Making Sense of Construction Improvement

• Main Author: Green, Stuart D. 1958- (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, West Sussex, UK WILEY BLACKWELL 2011
• Subjects: Construction industry > Management; Economic history > Superintendence; Building > Superintendence
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.
• Physical Description: xxii, 367 pages illustrations 25 cm
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index
• ISBN: 9781405130462; 1405130466

The book sets out deliberately to challenge the current construction improvement debate and the way in which it is conducted. It confronts the supposedly neutral nature of construction 'best practice' and demonstrates that that the advocated recipes seldom stand up to critical scrutiny. It further argues that commonly accepted components of best practice such as lean construction, partnering and collaborative working rarely live up to the claims made on their behalf. Such recipes invariably suffer from definitional vagueness, and are constantly reinterpreted to suit the needs the different audiences. Making Sense of Construction Improvement argues that construction sector improvement techniques cannot be understood in terms of their substantive content, and are best understood in terms of the rhetoric within which they are presented. The author also contends that the persuasiveness of such recipes depends upon the extent to which practitioners can adopt them for the purposes of making sense of the changes they observe happening around them. To be accepted as 'best practice' construction improvement techniques must also resonate with broader agendas of socio-technological change.