Choreographing Subcontracting: Rhythm, Coordination, Improvisation and Labour on Construction Projects

In a context of pervasive financialization and a global proliferation of interest-bearing capital, construction plays an increasingly important role in transforming liquid finance into fixed capital. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork on four construction projects of large new buildings in the North East of England, in this article I demonstrate the vital role the work of construction managers plays in these processes. Utilizing dance as an analytical lens, I show how managers are continuously engaged in choreography, orchestrating rhythm, and improvisation – spatio-temporal dynamics that enable the management of risk and precarity and eventually the successful completion of buildings. Building on scholarship that re-centres labour and seeks to better conceptualize the experiences of contemporary work, I suggest dance offers fruitful conceptual metaphors to illuminate a range of differing but interrelated spatio-temporal workplace dynamics, created, shaped and orchestrated through worker actions and relations of labour. Beyond the recognition of precarity as a structural labour condition, the lens of dance can capture the contingent, unfolding and live nature of precarity and risk as spatio-temporal processes that characterize everyday life at work.