Project, Company or Profession? Tensions in and Barriers for Developing Knowledge in Building Design

The production of knowledge in projects in building design can be characterised as an interplay between actors within and across several knowledge intensive companies including consulting engineers, architects and contractors. The product usually combines organisational knowledge stemming from various professional practices into a documentation representing a new building. The organisations operate under continual pressures from structural, organisational, professional and individual sources. The knowledge production consists of a bricolage of practical experiences, formalised information, transformation of demands from external alliances and customer demands. This paper combines a critique of the knowledge management discourse with contributions on project working and teams. Mainstream knowledge management discourse picture knowledge as either a well-defined tangible entity or describe how it can quickly become one. They also leave the issue of the content of the knowledge blackboxed. Although Community of Practice approaches dismantle the rationalistic perceptions of knowledge, a belief of the stability and non-political, 'power free' features of the knowledge production is maintained. And they still leave out the content issue. It is suggested to view the knowledge production as relying on temporary network building, knowledge alliances, in and across teams in the projects and the companies. The paper presents an ethnographic case study of a building design process. Several management initiatives in the involved companies address the production and management of knowledge. These managerial initiatives can be seen as an attempt to develop the internal resources as much as possible. However they occur under a continual regime of 'getting things done' in the ongoing project, very often with the project as 'the winner' on behalf of others in the battle of resources and attention by the project managers and employees. It is illustrated how the projects are carried out under continual stress and with restricted room for collective reflexiveness. We discusses through the empirical material, barriers for the knowledge production in building design which includes: group polarization, group thinking, power and politics, time pressure and the structure of the design process. It turns out that an important knowledge type to be handled is coordination-knowledge between various technical/professional areas, across projects and across companies. The empirical case presented shows how these domains continually are in tension with each other making coordinative knowledge political.