Unfolding roles and identities of professionals in construction projects: Exploring the informality of practices

Using a practice lens perspective, the environmental professional's role is examined in relation to social practices in construction projects. Drawing on several case studies of environmental management, the findings show that contradictory practices prevent environmental professionals from fulfilling their expected role and function. Different world‐views and communication cultures as well as a perception of environmental management as bureaucratic nit‐picking, create tensions between environmental work and project practice. Dealing with these tensions, environmental professionals develop alternative identities to adapt to the different situations that they find themselves in, i.e. formal roles in accordance with their job description and informal roles to suit different project practices. However, this strategy seems to result in further fragmentation between existing practices, creating barriers between professions. The study reveals four aspects that affect the professional's role: relational and positional power, professional identity, visibility, and the facilitation of meaning‐making processes in the project context. The research approach taken has created an opportunity to closely follow the development of an emerging profession in construction, opening a window that allows connecting a local and situational context to a wider societal discourse of environmentalism

Interactional perspective on environmental communication in construction projects

Drawing on theories of social interaction, a critical discourse analysis approach is used to examine the resources and constraints on environmental-communication practices in four construction projects in Sweden. The assumption is that talk and action work together to construct, maintain and change organizational structure, social practices, and contractual arrangements. The empirical data were collected through in-depth interviews and field observations where photo documentation was extensively used. The study showed mismatches between information and action, both within the project and between the project and its stakeholders. The mismatches were not caused by a lack of information, but rather by inconsistencies between the communication cultures, the status of the communicator, and the tools used to mediate the information, e.g. the media, discourses and genres used. These discrepancies resulted in a lack of engagement in environmental work in the projects. If environmental and other performances in construction projects are to be improved, more effort needs to be exerted on understanding the dynamics of the social context, human interaction, and the mediating tools used to communicate. This paper suggests an approach that can enhance such an understanding

Beyond Policies and Social Washing: How Social Procurement Unfolds in Practice

Social procurement is increasingly used by organizations to create social value. An important feature of social procurement used to mitigate issues with social exclusion is employment requirements, which aim to create internships for unemployed marginalized people. However, little is known of their effects on people working at an operative level. Through 23 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the Swedish construction and real estate sector, this paper adopts a practice lens to analyse the effects of employment requirements (ER). Findings show that practitioners must handle the tension between old and new practices, and strike a balance between fulfilling formal responsibilities and performing new practices on an ad hoc basis, and finding the time and resources to do so. Practitioners act as practice carriers for both traditional work tasks and new employment requirement practices, which can lead to role ambiguity. The paper provides novel details for how employment requirements unfold in practice. It also adds to practice theory by suggesting an important relational aspect between first-order, premeditated practices, and second-order, emergent practices, and how both types of practices are vital for working with employment requirements

The influence of multiple logics on the work of sustainability professionals

Organizational aspects, rather than technological ones, often represent the greatest barrier in the transition toward sustainable construction. However, despite sustainability professionals’ recognized role in sustainable development, few studies have focused on such professionals’ work. To understand the intrinsic influence of multiple institutional logics on the work and agency of sustainability professionals, we conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with sustainability professionals in Sweden’s construction industry. Building on the theoretical framework of institutional logics, the findings show how sustainability professionals’ everyday work, depending on the work conditions, is a blend of thankless, rewarding collaborative, and visionary work. In the organizational context of sustainable construction, characterized by dynamism and ambiguity, different institutional logics are combined in different ways to respond to shifting demands and problems. To maintain agency, sustainability professionals need to shift and balance their work depending on which logics are temporarily central. Showcasing how professionals cope with institutional contexts defined by multiple logics, the paper highlights the complexity involved in managing the vastness and ambiguity of sustainability and how it requires individuals to be both flexible and sensitive to the existence of multiple logics in their immediate context

Materiality in action: the role of objects in institutional work

Public property owners currently face a great backlog of renovation work at the same time as there is a need to build new, increase cost-efficiency, and comply with new environmental regulations on energy efficiency. To manage these challenges many public property owners have initiated change processes to develop new strategic ways of working with their properties, often aligned with a project portfolio approach. This involves a quite radical shift of practices in these organizations, which requires individuals to engage in institutional work. Recent studies have highlighted how institutional work is shared between humans and objects. To increase understanding\ua0of objects’ role in institutional work through which public property owners develop new practices that support a holistic, long-term, and sustainable property management,\ua0we analyzed observational data of strategy project meetings in three Swedish public property owner organizations. Findings show how objects have an active role in institutional work through acts of attacking, justifying, and/or safeguarding to maintain, create and/or disrupt institutions. Objects take on multiple roles and both unite and divide human actors as well as evoke emotions that guide actions. Three types of agency are highlighted: relational, discursive, and emotional. Increased knowledge on the role of objects in institutional work and how objects (can) influence human agency assists actors in making better-informed decisions in strategic change processes

What tensions obstruct an alignment between project and environmental management practices?

Using an activity theory lens, this paper aims to examine the interrelationships between project practice and environmental management. It also aims to focus on tensions that occur between human agents and material objects within a motivedirected, historicallysituated activity system, namely that of managing environmental issues in projects. Case studies of two large infrastructure projects were conducted 20032004 and 2008. The studies comprised onsite observations, text analyses, 20 semistructured interviews and one group interview. Time was spent on the construction site to become familiarized with the context and the practices of the project community. A total of 15 weekly environmental site inspections were monitored and photodocumented. The findings show how new and emergent environmental management practices and routines were inherently contradictory to the situated and established culture within the projects. In fact project practices seemed to amplify the contradictions between environmental management and project management rather than mitigating them. As a result project members and organization members strove toward different goals and foci. It is argued that management needs to create arenas where members from the two units can align practices and merge routines. Aligning the permanent structures of the organization with the temporary organizing of practices and operational activities in projects is a challenge for the construction industry. A prevalent lack of fit between the organization and its projects causes contradictions which negatively affect the way in which longterm environmental strategies and goals are understood and implemented in the project settings. The system theoretical lens adopted in this study enables a holistic interpretation of complex and dynamic activities and the linking of the micro, the individual, to the macro, the organizational structure. By indicating some inherent and emergent contradictions between project practice and corporate environmental management, this paper contributes to an emergent field of research that focuses on social practice in construction. \ua9 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limite

Populating the social realm: New roles arising from social procurement

Employment requirements, as part of social procurement, are increasingly used in construction procurement as a tool to mitigate issues of exclusion on the job market. To create a better understanding how employment requirements nurtures a new type of actor, here named the“employment requirement professional” (ERP), the aim of this paper is to study how this role is framed in terms of work practices and professional identity. Building on 21 semi-structured interviews in the Swedish construction sector, a detailed account of who works with employ- ment requirements, how and why they conduct their work is provided. The findings show how ERPs mediate between contrasting interests when they create new social procurement roles and practices; how they enact different approaches to promote social sustainability, how their roles are formed by multiple and reciprocal lines of actions, and how they make sense of who they are and what type of work they engage in. The research contributes to a discussion on effects from social procurement in construction and the emergence of a new professional role, their identity and work practices

Taking lead for sustainability: Environmental managers as institutional entrepreneurs

Over the past two decades, sustainability professionals have entered the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. However, little attention has been given to the actual professionalization processes of these and the leadership conducted by them when shaping the pace and direction for sustainable development. With the aim to explore how the role of sustainability professionals develops, critical events affecting everyday sustainability work practices were identified. Based on a phenomenological study with focus on eight experienced environmental managers’ life stories, and by applying the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, the study displays a professionalization process in six episodes. Different critical events both enabled and disabled environmental managers’ opportunity to engage in institutional entrepreneurship. The findings indicate how agency is closely interrelated to temporary discourses in society; they either serve to support change and create new institutional practices towards enhanced sustainability or disrupt change when agency to act is temporarily “lost”. To manage a continually changing environment, environmental managers adopt different strategies depending on the situated context and time, such as finding ambassadors and interorganizational allies, mobilizing resources, creating organizational structures, and repositioning themselves