Hold-Ups and Failures in Negotiated Order: Unearthing the Nuances of Rework Causation in Construction

Despite the significant amount of research undertaken to determine the causes of rework, construction organizations still struggle to mitigate its occurrence. This paper presents research from an ongoing longitudinal study using a sense-making lens to examine rework causation in a transport megaproject. It was observed that rework often emerges as a consequence of hold-ups, which are failures in negotiated order stemming from misunderstandings, misinterpretations, role ambiguity, and breakdowns in communications and interactions between project participants. Rather than adopting a reductionist view of rework causation that focuses on the use of prefixes such as poor, limited, inadequate, and lack of, which abounds in the construction and engineering management literature, this research unearths the nuances associated with errors and rework, enabling a richer understanding of the context within which it manifests in projects. The upshot is that a new theoretical framing is presented to understand better the why and how of rework causation in construction.