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 | ProfessorKristian KreinerCenter for Management Studies of the Building Process |
I am studying organizations and management, and I am interested in how things function in practice and in why they function as they do. Not least am I interested in how people collaborate about important things under difficult conditions and across professional boundaries.
If we wish to understand and explain how collaboration functions in practice, there are three issues which we must clarify:
1. We must know what is happening – therefore I am working empirically, preferably as close as possible to the ethnographic method.
2. We must be able to recognize that which is important, when we see it – therefore it is important to carry along all the time the theory and imagination in order to realize that things could have been different from what we actually see.
3. We must be able to explain why the things that we observe happen as they do when they could have happened in a different way – such explanations constitute the theoretical contribution.
There are few things in practice that I am not interested in. And few are the sectors and company types that I have not studied. Currently I am focusing on the building process: Organizing and managing under the conditions prevailing within the building industry. I study architect competitions, project management pre-qualification, building failures and scamped work, success, the role of the client consultant, conflict and collaboration… My studies are based on the assumption that conditions are imperfect – that complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity characterize them. Therefore it is no easy and simple task to find the winner of an architect competition or for architects to select an optimal competition strategy; there are no easy solutions to problems of building failures and scamped work in the building process.
Because my point of departure is realistic, and I attempt to analyze and theorize from this, it is also possible for me to form realistic interpretations and offer directions on possible alternative ways of managing the building process. I am convinced that ideal assumptions about the conditions of the building industry cannot lead to anything but ideal assumptions. And in my view such assumptions are of no value or relevance.
If we wish to understand and explain how collaboration functions in practice, there are three issues which we must clarify:
1. We must know what is happening – therefore I am working empirically, preferably as close as possible to the ethnographic method.
2. We must be able to recognize that which is important, when we see it – therefore it is important to carry along all the time the theory and imagination in order to realize that things could have been different from what we actually see.
3. We must be able to explain why the things that we observe happen as they do when they could have happened in a different way – such explanations constitute the theoretical contribution.
There are few things in practice that I am not interested in. And few are the sectors and company types that I have not studied. Currently I am focusing on the building process: Organizing and managing under the conditions prevailing within the building industry. I study architect competitions, project management pre-qualification, building failures and scamped work, success, the role of the client consultant, conflict and collaboration… My studies are based on the assumption that conditions are imperfect – that complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity characterize them. Therefore it is no easy and simple task to find the winner of an architect competition or for architects to select an optimal competition strategy; there are no easy solutions to problems of building failures and scamped work in the building process.
Because my point of departure is realistic, and I attempt to analyze and theorize from this, it is also possible for me to form realistic interpretations and offer directions on possible alternative ways of managing the building process. I am convinced that ideal assumptions about the conditions of the building industry cannot lead to anything but ideal assumptions. And in my view such assumptions are of no value or relevance.