Abstract
An investigation of a design project is presented with concepts and theory developed within critical psychology in order to understand the process. Investigating the co-operation of the design of a building allows us to see that the building, its design, and its use constitute common contradictory causes. In their co-ordinated activities, professionals participate from each of their perspectives with different functions and priorities, and in their acts they must take the contradictions into account. Contradictions as incompatible aspects in things and activities make it difficult to keep the common cause stable. This means that the participants’ co-operation is a continuous attempt to produce stability. They are constantly confronted with the possibility of reorganization, development, and conflict in their activities. Therefore, co-operation is conflictual. The theoretical position is based on the fact that our understanding is reciprocally formed with our local, common activities. The theoretical consequences of the position are explored.
The point of departure for this article is an empirical study of an incident in the management of a design project. It was an occasion to reflect on the relation between theory and praxis.
For psychology to become a science, we have set up theories on systematically derived empirical evidence, for example, experiments, observations, or other kinds of practice. Theories are understood as general descriptions of specific psychological structures or practices. Theories were mostly understood as abstract insights into concrete practice. It was common to use theories as the foundation for procedures to follow strictly in practice, for example how to scientifically manage a project, or how to treat psychiatric patients. But in the last 40 years, it has become more and more clear that theories cannot be used in this way. Practice became seen as containing unpredictable, surprising elements that must be handled concretely to make things work. It turns out to be a problem that abstract theory and concrete praxis were separate. Many suggestions have been devised to find the key to this problem.
One widespread device is to make theories contextual, that is, as concrete as the practices to which they are directed. Now theories are not universally valid, but can describe concrete phenomena not acknowledged before, or concrete procedures intended to provoke change, such as procedures in project management, or in pedagogy or therapy. However, by becoming a device to handle a changing practice, the theory itself is understood as unchanging, as a general clarification in the wilderness of practice. But since concrete practice is changing, and contextual theory isn’t, contextual theory is neither valid for nor clarifying all the changing aspects of practice. In this situation, it is common to become eclectic, grasp one theory for this aspect of practice, and another for that aspect.
I met the problem of theory and practice in my study of a control room in a district heating system (Axel, 2002). There, the engineers expected the operators to strictly follow theoretically derived procedures, supposing regularity was maintained by strictly following rules in practice, but the operators had to take many concrete aspects into consideration. Regularity was supposed to be maintained by strictly following rules in practice. But actually, in practice there was variability and learning, which I see as development. I discovered the dialectics of maintaining regularity through development in even the most rationally organized practice.
I could not understand development as change. Change is normally used to avoid the idea that human development is unfolding a specific nature, or has a specific direction. But change has an everyday meaning found in “changing name,” substituting one thing for another. It may also mean transforming, becoming a different substance, for example, transforming water into steam by warming it. But these formal and causal understandings point to arbitrary or one-directional deterministic results. This is very different from the notion inherent in the conception of development we shall expound here, that it is at one and the same time accidental and necessary. We must explore the grounds for how and why the process unfolds in a necessary way to move in many directions. Holzkamp (1983) was aiming at these facts when he stated: “Development is a necessary moment in the identification of sustainability” (p. 62). I take this to mean that theory must be as supple as praxis, it must come out of praxis, form it, and be formed by it.
To unfold this understanding, this article has been organized as follows. First, the history of how theory of project management comes out of its practice will be outlined. Second, we shall see how, in this differentiation of theory and practice during the Enlightenment and German Idealism, two understandings of theory were differentiated: an abstract one and a concrete, dialectical one. Then we shall jump to our time and see how the division between abstract and concrete theories was cemented with positivistic and humanistic positions, and how deterministic abstractions were modified with concepts of construction, agency, and habitualization. Next, a conception of praxis will be presented in an attempt to take the criticisms given into account, and its central notions of common cause, contradiction, subjective aspects in praxis, conflictual co-operation, and procedure. Finally, the empirical study inspiring the deliberations, an episode in a design project management, will be presented and discussed.
A sketch of the history of praxis regulation since 1200
The empirical study of how the design project was managed revealed central aspects of the regularity and development in human praxis.
We shall therefore begin with a rough outline of the history of praxis regulation or project management in the capitalist system. This historical presentation will help us see how development and regulation takes form in social conditions, why they vary, and how the variation shows promise that they can still be developed. The presentation will also help us trace the history of thinking about theory and praxis in this development.
The regulation of large bodies of people in complex privileged class systems opens the possibility of monumental construction projects. The Egyptian pyramids, Roman Colosseum, and Gothic cathedrals are examples thereof. Turnbull (2003) presented historical material hinting at how construction projects for the cathedrals were managed. From historical texts and model books with drawings he infers that the builders based their work on traditions for building cathedrals; discussed what to do; and used tools for measurement, standardization, and co-ordination, for example, strings for measurement and different templates to ensure that stones were cut to specifications. He considers the construction site as a laboratory where the Gothic style was developed.
In apparent contradiction to this understanding, there is a designed plan of the St. Gall monastery from 820. However, it is not drawn for a specific time or site and is believed to be intended as a monastery template for others to copy. For the Gothic cathedrals, we have model books and templates of different parts of the churches. Only at the zenith of the Gothic period in 1274 do we find evidence for the use of project plans from which drawings could be traced (Turnbull, 2003, p. 66).
From that date forward, in construction projects we see a movement towards more systematic and co-ordinating approaches. The advent of guns and cannons in Europe, for example, made it necessary to produce in large scale and, for example, to standardize balls to fit cannon barrels, and carriages for cannons had to be designed to reduce the recoil of the canons (Alder, 1999, 146ff). It became necessary to inform patrons and mine managers so they could explain the method of construction to others, and technological texts were written to meet this demand (Alder, 1999, p. 62).
In the 18th century in France, the need had been sharpened in the Enlightenment period. It put science over human values. Its atomistic, statistical, and mechanical natural science became seen as a basis for the rational scientific regulation of society (Taylor, 1975/1998, p. 10). The need for communication of technological matters was met by the state by establishing a class of engineers in the artillery. They achieved legal privileges through education in natural sciences and mathematics. They were supposed to mediate between theoretically based design and artisans’ craft in the manufactures. The engineers entered manufacturing as representatives for the state. They had the right to organize the work around standards. The artisans and their corporations contested these rights and the result wasn’t very successful (Alder, 1999, p. 131). Alder (1999) concludes that the engineers did not succeed very well in their attempt to organize manufacturing on rational principles, but they succeeded in organizing the military according to these principles. He argues that the engineers asserted their right to technocratic rule on the basis of a mastery that they did not possess (p. 346).
We must, however, understand this local historical development as an aspect of a larger perspective: the state engineers infused artisan production with rational principles. The engineers were not motivated by profits, and the artisans and corporations who were so motivated, or motivated to earn a living, resisted the infusion. All the same, in the system of activities in which this local development was embedded, we find other units of rational organization and profit making which will make for a stronger impact on the direction of development towards capitalism. This opens a vision of development as distributed—as going on in varied ways in many locations. There are similar activities in many locations, where local participants form the activities based on how common conditions appear in their location, an appearance which is different from the other locations. The different ways the conditions are handled in varied activities demonstrate that development is not deterministic. Development can take many directions. All the same, development most often has a comprehensive result. This depends on how conditions work together in different locations, how they make sense in them. The engineers in France tried to make a living through rational organization of production by receiving a fixed income from the state, and merchants and artisans tried to make a living through production and profits. Thus, the search for rational production and profits was separated among professionals in France. But in Britain, these conditions were distributed in another way among professionals. Entrepreneurs searched for profits by rationalizing production, thereby opening up for capitalism. The fact that capitalism became the comprehensive development in Europe is not a deterministic result, but came about from the way common conditions appearing in varied ways were handled, differentiated, and integrated in different ways in different locations.
Furthermore, establishing the engineers as a class above the artisans sharpened the differentiation of theory and praxis. Theory and praxis were generally discussed in this era through the functions of engineers and artisans. Diderot, for example, saw engineers as carrying theoretical principles and artisans working with particular solutions to particular problems. He claimed that theoretical training was counterproductive unless combined with practical knowledge of basic physical properties. He and d’Alembert promoted a rule-governed pratique that was general, flexible, and workable (Alder, 1999, p. 62).
Artisan practice is based on practical experience, which is the act of managing particular things with some kind of general insight or knowledge. The nature of knowledge was understood differently by different writers. In the tradition of German idealism, Kant argued for the possibility of ahistorical knowledge by grounding it on immutable categories (Bernstein, 1983, p. 10). It was commonly stated among writers during the Enlightenment period that too much weight on experience would make it waver with the situation. But, with Kant, it can be said that if experience was refined with experimental procedures, it was also possible to call forth the categories in consciousness and thus to demonstrate not only what is, but what universally must be, for example by showing a child that two balls added to two balls make four balls (Russell, 1945, Chapter 20.B). The trust in the ahistorical universality of rationality was so great that Saint Simon suggested organizing the political regulation of society with scientists and engineers.
This still left the question open: where do categories come from in the first place? Under the impression of how French revolutionaries dissolved a world order and produced other ones tumbling along, the German idealist Hegel identified development as fundamental. In his system, anything could be turned upside down while developing. Therefore, his answer to the origin of categories was that the order of things appears, breaks down, and develops through its connection to other things (Taylor, 1975/1998, p. 105). This understanding dissolves the notion of universal ahistorical categories to be identified in themselves.
Now if the order of things appears through their relations with anything else, we cannot pull things apart, we cannot abstract them totally, we act and think more or less concretely. Further, the order of a thing appears through its difference in its relation to other things. Things appearing through their difference to other things exist in contradiction, negate themselves through others and negate the other things, and are in opposition to each other (Taylor, 1975/1998, p. 110). A thing is a claim to independent existence, a unit, but it is identified through contradictions, which oppose it and threaten its existence (p. 106) and further its reorganizations. Hegel would insist that the ultimate synthesis incorporates division and unity (p. 48) and development. This dialectical conception of division, this struggle to maintain unity and development as fundamental points, will be taken over to the conception to be presented.
Hegel’s system dissolves the notion of universal categories. This was derided by Russell (1945), who claimed that in that case we couldn’t identify anything before we knew everything. But we actually only need to know what is relevant—essential—in order to act. Hegel’s standpoint made it possible to assert that building up a system of acts and knowledge can begin anywhere (Taylor, 1975/1998, p. 128). Therefore, his system began with a phenomenology, how the order of things appeared to us through developing historical praxis, and later introduced a logic of science.
Since development is based on particular contradictions in particular units, their investigators must be prepared to acknowledge the possible development of any of its aspects including the fundamental ones. This means that development connects concrete demonstrations, practical relevancies, and radical leanings. It also means that stability is maintained, that “development is a necessary moment in the identification of sustainability” (Holzkamp, 1983, p. 62).
From positivism to praxis
A history of the regulation of construction projects was outlined above. It was demonstrated how a differentiation of praxis and theory came out of the need for co-ordination in construction projects, and how it was sharpened in the 18th-century French Enlightenment and German Idealism. Taylor (1975/1998) stresses that some scientists in the Enlightenment (like Saint Simon) argued that a rational approach would render ethical and political issues redundant, while Hegel tried to incorporate them in his system. The discussions continued in the 19th century, now from the positions of rational liberalism and Marx’s historical materialism as well as his notion of praxis.
In order to get to a conception of praxis and its regulation, which we need to understand a contemporary design project, we shall omit a history of project management, and focus on a sociological and psychological general discussion of practice and theory leading to a notion of agency. The positions have become more marked and they will be set up here in sharp opposition. Now the positions were termed positivism on the one side and phenomenology and existentialism on the other. Positivism we can characterize by its insistence on formally well-defined concepts with which to expound determinate laws explaining how causes from the past push us ahead towards the future, while existentialism and phenomenology are characterized by conceptions of reflection on the meaningfulness of life and of a structure of subjective intention externally related to the world. At the time, the positivistic psychological and sociological sciences were marred by conceptual divisions necessary to devise their theories but detrimental to understanding practical activity. Critiques along this line were presented by, among others, Bourdieu (1977), Holzkamp (1987), and Schön (1983/1991). Thereby, it became clear that social structures were in a theoretical dimension of their own generality, not able to identify the concrete occurrences of everyday life. Similarly, phenomenologically and existentially inspired traditions like humanistic psychology struggled with the external relation to the world. Here it became a problem to find meaningfulness in one’s life if one should only reflect on inner experiences.
Inspired by Hegelian and Marxian traditions, this gap between abstract scientific structures and human experience was bridged with notions of action, practice, and praxis, as found in the works of, for example, Dewey (1929/1958), Leont’ev (1978), Holzkamp (1983), and Dreier (2008). While the scientific regulation of society had become a more compelling issue with the developed technologies, the necessity of understanding the concrete not only as isolated concrete experience but as an aspect in handling social structures became more evident.
Latour, Gergen, Giddens, and Bourdieu all participated in attempts to overcome the problems of the positions of positivism and phenomenology by establishing concrete connections. The suggestions of the four mentioned theoretical positions strive to preserve different aspects of the two philosophical positions. Latour argued that we should investigate how things are interconnected and not caused by the past but by effective constructions. He further wrote that the constructions by human beings and things should be treated as having no difference, for example, human beings construct networks of stations to measure the weather, whereas the wind and the blades construct the windmill (Latour, 1987/1997). But his constructions are only identified by the combination of fixed elements and their effects as causes, thereby repeating causal thinking on a more detailed level. Gergen (1973) included human beings’ ability to reflect on the construction of social psychological laws and their effects, which makes them able to change the effects of the laws. But he left the constructional process unresolved, thereby it is neither causal nor necessary but casual, happening by chance, and thus meaningless. Giddens (1984/1995) kept the cause and effect of social structure together in the monitored act, but mostly focused on how social structure was an unintended consequence of those acts and thereby did not integrate the social and subjective side of acts. Bourdieu (1977) stated that a person acts on an anticipating judgment of the situation based on the culturally produced habitus, but he wrote in ways that stated that people from the same social class acted in determinate ways regulated by habitus. The difficulties in our times with integrating the two philosophical positions, I understand as due to us being impressed by formal natural science and its results for our life. We feel obliged to follow a systematic approach as close as possible to the principles of mechanical natural science. If we cannot base our work on experiments, on universal laws and pure concepts, we try to stay uncommitted in research, or we find mechanisms like language or habitus, which work by themselves, or we incorporate categories as constituting devices. To be consistent and avoid confounding contradictions as required by formal laws of natural science we try to purify concepts, to make them homogeneous.
But the very important reasons for us to go concrete are still there. Another approach to understanding how acting under concrete circumstances develops ourselves and the social activities around us is the investigation of the problem of formal rules. To set up formal rules we must predetermine the symbols and their values to be used with the given logical operations. This means they constitute a closed system, where all results are tautologies, given by their premises. But coherence in praxis is only partly known, and the nature of the way the aspects play together must be investigated. Therefore, Jean Lave (1988) and Scribner (1997) could demonstrate that people don’t use formal procedures when they do math, they use available resources, whereby they learn. Further, Suchman (1987) and Axel (2002) demonstrated how results of the formal programs of digital information technology were handled exploratively by operators, based on their previous experience and particular aspects of the present activity. A consequence of these findings is that the same concrete contradictory activity of, for example, designing a house is handled differently by different persons in different locations. We could argue that since the activity varies with social locations, the contradictory activity is social. But thereby we are reinstating divisions between what is social and subjective and are overlooking, for example, the explorative activity of human beings. We must maintain that the process is subjective and social.
To sum up, the direction found for our investigation of why we must explain stability through development: we must maintain a notion of the importance of the concrete. Human beings act on local contradictory conditions, their acts are based on what the situations mean to them, on judgments. They don’t follow rules formally, the concrete contradictory basis of their acts forces them to vary their acts, opening up for development. This means that in order to understand how human beings act, how they regularly shape their environment under specific social conditions, we must take our point of departure in the four confusing aspects of human life—concreteness, contradictions, development, and subjectivity— that handle them.
Praxis, common cause, contradictions, and subjective aspects of praxis
To specify how these aspects move together, we shall develop a psychological theory of praxis. Some central concepts in the following text are developed in the tradition of the praxis theory of critical psychology and have been developed by the empirical material.
Praxis
Human beings are social, therefore we cannot base a theory of human beings on their acts, nor on their practices or specific activities. We must base our theory on praxis: how human beings socially sustain their lives, organizing them around the production and consumption of things made for and producing specific needs. Thereby human beings develop their nature, their conditions, and themselves in the process, as Marx stated in his material view of history, historical materialism. In evolution praxis developed with human beings, it was there before each of us, and will be there after each of us, so long as human beings exist.
Thus, praxis is constituted by the co-operation of human beings. This means that they must distribute materials for production and redistribute the result for consumption. Therefore praxis, as Aristotle stated many years ago, involves economy, that is, the distribution of resources; and politics, that is, the principles for distribution, and ethics.
Common cause
But praxis isn’t abstract production, distribution, economy, and politics where we can understand each separately. Praxis is about concrete, specific things, and we participate in and contribute to them as our common cause. In our time, a common cause may be a workshop, a corporation, a building project, a business company, a family, children playing, a school, a research institution, a cultural or a religious institution, the European Central Bank, and so forth. We are not only moving around in a social praxis, only choosing to participate in common causes that are worth our while. We are dependent on common causes, supporting all aspects of our lives through them; we cannot help being involved in them, and the common causes are dependent on human beings participating in them. Even though praxis and its current common causes are there before our allotted time in the world, we are constantly starting, inviting to, playing in, working in, messing around in, maintaining, distributing resources in, developing, adapting, entering, leaving, discontinuing, forcing into, excluding from, and so forth, common causes.
Even though praxis is about specific common causes for sustaining human lives, they do not come as separate entities. They come in concrete bundles. A building, for example, may have a particular purpose, for example, a community center, but it must provide for a bundle of activities and needs therein, halls to connect activities, rest rooms, a kitchen, assembly rooms, maybe a place where the priest can take a nap, administration, and so forth. Likewise, when we build a building, we must also provide, for example, food for the participants. For production as well as consumption, resources must be distributed and activities prioritized in and between common causes. Further, the nature of things we can provide for depends on how praxis is otherwise arranged, for example, the way a kitchen can be set up depends on what is generally available and done. Generally stated, what a cause is about unfolds according to the activities in other common causes. All these aspects—prioritizing and distributing, the fact that the causes come in bundles and that they are mediated by other common causes—implies that they cannot be isolated from other ones; the causes can only be identified through their concrete mediations.
Further, our way of participating depends on what we have done and where we have been. Our way of participating becomes a perspective on the common cause based on our general experience and the rest of our life. Our way of participating thereby depends on how we prioritize it in our life and how important we see it in social praxis. In the common causes, we are granted or stripped of privileges, according to our way of functioning, to our prescriptive rights, gained in one way or other. Therefore, we are engaged in common causes, positively or negatively and each of us prioritizes them differently.
But the pattern of acknowledged privileges and prescriptive rights can come so much under pressure that it becomes important for some to maintain the status quo by more or less strict measures. On the other hand, the more common causes in a bundle, the more intricate their organizations, the more we depend on development, the less it is possible to maintain previous privileges and prescriptive rights, and the more our common dependency on our causes dominates the way they are handled. This opens a possibility for democracy in the sense of each having the possibility to participate in the disposal over more or less comprehensive common conditions.
Contradiction
The concreteness of common causes means that they cannot be set up as isolated abstract models that are to be followed strictly (Axel, 2002). They always contain many participants’ perspectives, many coherent causes, which must be handled concretely. Contradictions are a consequence hereof. A contradiction is constituted by incompatible moments in the concrete common cause that all the same are dependent on each other (Ollmann, 2015). We need the concept of common cause to understand why the incompatible moments are dependent on each other (Axel & Højholt, 2019). In praxis, making things that won’t go together go together maintains the contradiction, but in developing forms that can be handled practically. For example, a common cause in the design of a house is to maintain a livable climate inside—this is mainly achieved with walls. To design a window is in contradiction to designing walls: a window is there so that the inside is not left in the dark, and so that we can see through it, but it does not protect as well from climate variations as walls do. The aspects of the contradiction are dependent on each other, for example, designing a window means deciding the size of the window and the nature of the glass in relation to the size of the climate variations outside, as well as the need for light and the need to see through the window to make the inside livable.
When Ollmann (2015) states that contradictions are incompatible moments in praxis, on the one hand he sees contradictions as a phenomenon in praxis, on the other, he connects them to Hegel’s notion of determinate negations. With the notion of determinate negation, which isn’t formal logic (Baskhar, 2001), but includes principles of law in a dialectical sense, we focus on incompatible elements that are interdependent, as in the exploration of the contradiction of the window. But identifying a determinate negation contains an arbitrary element. How do we identify it, if not with logic? It is the common cause that makes us see the contradictions, for example, livable climate inside the house which makes us see the need for striving to keep climate changes outside and to let in light and sometimes fresh air through the window. We come to focus on how our need for specific moments in praxis that are ensuring a livable climate forces us to encompass stable climate and light, which contradict each other in the cause, and we have to struggle to have both things at the same time, which makes us modify what we are doing with them in order to co-ordinate them. Instead of sticking to our intended activity and understanding it isolated from the rest of the common cause, the impediment in the contradiction makes us explore how to establish a livable climate inside. This opens our eyes to the concreteness of the situation and the nature of things.
In positivism, it is a requirement that a scientific identification of human activity must be consistent and precise. Thereby each activity is described as consisting of several interacting factors, each with a supposedly immutable essence, independent of its context. Thus, it is hoped that it will help us decide whether the activity is performed correctly or not. But, as a result, we come to overlook relevant aspects in praxis. Therefore, we must acknowledge that praxis is concrete and take as a point of departure the fact that human praxis is constantly varied because of the concrete contradictory conditions. The task for a systematic scientific identification is to openly understand the contradictory purposes in the common cause and how they are shaped as they are due to the social conditions. We may judge whether the performance is better or worse, but we cannot argue that it is right or wrong.
Additionally, contradictions open up for understanding the varied common cause as a basis for development. We vary the design of the livable climate inside by handling the contradiction between windows and walls according to what is available to us, thereby we try to achieve dependability or stability. At the same time, handling the contradiction opens up for a better understanding of the nature of things involved, thus paving the way for developing windows. Further, this specific design puts developing pressure on specific production techniques, also by abandoning other ones.
Lastly, contradictions specify concretely the political aspects of praxis. Prioritizing in a construction project, for instance between closed spaces walled in and open transparent spaces with large windows, is a political statement of what should be seen, for example, the clerk’s office, and what shouldn’t, for example, the director’s office.
Subjective aspects
What kind of understanding have we reached? A social one like Schatzki’s (2002) teleoaffective structures with combinations of motoric actions regulated by the meaning of doings and sayings and where norms, emotions, and values are located not in the person but in the practice? We miss important aspects of praxis by maintaining this. Several aspects of the problem presented force us to include the psychological aspects of a person’s subjective relation to the common cause as a crucial aspect. We could speculate whether a modern window with a steel frame and laminated glass could happen as a natural process or emerge (by chance?) in teleoaffective structures (cf. Havemann, 1966, 8. Lecture 6/12/1963). Maintaining this, we would overlook the intentional aspect of a person’s particular developing contribution to a contradictory social process, the subjective aspects of an individual changing the conditions of their life, which is their agency. We could believe that the principles of distribution were inherent in the teleoaffective structures. In that case, we would overlook the particular struggle about the contradictory common cause based on personal perspectives on the availability of resources and on a judgment about whether we have the cause sufficiently at our common disposal, another aspect of subjective agency (Schraube, 2014; Schraube & Osterkamp, 2013). Lastly, we could believe that the teleoaffective structure made us experience emotions fit for the event. But emotions are personal and social, tied up with our positions in our causes and the way we are able to participate based on previous experiences (Osterkamp, 1991). We need a psychological perspective to focus on what is meaningful to us in praxis, relevant for us in it, where meaning is constituted by the reflexive relation between the person and their conditions for handling and developing the social praxis (Axel, 2009; Dreier, 2008).
We have inherited the idea from dialectical understandings that we cannot set up a model for development. A common cause is concrete, particular, and context dependent; this determines the way its exploration should be performed. We must demonstrate how praxis works and develops. Demonstration is normally understood as practical thinking. Does this mean that we can only understand praxis with practical thinking? What has happened to the theoretical thinking? Theoretical thinking is systematical, disciplined, and open generalization on mediations in contradictory praxis available to a person. Practical thinking contains theories based on practical experience (cf. Axel & Højholt, 2019). With Dewey (1929/1958) we can state that theoretical thinking about praxis is a practical process. Accordingly, in the empirical section it will be argued that theory is modified in or dissolves into praxis.
The subjective aspects of the approach make us see that in the concrete contradictory common cause there is a constant possibility for conflicts. There are many possible directions opened up by the contradictions, the participants from their perspective may overlook some aspects of the contradictions—that is, the contradictions can be distributed among the participants—and how the common cause should be developed can lead to co-ordinations, discussions, and conflicts depending on how they are handled. Conflictual co-operation (Axel, 2011) is thus a phenomenon, where participants strive to do something together and may end up in struggles and divisions about the common cause, and may be torn apart.
Procedure
It is commonly understood that we set goals and that to attain them we establish means, which consist of ways of doing things according to rules; the more precise the rule, the better we avoid errors. However, as argued several times, human activity is varied according to particular contradictory causes, to follow rules, we must vary them in our activity (Axel, 2002). We must therefore be able to grasp the way we proceed, do things, handle causes, relate to each other, and so forth, in a way other than strictly following rules. As a start, we shall use the term procedure to indicate a way to co-ordinate the use and distribution of resources and productive activity in the common cause. The procedure may be repeatedly performed and there may be conditions that favor guidelines to be set up. They offer guidance for arranging practice in more or less particular ways. All the same, the procedure is mediated in the concrete contradictory conditions of the common cause, is varied to accommodate for these, and participants with different perspectives and kinds of intervention must negotiate their way of doing things in co-ordination. Thus, the procedure may contain a contradiction between its form, that is, guidance, and content, what it is about, and how it must be arranged in particular, due to the content. This contradiction makes the procedure reflexive. It makes us see that when we proceed as we commonly do, we arrange and produce at the same time. This implies that we arrange procedures while they are going on. Also, you can establish a procedure to arrange procedures, this means that its product is a future arrangement of other procedures, and still, in the future arrangement you must arrange and produce, while you are going on.
To sum up our exploration of how we must explain stability through development: we have found that contradictions exist in common causes because we must consider the many needs and functions in them, and the circumstance that they must be handled subjectively by participants needing to co-ordinate their perspectives and interventions with other participants. The need for variation in their doings opens up for development.
The empirical material
We can now turn to the empirical material to investigate what the presented concepts developed from the observations make us see. What is the relation between regularity and development in a design project?
The design project for a community center as a common cause was initiated by the parish council of the church, constituted by elected members of the congregation. They had to apply to the diocese for financial support for constructing the center and in 2008 they were allowed a sum of money with strict orders not to exceed the amount. The center was to be located in the vicinity of the church and graveyard.
Of the professional participants in the project, the following are relevant for the presentation.
To build a house has become an undertaking for professionals. Therefore, at the time of the project, it was becoming common for clients to hire a client consultant. The function of this professional was to advise the client on what to decide when negotiating with the designing professionals during design and construction.
The architectural shop that allowed me into their work functioned as a general consultant. They were responsible for organizing the project, and, relevant to the investigation being presented, an engineering firm and a landscape architect were hired. An architect from the shop headed the meetings that are part of this presentation.
The design work took place in the different firms of which the professionals were a part, and regular communication between workplaces took place. The co-ordination of the work was confirmed at meetings. At project meetings, only relevant professionals participated. At client meetings, the client, the client consultant, and relevant professionals participated. The client meetings marked the stages in the design procedure. Thereby, the meetings underscored the intended structure of the project. We shall discuss what happened around a meeting marking the transition between the phase of the building program, which the shop described as the phase where the functions and outline of the design were to be decided, and the framework phase, which the shop described as the phase where the elements of the design are decided.
I observed meetings in the project for its duration of 2 years. The following organized presentation is based on some of the extensive observation notes and related interviews, photos, and drawings from this work. In the next section I shall give a chronological account of the chosen material, and after that, I shall unfold and discuss the different aspects of problems in the presented material. As a consequence of the dialectical approach, both sections are formed by an understanding based on the material that appeared before, but also developed during the writing. Therefore, the presentation is a contradictory unit between material and understanding.
During some meetings, discussions arose around the landscape architect’s struggle to make room for her work in her co-operation with other professionals in the building project. When the opportunity arose in the midst of my other obligations, I undertook some interviews while this development of the project went on. At the time, I hardly understood what went on, and only afterwards, with concepts modified and developed in the process, have I been able to sort out an understanding of what happened. This is outlined in the following.
Designing the square in front of the community center
At a design meeting, I witnessed how the architect, engineer, and landscape architect discussed their design suggestions to be presented at a following client meeting. The landscape architect made the engineer accept a specific levelling of the terrain so that the square in front of it did not slope downwards to the building. He accepted that the money allotted could cover the suggested change. They accepted each other’s designs.
The clients met before they met with the professionals, meticulously discussing all the details of the project important to them. About the square, they noted that the granite used matched the granite in the graveyard, and they did not discuss the cost implications of her design.
In between the design and client meetings, the landscape architect had negotiated changes in the budget with the architect as general consultant.
At the client meeting marking the transition from the building program to the framework phase, the landscape architect presented her design for the square in words that were formed along the lines of the client’s program for the architecture competition. The client accepted her design. But the client consultant had run through the suggestions for change in the budget submitted at the meeting, and claimed he did not accept the budgetary changes: they should change the proposal, its levelling, and use of materials, so that it matched the money allotted for the square. After the client meeting, the client consultant talked with the client, made them choose between the landscape architect’s design and the planned zinc roof for the center. They wrote a letter to the landscape architect stating that they preferred the zinc roof and that she should change the square because they prioritized the building, since the terrain around the house could always be modified.
A cheaper design with the suggested levelling of the square, but with interlocking concrete z-pavers, was accepted at ensuing meetings. However, the economic crisis that followed made a modification of the expensive solution possible, which the client decided to adopt during construction.
Discussion of the empirical material
The presented chronology is organized by selecting and abstracting aspects of the comprehensive material in order to create a simplified account of events. It appears as a disruption, a breakdown in the transition of the formal procedure from building program to the framework phase. It is important to bring to light how the concrete contradictory relationships form the design process in other ways than the formal divisions. Thereby, we don’t find an inexplicable disruption, but an account of contradictory events in the co-ordination of the design procedure which contains development or a possibility for a reconciliation of the contradictions.
A procedure has been identified as a sometimes-repeated way to co-ordinate the use and distribution of resources and productive activity in a contradictory common cause. The material has revealed the following two contradictions affecting the progress of the design procedure in ways other than the formal division.
A first contradiction in the design procedure is one between the content of the common cause—the resulting house—and the form of the procedure—the way it was organized. To design the house and its terrain can be chronologically arranged and formed in many ways, the content and form are incompatible in the sense that both influence the other. One important aspect in this reciprocality is the significance of the thing to be designed. A thing is not designed from totality to detail, but from the most significant, difficult, or decisive aspect to the lesser ones. In my interviews with the landscape architect around the events accounted for, it became clear that the participants’ estimation of the significance of the designed aspect was important for the design as well as for its procedure. In an indirect comment to the client’s letter, the landscape architect stated that terrain must be taken seriously since everybody sees the outside, and not everybody sees the inside. However, she acknowledged that the client can dictate what they want.
In another interview, the landscape architect explained how she set up her work. She described how her design must be co-ordinated with the client’s competition program and the ideas of the architects who designed the building. She used border stones on the pathway from the church to the open street, passing by the entrance of the community center, and she used elongated border stones to invite people into the center across the square in front of it. Thus, stating the significance of the terrain and the need to co-ordinate her design with the sketches by other participants, she negotiated with the general consultant to arrange her participation in the building program of the project, which is at an earlier stage than what is common for landscape architects.
The concrete content of the design—the specific arrangements of border stones on the square—would modify the progress of the design process since the landscape architect argued she needed to get up front in the design process to make something meaningful. The procedure is not a guide to be followed strictly. In it we have seen a contradiction between form, its progress, and its content, the common cause. The procedure develops according to the development of the content, and the landscape architect worked to make room for it. I later understood that this agenda was actually an instance of a general attempt among landscape architects to get a more adequate position early in design projects.
A second contradiction affecting the design procedure is one found in the way resources should be distributed. In our time, money of the market economy provides a quantitative principle for distributing resources in a building project. The budget is an instrument for this. In order to move her work up front, the landscape architect also had to provide resources for her design by distributing values in the budget in new ways. This would affect what others could do. She negotiated with the general contractor. She had to take care in two aspects. First, with the allotted fee, she had to rethink when she designed what. She told me that in the building program she would also have to do work that was supposed to be performed in the frame phase, in order to save time and money to make her fee cover her work. Second, she had to modify the budget in relation to resources used for different aspects of the project. At the client meeting recounted above, and in interviews, she and the architect gave the following reasons for their alternative distribution of values in the budget. The landscape architect argued for a higher priority for the design of the terrain around the center. This argument allowed her to take some money from the building. Further, she proceeded contextually by taking locally changing prices into consideration. She described to me how she estimated the expenses for her design by calling local contractors who were able to carry out the work. She argued that this procedure ensured that the estimates were up to date and realistic, set by people who knew how to carry them out. At the client meeting, the architect argued for the redistribution by pointing out that, in general, prices were actually falling, and time had passed in the project, which decreased the risks involved.
We have seen that the client consultant did not accept the architect’s and the landscape architect’s design based on a redistribution of the project. In an interview, he explained this to me. From what he said, I understood he organized his procedure according to formal theories. We make a theory formal when we understand it as an entity in itself, when we use it irrespective of the content of praxis. The formality is underlined when we turn the theory into principles for a procedure, which we expect to be followed strictly without taking the context into consideration and which we expect will make the problems disappear. The anticipated result of the budget procedure was the final cost of the house. The client consultant set the formal budget in advance and during the design process of the budget procedure tried to embrace many possible outcomes in its slots. For example, with investigations, he asserted in advance that archaeologists had no interest in the site, that there was no pollution of the ground adding to expenses. To design his budget procedure, he also used resources derived by the formal approach: he used price books, set the cost of designing the grounds around the house as a percentage of the whole sum for the construction based on previous budget experience. He thus covered all outcomes he could foresee, and followed abstract directions from formal budget theory for price setting. He and I agreed that there is no ordinary project. But we see that with his procedure, he “normalized” the project, thereby he believed it was more probable that everybody could follow the set pattern of the budget prices strictly. Further, the client consultant based his planning on the estimation that the economy was the most significant aspect of the project.
We have seen that the landscape architect, in contrast to the client consultant, proceeded contextually and did not prioritize economy as the most significant aspect of the project. She knew that, officially, professionals were supposed to use price books. They are published every year. But prices change faster than that; oil prices, for example, may go up and down much faster. Consequently, she believed the price books were not very useful, so she bought them every second year. Asking possible contractors, she would get one estimate which was too high, another too low, moving along in the construction process prices would change for each estimate, so one could not be held accountable for each estimate, but only for the total price, and this one could ensure by adjusting the design along the way during design and construction programs. She, as well as the architect, claimed that it is not right to move money from slot to slot in the budget. They saw the exercise as very unrealistic. You must give the money back to be redistributed according to a professional judgment of what needs to be done in the whole project. To her I summarize what the architect had said to me: the budget is a fiction.
The landscape architect wanted to control the budget along the way, and even though the client consultant hoped to set up a budget that participants could follow strictly, he had to pro-actively make the client stop deliberating possibilities, make the landscape architect stop using more money than planned, and so forth. The stability of the direction of the budget was constantly threatened—in order to uphold it, the client consultant had to pro-actively impose order by making participants work in specific ways. He was working within a contradiction between the formal ideal of strictly following the budget and the necessity of taking care of specifics in the concrete common cause.
On the other hand, even though the landscape architect renounced the formal aspects of the budget theory and worked on the basis of experience, her approach was not inconsistent, but thoroughly thought out and systematic. It was not messy and based on volatile insights, as everyday practice not based on formal theories is commonly supposed to be. She had to argue for a proposal that cost more than was set aside for her work. She had to make changes in the project, the design and construction of other participants, and she took actual changes into account based on relatively immediate experience. The landscape architect was maneuvering in the constantly changing practice of the design project and changing it. She had to invoke ways of doing things which did force changes, and her approach threatened to destroy the execution of the budget, since it was not supposed to change.
Concerning their relation to the budget, it didn’t simply produce coherence by meaning different things for participants like a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989). The meaning of the budget for the participants differed in their negotiations; they did not agree about whether they should proceed more contextually or according to formal guidelines. Their disagreement was about the priority of the budget, and about the contradiction in distributing resources in the project, which have only been allotted a specific amount of money. On the one hand, each aspect of the design required certain resources, on the other, since there was only a certain amount of resources available, the distribution could not simply comply with the requirements, but had to set up a pattern of distribution according to how participants could agree on the significance of the things involved in the design. We see that the participants shared the obligation to respect the specific amount of money and set up a pattern of distribution. They prioritized different aspects of the contradiction, and they had to struggle with each other in order to find a way to proceed. This means that the contradiction became distributed between the participants with different priorities of its moments. We have seen an example of conflictual co-operation around the design of a new community center. In this case, there was a conflict about how the participants should prioritize in the contradiction. How the conflict was reconciled would in any case modify the progress of the procedure, reorganizing what is the building program and what is the frame phase. Here we find a trace of development and, in any way, a possibility for development.
But there was a conflict, and it could have been avoided. However they handled the conflict and whatever made them handle the conflict in this way, we see that it was not a question of one participant making the other do what the first wanted. It was a question of running the design project properly, of ensuring a good result, a common one. We found a struggle among participants to have the common cause at their common disposal. It is a matter of action potence, phronesis, or agency. We reason, make priorities, distribute resources, take different considerations into account in the ethics, economy, and politics of practice.
Another aspect of personal agency is its tentative character. We have seen that the participants acted in a concrete contradictory common cause, where they tentatively explored the possibilities of contradictions involved. Another reason for the tentative character is that we don’t know everything, nor everything relevant to the common cause. Changes in common causes around the design project studied were mediated in it, and led to surprising results. In the present case, it appeared as if the landscape architect’s first proposal was wasted energy, since it was rejected. But even though the negotiations made at the client meeting did not turn out immediately with a positive result, the tables turned in strange ways. Paradoxically, the market crisis made the house cheaper than expected, thus allowing for more money for the squares, and thereby opening the possibility of constructing the landscape architect’s first proposal. This is because her proposal, as she explained it to the clients, made good sense, even though it was rejected. Thus, we have seen how the design process, due to contradictions and conflicts, unfolded in ways not expected, and how what happened all the same was with good reason. We commonly believe that we can act in a strict way to get the results we are striving for. But the case also demonstrates that a well-thought-out proposal is not guaranteed fulfillment; it depends on the conditions on which it is planned and the mediation of other common causes, which we do not control. The cunning of reason plays its part in what we do, however well we have planned it.
Thus, the actual procedure in the common cause is managed with tentative agency, there is a constant struggle to establish stability in an apparently unruly process. The client consultant tries to arrange things to be followed strictly, but is constantly forced to modify them. The landscape architect making changes in changing practice all the same needs to be dependable, to establish stable agreements. Both thereby demonstrate that we must not only modify praxis in order to make it work, we must also modify our understanding, the theories that make us understand what goes on. For both professionals, the incentive to modify theory comes from the inherent contradictions. Their conflicting approaches come out of the same contradiction of stability and modification. One prioritizes formal stability, the other contextual modifiability. The contradiction forces them to reevaluate the understanding they act upon, and this opens the possibility of developing it and its principles, whether the understanding is a budget theory or a concrete procedure.
We have arrived at the question of how far theory holds in other practices. We can begin to answer this problem by discussing the function of theory in different practices. We could argue that the theoretical principles and tight structure are not necessary in small construction projects such as the project for the community center. In such projects, estimates based on experience will normally do. So, the argument could continue, the budget theory holds, and the fact that it was challenged by one participant and pre-adapted to specific conditions by another is simply due to the openness of the small construction project. Now, it could be argued that in large construction projects so many small details must be co-ordinated that you need a tight budget tightly executed in order to control costs. But the examples of large construction projects like that for the Public Service Danish Radio and Television Corporation in Copenhagen and The Turning Torso in Malmö show us that budget must follow what comes up in practice: the participants had to find more money because the construction of the houses had to be changed in the middle of the project (Flyvbjerg, 2003; Georg & Tryggestad, 2009). It could be argued that theories are different according to what they are theories about, some are about human beings, others about nature and objects, and some hold, others don’t, depending on their content. Statics for construction could be a case of a theory that holds. Again, an engineer in the project told me about a bridge in Denmark being designed with mathematical formulas and tested in a wind tunnel. In spite of the formulas and procedures used, the finished bridge would swing too much in the wind, and the designers had to put plates of metal on the span of the bridge to stop the swinging. We impose order with theories based on what is possible in practice, and sooner or later we must modify theory in order to make it work. We see that “development is a necessary moment in the identification of sustainability” (Holzkamp, 1983, p. 62).
Conclusion
This presentation has been a contradictory unit between empirical material and understanding. We can sum up the findings by outlining the distance we have travelled.
We have moved from rational project management to common causes in praxis, from linear management on abstract principles to many-sided management on contradictory principles, from imposing leadership principles to conflictual co-operation in common causes, from natural development with imposed directives and plans to regulated development, from fixed practice to continuous arrangement of praxis with flexible procedures, from fixed theories to dissolving theories.
Theory dissolves in praxis because it is under attack from the concrete. This could explain why professionals let go of or forget their theoretical allegiances from their schooling. They work with dissolved theories in their practice. Since their practice is organized according to several understandings, and since these are as contradictory as the understandings of the client consultants and the landscape architect, it is necessary to find ethical and political common understandings to make things work, instead of sticking to theoretical systems.
But the difficulty of making theoretical systems hold is not a reason to give up on the obligation to find comprehensive systems. It is a reason to understand this task as a process. This leads us to the second implication of the suggestion that theory is dissolved in praxis. It is commonly said that theory ensures order in practice. But when theory must be modified in practice for political reasons, how can we make practice hold with theory? It is the way we arrange and rearrange practice with its political reason that makes practice hold. This is a common and mutual project that implies the good life for us. But to find a comprehensive arrangement of a good life for us requires comprehensive theoretical systems that are as supple as practice. This is a reason for setting up a contextual notion of procedure, which changes with its focus of analysis. Concepts and theories are as stable as contradictory praxis.
In relation to the presentation here, the concept of conflictual co-operation developed by my grabbling in the brushwood of everyday praxis, was put in nice contradictory order for the sake of this presentation. To understand the common in the contradictory design project, the concept of common cause had to be further developed, and since the organization of the procedure was modified and developed in the professionals’ practice, it became important to argue that theories are modified in praxis. The stability of praxis said to be regulated by formal theories is not a result of formal theories, but produced by the content of concrete contradictory praxis and the falsification of the rules in the attempt to follow their intent.
The notion of bundles of contradictory common causes in praxis opens up the possibility of seeing how the big picture—in this presentation, the economic discussion of how to distribute resources in capitalistic societies—can be mediated in the activity of the common cause. It has been argued that the bundles of contradictory common causes in praxis around the particular common cause investigated lock, freeze, or stabilize the contradictions in it in specific priorities. This opens up the question of what are the conditions for a comprehensive meltdown or development of the fundamental social issues.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was funded by RealDania through CliByg at Copenhagen Business School.
