Opening up risk management through goffman's dramaturgical approach

Risk management is a longstanding topic of interest in the field of construction management research. Previous scholarship tended to focus on the development and application of various quantitative tools to analyse risk and identify appropriate risk mitigating strategies. The underlying assumption in prevailing scholarship on risk management in construction is that risk is some thing that needs to be controlled and eradicated. Far less attention is paid to examining risk management as a qualitatively dynamic process of what people do in everyday organization practices. . In this paper, we draw on the work of Erving Goffman and his dramaturgical analytical approach as one way to unlock the analysis of risk management as a form of social interaction. We argue that a Goffman-inspired dramaturgical analytical approach offers us the possibility of examining actions and performance rooted in everyday organisational routines. The dramaturgical approach can help us understand why an individual might 'act' or engage in impression management techniques to manipulate others, and establish interaction boundaries using the 'front-stage' and 'back-stage' metaphors to view the workplace as a stage where a satisfactory work performance is judged not by abstractions of performance measures (e.g. key performance indicators and targets) but by the performance of work through text, words, and gestures. Thus, we look towards organisational routines as the unit of analysis in examining the role of the back stage and front stage in dynamically staging notions of risk and how impression management techniques are played out in doing risk and risk management in construction. We conclude with implications of adopting a Goffman-inspired view to question risk and risk management in construction.