Management as an accomplishment of project team meetings in construction

Amongst academics and participants the paramount importance of communication has long been recognised in the construction industry. The ways in which the various parties coordinate their activities has been the subject of many studies, yet few have tackled the seemingly simple matter of the project team meeting. Meetings are a regular occurrence in all phases of construction activity and their metronomic regularity is itself a testament to their apparent effectiveness. This paper reports on the preliminary analysis of data in connection with ongoing research into the project management of a live construction scheme. The analysis is primarily based upon a contemporaneous account furnished by an audio record of project team meetings, which has been maintained for over a year. One 45 second segment from this record has been transcribed to provide an illustration of conversational analysis as a research instrument. This, and other colloquies have underscored the need for re-presentation of practical actions to enable talk to be done upon it, to manage it.Prior to a report of the empirical work, the paper highlights the shortcomings of research which is limited to an enquiry at the level of the process, rather than the action. Approaches should seek out the quiddity of their study, as exemplified (in part) by language which is evocative of the action of which it attempts to speak. In sympathy with this tenet, the headings in this paper have been designed to conjure up their content.