Editorial - Construction Project Organising: Towards a Theoretical and Practical Understanding

Simon Addyman and Hedley Smyth

1 Introduction

Construction project organising is about process. Organising is active and conceptually distinct from organisation. In practice, organising and organisation cannot be separated. Organising leads to practices becoming embedded. The organisation as an entity, such as a firm or project, once in place in a rudimentary or mature form, frames the scope for any ongoing organising. There is an iterative interaction between the organisation and organising on the ground. It is explicit in this editorial chapter and many of the contributions, and implicit throughout. Organisations do not emerge or arise in a vacuum. While this is self-evident, many contributions from professional bodies of knowledge, textbooks of guidance for those learning and training to be project managers, construction managers, and managers for the firms involved in developing and delivering projects, present the organisation as pre-given - a kind of 'natural' entity that is presented in a taken-for-granted way. Thus, the first major theme of this book is the articulation of organisation and organising.

Organising is addressed here and in this book as a dynamic process, whether practically or conceptually, through a variety of theoretical lenses. At the crux of organising, it is people who organise themselves and the materials they work with, through saying and doing. This may be undertaken by individuals or by groups and teams. Such organising is undertaken on both an informal, ad hoc basis and on a more formal footing using written rules and procedures to accomplish tasks and reach specific goals. In both the cases, the 'oil' that facilitates people organising is relationships, how they are created and maintained. Multi-organisational teams are formed on temporary bases for and over project life cycles, organisationally acting relatively autonomously from the firms who employ them. Relationships, and the management of them, are therefore central to construction project organising. Both the editors of this book see it following on from and building upon two predecessors where relationships formed a core theme (Pryke and Smyth 2006; Smyth and Pryke 2008). Therefore, a second major theme is extending relationship management through the articulation of organising and relating.

There are two important, yet related signals to raise at this point about organising relationship development and organising through relationships. First, there has been considerable emphasis placed on collaboration and collaborative practices across construction that these predecessors reported upon. It is also the case that collaboration has been pursued under overarching contracts and frameworks or merely declared as intentions without it reaching down to the point where the relationships have been managed. Second, much has been left to individual responsibility (Smyth 2015a) and to informal group or team action across the industry and project networks (Pryke 2020).

Organising, as a process that constitutes organisation, creates and recreates structures. Structures can be hierarchical and horizontal. For example, structures for line management and control on the one hand, and structures to facilitate integration at, say, programme management level or through functional departmental boundary spanning on the other hand. These structures both enable and constrain the actions that constitute the organisation. They may be rigid in many cases; yet, they are not static and are subject to change and open to different possible actions (Bourdieu 1990). Subsequent organising acts back to change the structures on the ground. This has been encapsulated sociologically through structuration theory (Giddens 1984), whereby structuring is a continuous process of change and stability, not only as a function of tangible organising on the ground, but also of changes to beliefs and shared values in an organisation within the organisational culture and subcultures.

From a practice-based perspective, a key element of organising is how organisational habits emerge from individuals and groups, which have been called routines (Cohen and Bacdayan 1994). Something that is routine has been conceived as having sufficiently standardised a set of rules that bring order to the processes of organising with minimal management intervention (Cyert and March 1963; Nelson and Winter 1982). More recently, routines have been unpacked, and through enacting the rules, new action patterns may emerge (Feldman and Pentland 2003; Feldman et al. 2021). Emanating from organising, routines are a bridge to structuring the organisation, embedding processes that form structures for the organisation to become recognisable in form. This is not automatic and routines can remain as norms for individuals and small groups without being adopted more widely. Routines, as 'repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors' (Feldman and Pentland 2003 : 95), shape the patterning and performing of action (Feldman et al. 2021). They provide the raw material for managing and accomplishing tasks within organisations. In projects and construction, while delivery is temporary in any one location, multiple organisations are involved with different tasks at different life-cycle stages and team membership within these stages repeatedly changes within teams. This means routine dynamics take on special significance for construction project organising as they help inform the dual challenge of adapting to unique situations, while maintaining capabilities (Bygballe et al. 2021; Cacciatori and Prencipe 2021). Thus, a third major theme is the articulation of organising and routines.

The significance of the above three themes - organisation and organising, organising and relating, and organising and routines - has played an important role in organising this edited collection, from this introductory editorial chapter to the selection of authors and the content. The chapter proceeds by unpacking the key issues raised in these themes and examining in more detail organisation, project organising, and the extent to which organising may be needed yet absent. We do this in four parts: first, we explore organisation through a layered lens, from the institutional level to the individual. We then explain and position our understanding of project organising and present new ideas and a definition for what we see as non-organising. After this, we return to the three themes suggesting avenues for future research for each theme. We finish the chapter with some concluding remarks, which we hope will prompt new discussions in theory and practice.

2 Organisation

2.1 Institutions

The professional bodies, trade associations, client bodies, government policies, and reports trying to stimulate sector transformation have provided some of the main institutional influences on firms and project teams over successive decades. The professional bodies, such as Project Management Institute (PMI), Association for Project Management (APM), and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), have produced plans of work and generated bodies of knowledge. Most of the guidance and associated training is linear in conception, primarily reflecting the tools, techniques, behaviours, and goals of successful completion, especially around time, cost, and quality through a life-cycle model. The idea is largely to bring management certainty to construction projects that are inherently uncertain, spatially unique, and bounded by temporality.

While there is nothing wrong with this as an organising approach, in terms of achieving successful completion, the approach is limited (cf. Morris 2013) as it simply does not embrace the dynamic nature of construction projects in practice (Winter et al. 2006; Blomquist et al. 2010). There have been efforts to adopt more flexible guidance, for example APM (2019) and more recently PMI (2021), both in project management methods, such as agile adopted from information technology (IT) projects (PMI 2017), and to broader management approaches to organisation, including the front end of projects (Morris 2013). However, the dominant approach has remained linear on the basis that certain project management inputs help management create order and reduce uncertainties to induce certain outputs, which are prescriptions that are insufficient in practice and flawed methodologically (Smyth and Morris 2007).

Client and government initiatives have taken a broader perspective, embracing practices around collaborative working, for example, in the UK, the Latham (1994) and Egan (1998) reports, which had considerable international influence in construction. These have had some impact upon improvement at organising as a process. Yet, there are limitations. A limitation noted early on concerned organisational behaviour and the failure of clients and contractors to commit to such practices in coherent and consistent ways (see also Bresnen and Marshall 2000), whereby the initiatives were seen as being as temporary as many large projects and, thus, merely another 'fad' (Green and May 2003; Green 2011).

Another problem is that contractors in particular proclaimed the rhetoric of collaboration, while failing to...