Partnering and the traditional: Institutional determinants of governance in Danish construction

Projects have traditionally been constituted by contracts, whose enforcement is held in place by governance mechanisms that involve high degrees of surveillance. In this light, partnering is advocated as a project specific, communicative alternative to this traditional legal coordination process of the construction industry. In a Danish context partnering has, however, so far not been able to offer a well-defined alternative to this traditional regulatory governance frame. However, rather than providing a well-defined alternative, in this paper we argue that partnering can be seen as a nullification of the traditional, i.e. as a counterconcept to a juridico-discursive conception of project governance that otherwise has been instrumental in organizing and coordinating various aspects of the construction process according to a more or less taken-for-granted regulative schemata of institutional order. Accordingly, it is suggested that the effects of partnering in the first instance stem from a series of interventions in the institutional and regulative context of the construction process, and that future case studies could benefit by paying closer attention to the institutional determinants of management thinking and practice