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Abstract
During the 1990's, the UK construction industry came under pressure to change its traditional ways of working. The Egan and Latham reports sought to identify the issues facing the industry and concentrated on promoting new ways of working. Whilst the reports have identified ‘culture’ as a significant factor in explaining the industry's ‘problems’, the focus has been towards new methods of procurement and technical practices rather than understanding the social processes, of which current practices and ways of working are an expression, that occur within construction.
This thesis attempts to carry out a more fundamental understanding of the social processes that occur within the construction industry. The concept of culture is explored in depth both at the general level of shared understandings within the industry (in the case of the construction contract) and at the specific level of occupational and corporate groups within the industry.
Using Weber's concept of the ‘ideal type’, the thesis proposes that both the corporate/project roles of client, contractor and consultant, and the professional disciplines of architect, engineer and quantity surveyor, represent ‘ideal types’. These ‘types’ interact on the project but share between them a common understanding of the construction process expressed and mediated through standard forms and conditions of contract.
These propositions are investigated using 4 case studies of construction projects involving 42 semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire based on Hofstede's VSM with a sample size of 790 individuals selected from a range of occupational and corporate groups.
Analysis of the case studies investigates the shared understanding of the construction process expressed through the construction contract and the ways in which the ‘ideal types’ of the occupational images uncovered within the interviews interact with each other within the construction project. From the questionnaire, statistical support for the existence of, and significant differences between, the various ideal types were identified which were correlated to the stereotypical images explored within the case studies.
