Becoming collaborative: enhancing the understanding of intra-organisational relational dynamics

Managing the delivery of highway maintenance and management is complex. A multi-faceted and highly reactive service provision requires the coordination of an interconnected web of intra-organisational inputs. Collaborative approaches for the management of such complexity has attracted a great deal of research attention over the years but there remains a lack of research examining collaboration “in flight”. In Construction Management Research (CMR) studies orientate toward antecedents and processes for the application of a collaborative approach. Practically, contracts are used to govern these works, to coordinate expectations, and to structure relationships, with most of the work procured under transactional, non-collaborative and financially punitive forms of contract, which makes the enactment of collaborative working practices even more challenging. To investigate how collaborative approaches to service delivery might improve performance, this study examines the conditions that render collaboration operable when deployed within non-collaborative delivery frameworks. To aid this understanding the theoretical lens of institutionalisation, a theory underutilised in CMR, is used to unravel the multiplicity of factors acting to both support and erode collaborative working practice as observed at the micro level. Typically, institutional theorists examine micro and macro elements separately. Through a longitudinal case study consisting of four and a half years of participant observation, this study adopts an approach to examine micro-practices of collaborative behaviour to reveal how collaboration plays out in practice, leading to an understanding of how collaboration is shaped by macro-institutional logics. Through the lens of institutionalisation this study supports a reconceptualisation of collaboration, not as an exceptional event, but as an ongoing journey of accomplishment. This work follows the observations of three improvement initiatives designed to enhance collaborative working for the purposes of service ...