Here’s the Paper on Linguistic Action Theory
July 7th, 2003 by Hal
Foundations of Lean Construction: Linguistic Action, by Hal Macomber and Gregory Howell, to be presented at the International Group for Lean Construction's (IGLC) 11th Annual Conference, July 22, 2003. How did I get started on this? I responded to Lauri Koskela's call for papers on project management theory. I just had to do it. He referred to my blog in his paper.
New communities of practice
The World Wide Web is facilitating the emergence of literally hundreds of communities of practice. There are roughly (a) thousand project management related e-mail discussion lists on Yahoo (Project Management World Today 2003b), as well as several web magazines on project management. The opinions on project management are as fragmented as in the case of research. Recently, the Editorial of the web magazine "Project Management World Today" (2003a) said: "We predict that the Project Management is going to change as little in the next 10 years as it has in the last 20." On the other hand, very interesting discussions among reformers, who vocally reject the unchanged project management, can be found from Hal Macomber's Blog "Reforming Project Management" (http://halmacomber.com/jammin/2003_02_02_archive.html#90268453).
While I was hesitant to propose a paper, having never written for this kind of community, I was convinced that I would offer a different perspective on projects from the ones offered by people who studied civil engineering and construction management. Having begun my writing on a linguistic action basis for project management, I thought there just might be something there. Emboldened, or just stupid, I began.
So I wrote the paper in the style of the papers presented in the previous ten years, not my style, but an accepted style. I encourage you to read Greg's and my paper so you can participate in a discussion. For the next 4 or 5 days I'll discuss various aspects of the paper.
Here's the funny thing: once submitted and accepted, Greg and I began speculating on how I would present it. After weeks of discussion we concluded we wrote the wrong paper! Not that there's something wrong with what we said. We just omitted to say what we contend is of most importance. Oh well…I'll just have to say it in this weblog (and when I present).
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August 14th, 2003 at 2:23 am
I think you make a great point. A number of people have suggested my offering a linguistic action perspective is done with the intent of being that new theory. That couldn’t be further from the truth for me. I see our proposal as augmenting the current commonsense about projects by adding a particular orientation to human-ness to the engineering process. Those studying the same references we used have made favorable remarks.