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Construction Management and Economics
ISSN: 0144-6193 (Print) 1466-433X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcme20
Living the dream? Understanding partnering as
emergent practice
Mike Bresnen
To cite this article: Mike Bresnen (2009) Living the dream? Understanding partnering
as emergent practice, Construction Management and Economics, 27:10, 923-933, DOI:
10.1080/01446190902974145
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01446190902974145
Published online: 23 Nov 2009.
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Living the dream? Understanding partnering as
emergent practice
MIKE BRESNEN*
Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Manchester, MI5 6PB, UK
Received 1 December 2008; accepted 15 April 2009
The ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies has recently emerged as an important set of perspectives which has
implications for understanding processes of knowing and learning within and between organizations.
Consisting of a range of different approaches, it emphasizes the situated nature of knowing and learning in
practice and offers an alternative to understanding human action that transcends the dualism of structure and
agency effects on action. The ontological and epistemological underpinnings of a practice-based approach are
explored before attention is directed towards assessing the implications for understanding the knowledge,
learning and change in project-based organizations associated with the emergence of partnering.
Keywords: Partnering, practice-based perspective, organizational learning.
Introduction
Work on partnering and related forms of inter-firm
collaboration in the construction sector has often taken
as its starting point the search for a clear definition of
partnering and the range of practices it encompasses
(e.g. Thompson and Saunders, 1998; Nystro ̈ m, 2005;
Anvuur and Kumuraswamy, 2007; Eriksson and
Pesamaa, 2007). Research effort is then often focused
on understanding any gaps between these formal
attributes and partnering as enacted in practice (e.g.
Black et al., 2000; Cheng et al., 2000; Li et al., 2001;
Beach et al., 2005; Nystro ̈ m, 2008; Yeung et al., 2008).
Arguably, however, partnering is much more informal
and emergent than this (Bresnen and Marshall, 2002;
Bresnen, 2007) and, consequently, greater insights are
possible if partnering is understood as an emergent
process that is not only situated in particular (local)
circumstances and practices, but also actively consti-
tuted through the collective sense-making activity of
those directly involved.
Such an approach to partnering emphasizes the
value of taking a ‘practice-based’ approach to studying
organizational and management processes and it is
this perspective—highly influential in recent years in
research on knowledge and learning processes (e.g.
Nicolini et al., 2003)—that forms the conceptual
backdrop to this paper. Rather than beginning with
theories abstracted from action, theory and research
from a practice-based perspective takes a more
inductive line, in which interest is directed towards
the ways in which practices (and, through them,
structures and systems) are constituted and reconsti-
tuted through the complex and situated use of a
wide array of tools, technologies, objects, languages
and bodies of knowledge that populate a domain of
activity (e.g. Suchman, 2000). Underpinning much
research in this area is a critical interest in the
importance of power for understanding how practices
are constituted and how they, in turn, relate to broader
social structures in which action is embedded (e.g.
Giddens, 1990).
Drawing directly upon interview data from a case
study of partnering in the construction industry
(Bresnen and Marshall, 2000), this paper explores the
active constitution of partnering in practice, focusing
upon the ways in which it emerges through sense-
making—partly as a reflection of, but also in juxtaposi-
tion to, models of collaboration that are prevalent
within wider industry discourses. The result is an
analysis which emphasizes the situated nature of
knowing and learning associated with partnering and
the importance of (local) power relations in helping
shape the form that it takes and in effectively*E-mail: [e-mail]
Construction Management and Economics (October–December 2009) 27, 923–933
Construction Management and Economics
ISSN 0144-6193 print/ISSN 1466-433X online # 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/01446190902974145Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 20:33 19 June 2016

circumscribing the practices involved and their legiti-
macy.
In assessing the implications for theorizing about,
and researching into, partnering in the construction
context, the paper also takes a reflexive look at the role
of research and the involvement of researchers in
contributing towards an understanding of partnering
in practice (and, thus, potentially helping legitimize
partnering). Understanding the relationship between
theory and practice is critically important in an age in
which so-called ‘mode 2’ forms of knowledge produc-
tion are considered vitally important (Gibbons et al.,
1994; Nowotny et al., 2003). Yet, rarely does (con-
struction management) research reflexively consider its
own role in the social construction and constitution of
management knowledge. By examining the subject
position of the researcher in research that was very
much intended to follow the lines of ‘engaged scholar-
ship’ (Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006), a number of
important methodological implications arise for con-
struction management research—not least of which are
the importance of negotiated interaction between
researcher and practitioner and the value of ethno-
graphic forms of research and more in-depth methods
(such as observation) for studying construction man-
agement phenomena.
The ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies
Within mainstream organizational and management
studies, there has been considerable interest in recent
years in ‘practice-based’ views of organizations—
particularly in the area of organizational knowledge
and learning. In contrast to approaches that take a
more abstracted or ‘commodified’ view of knowledge
management, innovation, organizational change and
learning (treating ‘knowledge’ as an object that can be
shared, transferred and manipulated), practice-based
theorists and researchers have focused attention instead
upon what people actually do—thus, treating processes
of knowing as of more importance (e.g. Orlikowski,
2002). Consequently, a practice-based perspective
takes a more emergent and inductive approach to
understanding the development of social structures and
systems. It does this by emphasising how practices are
socially constituted and reconstituted through the use
of the variety of tools and techniques, sources of
knowledge and discursive resources available to those
involved in a particular realm of activity (Blackler,
1993; Suchman, 2000; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2003).
The ‘practice turn’ in organizational studies has
emerged in recent years partly as a response to the
long-standing problem in philosophy and social theory
of the dualism that exists in the relationship between
agency and structure as the basis of human action (e.g.
Giddens, 1990). Put simply, the problem is whether
one attaches primacy to individual agency or to social
structure as the basis of human behaviour. So, for
example, if social structures shape or even determine
our behaviour, what part does agency play (or can it
play) in the production of social order, the enactment
of social systems and the development of social change?
Practice-based approaches are an attempt to transcend
this dualism and overcome the schism between
psychological and social approaches that lies at the
heart of the social sciences by proposing the ‘field of
practice’ as the appropriate point of departure for the
study of human behaviour. In contrast with structur-
alist perspectives that emphasize the (determining)
influence of social structure on action and the establish-
ment of custom-like regularities (e.g. routines) and with
individualist approaches that emphasize the importance
of cognitive processes (e.g. reasoning), practice-based
approaches stress the fluid and unfolding nature of
routines and their active, social constitution (Schatzki et
al., 2001, pp. 6–7, 13). Practices themselves are thus
defined as ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of
human activity centrally organized around shared
understandings’ (Schatzki et al., 2001, p. 2).
Given the scope offered by such a definition, it is
perhaps not surprising that there is no single unifying
practice-based theory or approach. The range of
perspectives encompassed is tremendously wide
(including phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethno-
methodology, activity theory (Blackler, 1993), actor-
network theory (e.g. Law, 1986, 1992) and Bordieu’s
(1990) ‘habitus’ concept). Despite this, there are
important points of convergence, particularly in the
emphasis placed upon understanding knowing and
learning as unfolding processes centred upon practice
(e.g. Orlikowski, 2002). According to Nicolini et al.
(2003, p. 3), organizational knowing is
situated in the system of ongoing practices of action in
ways that are relational, mediated by artefacts, and
always rooted in a context of interaction. Such knowl-
edge is thus acquired through some form of participa-
tion, and is continually reproduced and negotiated; that
is, it is always dynamic and provisional.
Crucially, therefore, practice-based approaches empha-
size the fluidity of knowledge and learning and the
difficulties of codifying knowledge and of representing
it as such (Shatzki et al., 2001, pp. 8–9).
Inevitably, however, there are also important differ-
ences, most notably in the emphasis placed upon the
role of material objects. Since practices are ‘materially
mediated’ nexuses of activity (Schatzki et al., 2001,
p. 11), objects play an important part in practice and in
924 BresnenDownloaded by [University of Florida] at 20:33 19 June 2016

understanding processes of knowing and learning.
Work on ‘boundary objects’, for example (Boland and
Tenkasi, 1995), demonstrates their importance in
mediating communication within a joint field of
practice and in providing the ‘tangible definitions’
needed to allow knowledge to be shared or transformed
(Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2004). Work within an actor-
network theory perspective goes even further by
proposing that objects themselves play an active part
in propagating practices—effectively having agency and
behaving as ‘actants’ (Law, 1992). Such a proposition
has, of course, been subject to considerable criticism
and debate. Nevertheless, it is clear that practice-based
approaches place a strong emphasis on the role and
impact of objects—both material and symbolic
(Nicolini et al., 2003, p. 22).
There are also important differences in the emphasis
placed upon issues of power and control within a
practice-based perspective (Nicolini et al., 2003,
p. 24). Where concern is directed more towards
achieving integration within and across complex fields
of practice (e.g. Wenger, 1998; Brown and Duguid,
2001; Carlile, 2004), local conditions of power and
influence are certainly acknowledged, but questions of
control, hegemony and domination in social relations
between actors tend to get downplayed. In contrast,
approaches that derive from a poststructuralist per-
spective see relations of power as of central impor-
tance in constituting fields of practice through their
impact on what constitutes knowledge, meaning,
practice and identity (Foucault, 1980). So, for
example, systems of power within which social
interaction is embedded have an important influence
on practice through the mutual constitution of power
and knowledge which, in turn, shapes meaning and
identity through conceptions of what constitutes
normal and accepted practice.
Consequently, the practice turn in organization
studies points to a very different set of implications
with regard to research approach and method. At an
ontological level, the more relational, constructive,
heterogeneous and situated nature of knowing and
learning, combined with a more indeterminate view of
supposedly fixed elements such as structure, knowledge
and boundary (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) brings into
question any assumptions made about the nature of
‘knowledge production’ and the range of stakeholders
involved (cf. Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al.,
2003). As Nicolini et al. (2003, p. 27) put it: ‘from a
practice perspective, the world appears to be relation-
ally constituted, a seamless web of heterogeneous
elements kept together and perpetuated by active
processes of ordering and sense-making’. Whether or
not one takes an approach that emphasizes relations of
power and control, it is clear from this that knowing
and learning are highly situated in practice, as well as
continually constructed, reconstructed and contested.
A similar set of issues arises when one considers the
epistemological implications of a practice-based
approach to knowledge and learning. The strength of
a practice-based approach is in getting close to practice
and in exploring action in ‘real time’—attempting to
ground theory better in what people actually do, rather
than beginning with theories that are abstracted from
practice. At one level, this would appear to dovetail well
with the aim of grounding knowledge in experience and
in effecting changes in practice where needed. An
emphasis on situated learning and greater sensitivity to
what is local and contingent would therefore appear to
introduce more social realism into the research process
(via grounded theorizing) and a corresponding empha-
sis on action-centred and experiential learning.
At the same time, however, the methods implied by a
practice-based perspective tend to rely more upon
anthropological-ethnographic and sociological-partici-
pant observer techniques for conducting research.
While such methods are by no means inconsistent with
the level of engagement necessary for conducting
action-based research, they do however proceed from
very different assumptions from those methods more
commonly used in applied business and management
research (Bryman and Bell, 2007). Not only do they
take a much more qualitative, open-ended line for the
study of organizational phenomena, they also tend to
eschew any kind of privileged perspective on the issue
at hand, in preference to taking as paramount the
subjective position of those researched. In other words,
such methods are not particularly well suited to, or
even consistent with, an agenda for research that is
determined ‘top down’ from a purely managerial
perspective (even if that agenda is explicitly concerned
with understanding subjective perceptions or atti-
tudes).
Understanding partnering as emergent
practice
The above discussion suggests, of course, a number of
important challenges in attempting to apply practice-
based thinking to the context of the construction sector.
However, it also suggests a number of ways in which
doing so can make a significant contribution towards
understanding organizational processes within the
sector. One such case in point is in the development
of partnering.
It is well over a decade since industry- and govern-
ment-sponsored reports in the US, the UK and
elsewhere first identified partnering as a way of
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