Lean Construction: The Contribution of Ethnography
2013
Download PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.60164/m91tqhahc
Author: David Seymour
Citation:
Seymour, D. (2013). Lean Construction: The Contribution of Ethnography. Lean Construction Journal pp. 36–46.
Abstract:
I am a sociologist who taught management to construction managers and engineers in the School of Civil Engineering, University of Birmingham, for over 30 years. In the early nineties I met Glenn Ballard in Chile and I recognized affinities between his work and mine. That’s how I became involved with Lean Construction.
Lean Construction (LC) is a philosophy and a set of practices which largely originated in the seminal work of Koskela and Ballard and Howell. In brief, it’s about how to deliver optimum value to a customer by managing the transformation of materials into products through the multiple flows of activities which constitute a construction project, called ‘TFV’ (see Koskela 2000).
This paper will propose that there is still much misunderstanding of its implications even by those who wish to ‘buy into’ it. This is, in part, because of the deep-seated ideas that have developed, at least since the European Enlightenment, and are difficult to shed.