Making sense of partnering: discourses, governance and institutional change

Abstract

Coordination in construction projects has traditionally been based on contractually defined relations involving high degrees of surveillance. In recent decades, partnering has been advocated as a project-specific, communicative alternative to this contractual mode of project governance. Taking a perspective of institutional theory, however, the development of partnering can also be understood as a strategic intervention that has destabilized the established regulative context in which the traditional contractual mode of project governance takes place. Drawing on a historical document study and data from an ethnographic case study of a public partnering project, it is shown that rather than providing a well-defined alternative to the traditional form of project governance, the institutional destabilization has cultivated an organization field offering a legitimate frame for local sense making. Thus, as a project governance mechanism, partnering emerges as a collective sense-making process directed at (re-)creating a new form of rational behaviour under changing institutional conditions.