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Towards a new theory of construction innovation: a socio-material analysis of classification work

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posted on 2021-07-12, 10:29 authored by Dan SageDan Sage, Chloe Vitry, Andrew Dainty, Sarah BarnardSarah Barnard
There has been a longstanding concern among construction scholars and practitioners in classifying construction innovations, whether as ‘incremental’ or ‘radical’, ‘technological’ or ‘organizational’, ‘product’ or ‘process’. In this paper we extend this interest in classification to examine what classification work accomplishes within construction innovation practices. Instead of addressing the validity of innovation categories as objective representations we explore how innovations are classified within everyday interactions that shape how they proliferate. Our approach is informed by socio-material theories of classification, communication and innovation, particularly those from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Ventriloquial Analysis (VA). Empirically, our approach is developed through an analysis of how a single innovation – a large format concrete block – was classified within a single warranty approval meeting as it entered the UK housing market. Our analysis explains how such classification work is dynamically constituted by formal and informal classificatory acts that involve displacements of human agency that shape how construction innovations proliferate. Classification work is thus shown to make a vital difference to how construction innovation is accomplished and can be understood.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

Construction Management and Economics

Volume

39

Issue

8

Pages

637-651

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor and Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2021-05-29

Publication date

2021-06-21

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

0144-6193

eISSN

1466-433X

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Dan Sage. Deposit date: 1 June 2021

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