ABSTRACT
The construction industry is constituted by a plethora of social practices and materialities, and involves a long series of occupational and professional groups (Bowen, Pearl and Akintoye, 2007). In order to understand how knowledge is formed, articulated and circulated in such heterogeneous environments, a number of analytical concepts need to be brought into discussion. In this chapter, some of the central concepts of the theoretical framework guiding the empirical studies are introduced and discussed. Such concepts include occupational and professional groups, practice, routines, rules and standard operation procedures, and they form a theoretical framework underlining the actual day-to-day practices in construction projects as the constitutive components of any knowledge-management initiative in the industry. To put it differently, the perspective taken in this book is essentially ‘bottom-up’, emphasizing the everyday work procedures in knowledge work rather than a ‘top-down’, information-management perspective where knowledge management systems are defined a priori and practices are located within a determining system. In the latter half of the chapter, the literature – or rather some of the literature belonging to the fastgrowing corpus of texts – addressing the intersection between knowledge and management is reviewed. The chapter thereafter addresses some of the central characteristics of the construction industry, pointing towards the more empirically oriented parts of the book.
