Shifts in the Logic of the Danish Construction Industry

Participants
Eva Boxenbaum

Keywords
Institutional theory, market formation, prefabrication, theorization, discourse, comparative case study 

The project on shifting logics in the Danish construction industry takes its starting point in the empirical observation that ideas about how best to organize construction have changed significantly during the 20^th century. For instance, in the post-war period, new ideas in architecture, engineering and contracting manifested themselves in innovative building designs, construction materials and production processes. Traces of these ideas, and the construction practices that developed in correspondence with them, are still detectable in the construction industry today. For instance, Denmark has one of the highest prefabrication rates in Europe today because of developments in the 1950s and 1960s. One objective of the project is to identify how the new logics manifested itself in the Danish construction industry, e.g. in the market for new construction materials. Another objective is to identify why new logics, e.g., scientific management or modernism, had a particular concrete expression in Denmark. The project investigates, for instance, how ideas about prefabrication expressed themselves in Denmark and France in the post-war period (1945-1968), notably how changes in ideas affected the market for prefabricated elements in the two countries. The insights from this research project may be used to shape current developments in the Danish construction industry. 

A better understanding of how markets for new technologies evolve, and hence of how it can be shaped.