Project organisations as organisational fields: an exploration of construction projects through Pierre Bourdieu's Theory of Practice

Project organisations are transient organisations formed though loosely coupled firms (Dubois and Gadde 2002; Turner 2006). They tend to be, as suggested by Henisz, Levitt and Scott (2012: 37), ‘one-off projects for which transactions have no strong “shadow of the future”, but where elements of relational contracting are still ubiquitous’. Past scholarship has explored the implications of the transitory nature of project organisations through supply chain and network analysis, approaching it as a process and as a constellation of formal and informal relations. It does, however, remain unclear how the human or sociological side of project organisations may be adequately addressed. This paper explores one possible avenue for such inquiry, namely Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) Theory of Practice. Through an analysis of Bourdieu’s key concepts—habitus, capital and field—it explores how the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector and the project organisations of which it largely consists may be investigated not only through its processes and interactions, but also through objective relations that exist beyond these processes and networks.