Border Patrol: Negotiating Jurisdictional Boundaries in Building Design and Construction

Abstract

This study examines the rise of sustainability concerns in the building design and construction industry to discover how professionals negotiate jurisdictional boundaries in the workplace. It draws on archival, interview, and observational data from five building projects to analyze points of task emergence and negotiation highlighted through participants’ everyday interactions. Theories of professional jurisdiction suggest that a profession’s claim to specific tasks relies on its members’ ability to apply abstract knowledge to perform tasks— knowledge legitimized through formal theoretical training. Though the literature recognizes in situ workplace variation from the public representation of jurisdiction, it does not address how jurisdictions claim emergent tasks that have not yet infiltrated the professionals’ training grounds. My findings show that professionals rely on a specific set of non-material resources to determine emergent task assignment in the workplace, thus giving a clearer view of the initial stages of jurisdictional modification. I find that professionals agentically adopt or reject equivocal tasks on a per-project basis, dependent on the uniquely professional resources of: (a) individual and firm expertise, (b) individual and firm interest, (c) the relative power of the professional’s voice, based on experience and project- specific formal and informal structures, and (d) the task’s inherent time pressure and time commitment. The study’s findings shed light on the micro-processes of governance, vacancy, and strategy issues inherent to professional jurisdictional claims.