ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the practical challenges of classic ethnography in the construction sector and how alternative ethnographic practices might offer pragmatic ways of overcoming them. It shows how 'rapid' ethnography was adopted as a viable alternative and how this might be suitable to other social research in the broader field of construction management. The chapter discusses debates around the role of ethnography in construction research and demonstrates how rapid ethnography can be used effectively to examine the informal rules, norms, and practices that undermine gender equality in construction. The use of new institutional theory to understand how gendered power dynamics operate and are enforced and maintained in construction requires new methodological thinking. The use of ethnography to reveal gendered dimensions of social life has a long history, but as Chappell and Waylen note, ethnography has rarely been used in new institutionalist research in specifically gendered ways, or as a gendered lens on informal institutions.