Alexander Styhre recently challenged Construction Management and Engineering (CME) scholarship to develop a stronger contribution to debates around materiality in mainstream management and organization studies. The rationale for his challenge is that CME scholars have a unique engagement with an important materiality – the built environment – that affords them a significant, yet largely unrealized, potential to inform wider debates about the materiality of social and organizational life. In my response here I do not disagree with Styhre’s overall argument. Instead I critically reflect, via a discussion of two themes implicit within his proposals – hiddenness and managerial power – on the rather unitary formulation of his argument. In so doing I do not so much seek to flag up challenges as to enliven his proposals by discussing the breadth of opportunities for contribution presented to CME academics in engaging with materialities with general management and organization scholarship.
History
School
Business and Economics
Department
Business
Published in
Construction Management and Economics
Volume
35
Issue
11-12
Citation
SAGE, D.J., 2017. Thinking with materialities in construction management: a response to Alexander Styhre. Construction Management and Economics, 35(11-12), pp.657-662.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2017-06-16
Publication date
2017-07-10
Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Construction Management and Economics on 10 July 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01446193.2017.1348612.