A new approach to studying gender in construction

The gendered dimensions of informal institutions in the Australian construction industry

“…People may not recognize the existence of informal gendered rules because their taken-for-granted nature can also render them invisible for those who live and perpetuate them (Acker, 2006). To address this, we adopted a rapid ethnographic approach (Galea et al, 2017).…”

“…While rapid ethnography has been criticized by classic ethnographers as a second-rate approach to ethnography, it is a practical solution to the real challenges of fieldwork (see, e.g., Galea et al, 2017;Isaacs, 2013;Pink, Tutt, Dainty, & Gibb, 2010).…”

“…A wide range of roles and occupations were shadowed and interviewed including senior managers (such as operations managers and general managers), project directors (managers of individual construction projects), commercial managers, programmers, site engineers, foremen, project engineers, design managers and safety managers. The observations of company events focused on several factors including room layout, presenters, timing of events, who attended, who had a 'voice', tone of conversation (Galea et al, 2017). The observations on-site focused on work practices (e.g., what time people arrived and left the site), roles on-site (e.g., who does what roles, and whether roles were associated with particular work practices such as total availability or leadership).…”

“…People may not recognize the existence of informal gendered rules because their taken‐for‐granted nature can also render them invisible for those who live and perpetuate them (Acker, 2006). To address this, we adopted a rapid ethnographic approach (Galea et al, 2017). While rapid ethnography has been criticized by classic ethnographers as a second‐rate approach to ethnography, it is a practical solution to the real challenges of fieldwork (see, e.g., Galea et al, 2017; Isaacs, 2013; Pink, Tutt, Dainty, & Gibb, 2010).…”

“…Thematic analysis involved: ‘immersion’ in the data (repeatedly reading the field notes, interview and debriefing transcripts to obtain a high level of familiarity with the data); categorization/coding (organizing and generating an initial list of codes from the theory); searching for themes (examining how codes combine to form over‐reaching themes in relation to the research questions); refining themes (continuing to search for data that supported or refuted proposed themes and connections between overlapping themes). The coding process was carried out by a team of researchers who reconciled the initial and corresponding thematic codes across each stage of analysis (for a detailed discussion of the methodology, see Galea et al, 2017).…”