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

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.