‘Shared Sense of Purposefulness’: A New Concept to Understand the Practice of Coordinating Design in Construction

Construction management literature sees the collective task of coordinating design as being about the ‘integration’ of ‘fragmented’ discipline-specific design tasks/outputs, thus overlooking the important role of social interactions. This is not only conceptually problematic but also presents a practical management problem. As a response, a practice-based approach, which relies on a ‘becoming’ ontology, is adopted for a practical explanation of design coordination for more effective design management. The adopted methodology suggests that design develops as a result of unfolding (path-dependent) individual actions and interdisciplinary interactions. Based on this, the concept of a ‘shared sense of purposefulness’ is proposed to refer to the temporary and precarious organisational state of a design team in which each of the interacting team members has achieved a state of purposefulness to resume individual action. Hence, design coordination in construction is redefined as continuously re-establishing and maintaining ‘a shared sense of purposefulness’. The concept’s usefulness for understanding the practice of design coordination is demonstrated using data collected from a project in the UK. The discussion enables fresh insights into the everyday operation of design coordination. It is concluded that the proposed conception paves a way forward both for the research and practice in construction design management. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article to be published by Taylor & Francis in Construction Management and Economics. It will be available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rcme20/current