A ‘Strategy-as-Practice’ exploration of lean construction strategizing

Abstract

A growing body of work emerging from the management and organizational studies literature is the 'Strategy-as-Practice' (SaP) perspective, which focuses on the ways in which strategy is enacted or 'done' within organizational settings. In this paper we use this perspective to examine the diffusion of lean construction. In recent years, lean construction has grown in prominence to become one of the primary performative improvement recipes for the sector.However, rather than lean providing a stable strategy around which more collaborative, intelligent and efficient project-based organizations develop, 3 this research reveals how it transforms during its journey with unintended consequences for organizations. Ethnographic study, informed by SaP, demonstrates how a lean strategy and its effects on organizational practice and culture cannot be understood separate from its material and embodied practices and its power effects. As well as contributing to the empirical examination of lean construction practice, this paper opens up new trajectories for research into strategizing within construction which are orthogonal to celebratory or critical positions and provides researchers with ways of exploring lived practices and spaces where strategizing takes place.

Stefna í reynd í litlu íslensku hátæknifyrirtæki

“…Þó hafa rannsóknir út frá stefnu í reynd meira beinst að stjórnendum og áhrifum þeirra en minna verið skoðað hvaða áhrif starfsmenn almennt hafa á stefnu og iðkun stefnumiðaðs starfs (Égels-Zandén og Rosén, 2014). Rannsóknir á þessu sviði hafa til að mynda beinst að stefnumiðuðu starfi í háskólum (Jarzabkowski, 2003), fjölskyldufyrirtaekjum (Nordquist og Melin, 2010), fjölþjóðlegum stórfyrirtaekjum (MNE's) (Balogun, Jarzabkowski og Vaara, 2011;Ocasio og Rise, 2008), byggingafyrirtaekjum (Sage, Dainty og Brookes, 2012), á hágaeða veitingastöðum (Gomez og Bouty, 2011) og yfir í það að skoða með hvaða haetti stjórnir fyrirtaekja vinna stefnumiðað starf (Hendry, Kiel og Nicholson, 2010).…”

Understanding operations strategizing in project-based organisations: middle managers’ interaction and strategy praxis

“…Cheah et al, 2007;Russell et al 2014;Stewart and Spencer, 2006) rather than the doing of strategy. This focus on doing strategy posits our contribution in prolongation of that provided by Räisänen & Löwstedt (2014) and Sage et al (2012). This perspective is important, not least because 'preparing practitioners better for entry into strategy praxis should help middle managers and others contribute more effectively to their organizations' strategizing' (Whittington, 2006: 627).…”

“…Responding to this situation our aim in this paper is to contribute an empirical examination of an OS enactment within project-based organisations. Developing empirical insights into the processual aspects of OS demands an approach which reveals the nature of the situated practices which surround it, and within which OS can be viewed as an ongoing social accomplishment (Sage et al 2012). Strategy as practice (SAP) offers such a lens by directing attention towards the strategy practitioners (those making and executing strategies), the strategy practices, the predominantly extra-organisational, but also intraorganisational routines that practitioners draw upon in their praxis, and strategy praxis (what practitioners actually do in designing, shaping and implementing strategies) (Helkiö 2013;Rouleau 2013;Whittington 2006).…”

Maturity and Maturity Models in Lean Construction

“…Given the emphasis by authors such as Caffyn (1999) on the importance of approaches to assess the organisational transformation and further consider the fact that implementing LC is a transformation (also often stated as journey) of an organisation (Mossman 2009, Sage et al 2012, Zimina et al 2012, the transformation can be seen as the movement towards maturity. However, as maturity is conceptualised as the movement towards an ideal point (Hogan and Roberts 2004) and an organisation is mature when it is perfectly conditioned to reach its objectives and goals continuously, in the real world it would be impossible to find a fully mature organisation (Andersen and Jessen 2003).…”