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Exploring craft in construction with short term ethnography reflections on a researcher s prior insight.pdf (2.13 MB)

Exploring craft in construction with short-term ethnography: reflections on a researcher’s prior insight

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journal contribution
posted on 2022-03-10, 16:20 authored by Richard BrettRichard Brett, Derek ThomsonDerek Thomson, Andrew Dainty
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 fieldwork activity in return for intense engagement between the researcher and their participants. The rich points that make up an ethnographic account need to be actively sought in short-term ethnography. This can be achieved by utilizing the prior construction experiences of the researcher. The researcher enters the field with an emic insight that can be used to seek out events and allows the production of meaningful ethnography from a shorter, more intense fieldwork period, learning much from individual workers before they move on. Engagement extends beyond the onsite interactions through the use of video cameras to record everyday activities. Examples from two short-term ethnographies of two deliberately different sites explain how, in the search for craft traits among construction workers, the fieldworker is able to mobilize emic insight and craft theory to seek out rich points in everyday events which are typically serendipitous in nature. This account serves to provide a demonstration of how the very real tensions between the limitations of project context as a field site and the need for methodological rigour can be reconciled through careful attention to reflexive ethnographic practice.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Construction Management and Economics

Volume

40

Issue

5

Pages

359-373

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor & Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2022-02-20

Publication date

2022-03-09

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

0144-6193

eISSN

1466-433X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Derek Thomson. Deposit date: 9 March 2022

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