor...

Purpose Conceptual interpretations of sustainability and resilience are widening with discursive use and altering the relationship and understanding of both concepts. By using three city case studies in the USA, this paper aims to consider which conceptual interpretations are operational and what is being measured in the context of city policy, mun...

The gap between the intent and the impact of policy for construction in the UK has been well established both in academic literature and in public discourse, contributing to repeated calls for transformation of the industry. The apparent failure of policy was investigated, taking policy at sector level as the unit of analysis. The objective was to...

Reductions in end-use energy imply some level of technological and behavioural change — yet there are marked differences in the balance between them. Moreover, the ways in which these influences can combine and mutually shape each other are complex, especially where multiple users interact within the same environment. A socio-technical perspective...

Policies and actions to address gender inequalities are widespread across a range of institutional and organisational contexts. Concerns have been raised about the efficacy and impacts of such measures in the absence of sustained evaluation of these activities. It has been proposed that important contextual factors may propel or inhibit measures to...

There has been a longstanding concern among construction scholars and practitioners in classifying construction innovations, whether as “incremental” or “radical,” “technological” or “organizational,” “product” or “process”. In this paper we extend this interest in classification to examine what classification work accomplishes within construction...

The transition of early career researchers into academic posts is understood to be a crucial career step and marks a point at which representation of women declines significantly. The research adopts a participatory qualitative research methodology through career narrative interviews and group discussions with women engineers recently appointed int...

The aim of this article is to explore sensemaking and learning processes with and through affective atmospheres. We engage with recent research within the ‘affective turn’ across the social sciences and humanities to conceptualize the significance of quasi-autonomous affective atmospheres that emanate from, and also condition, collectives of humans...

Health and safety inductions are ubiquitous in construction but tend to be poorly designed and suffer low levels of worker engagement. In this paper we report on the evaluation of an innovative, full day, actor-based health and safety induction called EPIC, currently being used on London's Thames Tideway Tunnel megaproject. As of March 2019, more t...

Within the UK construction industry Social Value (SV) is a public sector procurement criterion of such importance that how a contractor engages with SV could ultimately be the difference between procurement success and failure. Contactors are increasingly expected to measure and communicate their SV. Therefore, they must do so in a way that is unde...

Diversity within civil engineering has been limited by the sector's failure to recruit and retain minorities. A contributing factor to this disproportionate turnover of out-group members is hostile and discriminatory treatment from peers and managers. When evaluated critically, equality approaches intended to reduce discrimination within organisati...

Purpose The evolving roles of BIM and smart building technologies in the design and management of construction projects often present unexpected events and variabilities, which tend to erode professionals’ prior knowledge authority. The purpose of this paper is to explore how construction organisations can deploy knowledge and adapt to the requisi...

Long-running multi-faceted intervention studies are particularly problematic in large complex organizations where traditional methods prove too resource intensive and can yield inaccurate and incomplete findings. This paper describes the first use of, longitudinal tracer methodology (LTM), a realist approach to evaluation, to examine the links betw...

In this paper we explore the role of affective encounters between human and non-human bodies in the proliferation of new technologies within and across work organizations. Our exploration challenges not only the long-standing rationalism within studies of technological innovation but the anthropocentrism of burgeoning studies of technology, innovat...

In 2005 the ‘Contributing factors in Construction Accidents’ framework (ConCA) introduced a sociotechnical systems approach to risk management in construction. ConCA demonstrated the value of exploring distal factors and identifying underlying or latent causes: It promoted an understanding of construction accidents as systemic accidents and challen...

In UK society there has been a growing perception that unjustified, frivolous or fraudulent legal claims are being made following safety accidents or incidents, in what has become known as a ‘compensation culture’. Participant observation of construction practice during a three year period enabled the unpacking of the complexity of the compensation...

The construction industry takes an orthodox approach to safety: Finding root causes, quantifying risk, and often blaming frontline workers. However, safety has reached a plateau and the limitations of this approach are starting to be acknowledged. A sociotechnical systems approach (as applied in the ConCA model) presents new opportunities to unders...

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 traditi...

Sage, Justesen, Dainty, Tryggestad and Mouritsen’s chapter examines the role that animals play within human organizational boundary work. They thus 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. Inspired by actor–netw...

Purpose The intra-organisational relationships of through-life support services providers are complex, especially given the multifaceted nature of the provision required. For example, capabilities within the UK highways maintenance arena must support engineering design, routine maintenance and the ongoing management of the network. While collabora...

Over the last three years, the New Civil Engineer, Architects' Journal and Construction News have conducted a survey investigating the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workers in the sector. The surveys reveal that homophobia is commonplace in the construction industry and few feeling that they could be open about their...

Previous research has suggested that self-awareness, visioning, and sincerity are foundational managerial skills for delivering positive safety outcomes in construction projects. This paper aims to verify this finding and to suggest learning approaches for developing these skills in practice. Interviews with experienced construction practitioners w...

The need for technological and administrative innovation is a recurrent theme in the UK construction-reform agenda, but generic improvement recipes are beginning to give way to a more focused prescription: building information modelling (BIM). The current strategy is to mandate the use of BIM for government projects as a way of integrating the desi...

This paper examines the organizational phenomena of long-term projects. While the research literature frames projects as “temporary organizations”, megaprojects may have very long initiation and delivery phases, which may last for many years, sometimes even decades, and they deliver capital assets that are used for decades or centuries. Instead of...

The zero accident mantra has become embedded within the safety discourse of large UK construction organisations, but the extent to which zero-focused approaches yield reductions in accident frequency is yet to be empirically investigated. By way of an evidence-based critique, we examine the relationship between major accidents and zero approaches b...

Abstract Anchored within the strategic HRM and alignment literature, and drawing on efficiency and legitimacy perspectives of organisational behaviour, we investigated a Human Resource Management (HRM) intervention targeted at energy reduction goals in a large multinational retailer. The HRM intervention was focused on embedding the environmental a...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives are increasingly becoming an important tendering criterion for UK public sector construction. Nevertheless contractors are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the expectations of public bodies, with CSR remaining an elusive and conflicting concept. However, the client motivation behind the grow...

Today, in many European countries, research and higher education institutions have made steps to implement gender mainstreaming: integrating the gender issue in management processes, in staff and leadership development programmes and assessment procedures. There are signs of concerted efforts to tackle persistent gender inequality, with varied leve...

Establishing long-term relationships, collaborating and making decisions with suppliers has become a major requisite for firms' competitiveness and for implementing innovation. In a relatively unbounded context, such as the construction industry, innovation takes place across a network of loosely coupled organisations. Thus, cooperation and efficie...

Purpose – Construction organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the impacts of their operations, from both an environmental and, more recently, a social viewpoint. Sustainability standards can enable an organisation to evidence a benchmarked level of performance against a particular issue. To date, research on standards has largely focused...

What are a country’s traditional and non-traditional security challenges? How are these being discussed and by whom? What is the relevance of security, ethics and human rights to these issues? Questions like these are often addressed in security policies. Yet to date an overview of these concerns does not exist. Research conducted within the projec...

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 st...

Despite the prevalence of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and micro organisations, comparatively little is known about how such organisations approach occupational safety and health (OSH). Research has tended to present a negative picture of OSH practices in smaller organisations. This paper discusses some of the challenges to researching...

In this article, we argue for an interdisciplinary and pluralistic account of how occupational safety and health (OSH) is enacted in practice, informed by a critical understanding of OSH management and flow knowledge in organizations. We compare how in human factors and ergonomics, organization studies, and safety science this question is approache...

Final project report co-authored with Alistair Gibb, James Pinder, Phil Bust, Alistair Cheyne, Andrew Dainty, Mike Fray, Aoife Finneran, Jane Glover, Ruth Hartley, Roger Haslam, Wendy Jones, Sarah Pink, Patrick Waterson, Elaine Yolande Gosling

Prone to multiple interpretations, ‘security’ is becoming a multiple and hence, nebulous concept. Security can be associated with national security and the State’s military power; notions of the individual safety; or human values and fundamental rights issues. This is clearly demonstrated in Europe with various member states using various concepts...

Organisations engage with sustainability for a number of reasons, often implementing standards to demonstrate commitment to sustainability or benchmark performance. However, many scholars discuss sustainability from an operational or administrative perspective, largely neglecting the role of individuals making up the organisation. Central to organi...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the general perceptions of UK construction organisations on developing successful inter-organisational relationships, with the paper reports on five case studies of different construction organisations, which include the main contractors, a specialist contractor and a managing agent contractor. The invest...

The paradigms of sustainability and resilience have had significant impacts on both research and practice in the built environment, attempting to frame ethical approaches with regards to the fragile relationships between the built, the natural and the social environments. Both paradigms adopt a systems approach to the understanding of complexity, h...

The study of operations strategy (OS) in production organisations has largely focused on the content of high-level strategies, and less on their practical enactment. Little attention has been paid to the middle managers who mediate the space between the strategic intent of production organisations and their operational realities. The role and strat...

Design evaluation is a complex and rich social practice that is organized and distinguished by its practical understandings, rules, general understandings and teleoaffective structures. This praxiographic study of a major National Health Service (NHS) hospital project uses practice theory to investigate the concept of design evaluation as ‘a practi...

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...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies are mobilised by organisations as a way of rectifying negative impacts of their business activity, improving reputation and making positive differences to society, the economy and the environment. Arguably, CSR strategies are set by Strategic management which are then interpreted, enforced and diffus...

The achievement of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives is increasingly being viewed as of key importance in the procurement process of public sector construction projects. As such, main contractors and public sector clients are increasingly interested in and keen to espouse the benefits of CSR strategies and their measurement. However,...

Construction innovation is a highly contested concept, both in industry practice and academic reflection and research. Fundamental reasons for this are the nature of the construction industry itself, and in the lack of clarity on what is actually meant by the term innovation. The industry and the value creation activities taking place within it are...

Responsible sourcing (RS) of materials is defined as the ethical management of sustainability issues within the construction supply chain, and engagement is typically evidenced by certification to BES 6001, the framework standard for the responsible sourcing of construction products. Points are scored in BES 6001 under a number of clauses, yet litt...

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...

Construction innovation is a highly contested concept, both in industry practice and academic reflection and research. Fundamental reasons for this are the nature of the construction industry itself and the lack of clarity on what is actually meant by the term innovation. The industry and the value creation activities taking place within it are mul...

The resilience of any system, human or natural, centres on its capacity to adapt its structure, but not necessarily its function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. In the long term, therefore, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving a system's ability to resist an immediate threat or to recove...

One perspective on construction safety practice and knowledge sees them as mutually constituted and intertwined. As such, it is important that construction safety research generates knowledge and understanding which is closely connected with safe working practices across contexts. This paper reviews the construction safety literature in order to ex...

In this article, the authors demonstrate how an anthropologically informed approach that attends to the material culture of occupational safety and health (OSH) offers new insights for such applied research fields. Research into OSH typically seeks to solve its perennial problem of ‘improving’ workers’ health and safety through scholarship dominate...

This article introduces the special issue on barriers and consequences of radical innovation (RI). Radical innovation, as distinct from more incremental forms of innovation, is increasingly important for organizations and national economies. However, firms face many challenges and barriers (both internal and external) which hinder their RI efforts,...

In recent years, the UK retail sector has made a significant contribution to societal responses on carbon reduction. We provide a novel and timely examination of environmental sustainability from a systems perspective, exploring how energy-related technologies and strategies are incorporated into organisational life. We use a longitudinal case stud...

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...

Organisational resilience is a capability which enables organisations to adjust to perturbation, moderate the effects of risk and uncertainty and take advantage of emergent opportunities. The concept of organisational resilience has in the main been developed and operationalized in relation to permanent and stable organisations. The concept is, how...

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...

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 i...

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...

The implementation of rapidly evolving building information modeling (BIM) technology is widely seen to increase the level of integration within the construction sector. However, even with the plethora of research and investment in the development and deployment of BIM, its use is not mainstream construction practice and the practicality of the imp...

This paper explores the organizational phenomena that we have labelled as ‘enduring projects.’ Enduring projects possess many of the features of temporary organizations but have very long lifetimes: typically, enduring projects last for decades. We use empirics gathered in a study of European megaprojects to characterise the ‘enduring project’ phen...

The need for sustainable practices in the food supply chain, particularly in the area of energy reduction, is becoming acute. The food industry currently has to contend with multiple competing pressures alongside the new challenges of sustainable production. We applied Institutional Theory to explore the role of supermarkets in the development of l...

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...

Many global engineering organizations have gradually shifted away from the provision of tangible products toward the provision of high-value-combined product-service solutions. This business paradigm is purported to represent a key strategic opportunity for such firms, and has attracted the attention of practitioners, consultants, and researchers....

Recent decades have witnessed various industry-focussed government reports that have urged construction stakeholders to look further ahead by focusing on future-oriented issues such as continuous performance improvement, sustainability, training, and research and development. Evidence from a recent industry workshop of senior construction managers...

We investigate attitudes to energy-management tasks within a retail organisation, and reflect on links between organisational structure, staff behaviours and energy-efficient design strategy. Research was conducted amongst operational UK shop-floor staff in a large global supermarket chain, using a focus group methodology. We consider the interplay...

By integrating the approaches of Forrester and Burbidge [Forrester, J. W. 1961. Industrial Dynamics. Pegasus Communications; Burbidge, J. L. 1961. “The “New Approach” to Production.” Production Engineer 40: 769–784], a set of five design principles have emerged which provide a foundation for sound supply chain design. The ‘FORRIDGE’ principles have...

In this paper we attempt to connect the corporate social responsibility agenda with current debates within sustainable construction. We reveal an apparent disconnect between the focus on sustainable products and processes and the orientation of the businesses within which they reside. Current agendas are characterised by a desire to create a more s...

Architecture represents a creative, high profile and influential profession and yet remains under-theorized from a gender perspective. This article examines how gender is (re)produced in architecture, a profession that remains strangely under-researched given its status and position. The empirical work advances the theoretical concept of hegemonic...

How to deliver project success has become a prominent discourse in both academic and practitioner debates on project management. However, despite years of research, how to improve the likelihood of successfully delivering a project and the criteria for assessing project success still remain unresolved. This study reviews conceptual and empirical re...

Across many construction projects, and especially infrastructure projects, efforts to mitigate the potential loss of biodiversity and habitat are significant, and at times controversial. In our paper we do not propose to gauge the success or failure of this effort; rather we are interested in fleshing out some conceptual approaches via Actor-Networ...

Despite over 20 years of initiatives, research, and agendas the UK construction sector has failed to embed equality into business priorities and approaches; with both women and minority groups remaining under represented and unfairly treated in construction trades and the professions. Literature in this area shows low levels of retention amongst mi...

This paper is part of on-going research that is investigating the potential of a practice theory perspective to understanding stakeholder evaluation of hospital design. Practice theory offers numerous affordances, especially to researchers and practitioners who seek alternatives to the problematic assumed universality of other 'traditional' theoret...

Over half of the top 20 UK construction companies aspire to provide services and solutions to their clients. This is a clear recognition that constructing on time, defect free and within budget is no longer a differentiator; instead competitive advantage can be gained from technical expertise, consideration of whole life costs and delivering the cl...