An examination of project management team meetings in railway construction

The research for this thesis originated in an investigation of Bion's psychoanalytical model of behaviour in groups, which claimed to show the operation of three 'basic assumption' states: 'dependency', 'pairing, 'fight-flight'. Drawing on a literature review, the model was initially inspected to permit its deployment in the setting of a management team on a civil engineering project. The findings from this phase of the research revealed that the 'basic assumptions' are founded upon phenomena which share similarities with Freud's 'unconscious'. Further examination has concluded that the model is unsuitable as a means of understanding behaviour in a group, since crucially, it is limited to furnishing 'description' or 'interpretation', rather than explication. Whilst 'reviewing the literature, a number of 'interventions' using Bion's formulation were considered, and a conclusion is drawn that their attention to the rigours of the scientific process, leave a number of important questions unanswered. As a consequence of this inspection, a different approach to the empirical component of the project was undertaken, utilising 'ethnomethodology', an orientation in sociology drawing upon Wittgenstein's philosophy founded on 'grammar'. This approach necessitates the making of an exact, real-world, contemporaneous account, requiring the researcher's presence in the setting. Overcoming the sensitivities such an approach evokes requires a degree of negotiation; details of how the project progressed this phase of the research are included. After successfully negotiating access to the setting, the fieldwork has been used to obtain an audio record of meetings, and this data has been transcribed. This material is fundamentally 'episodic' in nature, and three episodes are presented in the thesis, further broken down into 'colloquies' for explicatory convenience. Analysis reveals the importance of 'topical coherence' as the means by which attendees conduct the business of a meeting. And it is the principle vehicle upon which 'speaking-during' can be made understandable to the conduct of a scientific investigation.