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This edited collection explores building construction as an inspiring, yet often overlooked, place to develop new knowledge about the development of human societies. Eschewing dominant engineering and management perspectives on construction, the book is purposefully broad in its scope, both empirically and theoretically, as reflecting the rich underexplored potential of studies of building construction to inform a wide span of intellectual debates across the social science and humanities. The seven chapters encompass contributions to theories of: spatiotemporal organization with wildlife on building sites; institutional change with building ruins; home with Mexican self-help housing; place with a suburban housing development; socio-materiality with the adaptation of a university library; migrant labour with the Parisian postwar construction boom; and gender with a female site manager in Sweden.
This book seeks to develop a new critical sub-area for construction studies that focuses on the actual processes and practices of 'constructing'. Bringing together diverse members of construction research communities working in a variety of contexts, it develops empirical engagements with building work to challenge its marginalization, relative to architectural studies, to provoke novel understandings of human history, geography and sociology.
List of contents
1 Introduction: societies under construction; Daniel Sage and Chloé Vitry.- 2 "This building is never complete": studying adaptations of a library building over time; Hiral Patel and Dylan Tutt.- 3 Constructing work: politics, society, and architectural history on the Paris building site; Jacob Paskins.- 4 Liberating the semantics: embodied work(man)ship in construction; Rikard Sandberg, Christine Räisänen, Martin Löwstedt and Ani Raiden.- 5 Change and continuity: what can construction tell us about institutional theory?; Paul Chan.- 6 Building home futures: materialities of construction and meanings of home in self-help building practices; Monika Grubbauer.- 7 From relational to regressive place-making: developing an ANT theory of place with house building; Daniel Sage and Chloé Vitry.- 8 Organizing space and time through relational human-animal boundary work: exclusion, invitation and disturbance; Daniel Sage, Lise Justesen, Andrew Dainty, Kjell Tryggestad and Jan Mouritsen.
About the author
Daniel J. Sage is Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour in the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University.
Chloé Vitry is Research Associate in the School of Business and Economics at Loughborough University.
Summary
Explores the previously under-examined topic of construction activities and their effect on human histories, geographies and sociologies.
Offers a cross-disciplinary approach from a broad range of fields within the social sciences and humanities.
Develops construction management research beyond the purely practical
