Thinking about materiality: the value of a construction management and engineering view

Alexander Styre

Construction Management and Economics, 2017, vol. 35, issue 1-2, 35-44

Abstract: The increased interest for materiality as an analytical category in the social sciences provide construction management and economics scholar with new possibilities to better exploit the detailed empirical data being collected in the construction industry and related fields. While constructivist and other idealist theories have tended to dominate the social sciences since at least the mid-sixties when the social sciences sought to release itself from the methodological dogmatism of the “hard sciences”, materiality is now recognized and subject to theorizing within different social science traditions. This article advocates a broad engagement with materiality within construction management research and presents a series of analytical concepts and empirical studies that stress how the built environment that human beings inhabit is far from passive, inert and stable as common sense thinking easily misleads analysts to believe. An image of materiality that recognizes an agential, dynamic and more fluid nature of materiality is thus arguably conducive to an intellectually stimulating construction management scholarship.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01446193.2016.1272760 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:35:y:2017:i:1-2:p:35-44

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446193.2016.1272760

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().