Good enough quality: Multiple quality cultures in a Swedish region

Despite decades of efforts, civil engineering is still haunted by defects and impaired quality. The Swedish public investment in infrastructure is impressive and counted in billions of euros these years. Yet the investment costs and the quality of the realized infrastructure is controversial. This paper aims at analyzing the determinants of quality in civil engineering in Sweden, unravelling the multiple interacting factors that produce the quality. The actors that populate this production are despite their efforts unable to deliver an excellent quality, but merely quality on an acceptable level. The theoretical lens adopted is that of quality culture, inspired by Geertz. A central notion is “quality praxis” which juxtapose engineering practices with organization, management, digital technologies, standards with formal and informal norms. Organizational culture can occur as multiple in complex constellations. The empirical material consists of 45 interviews, documents and three observations, one of a design meeting, the other of a site and the third of a final quality audit. A selection of two major quality culture devices is done. One is the concept of contracting adopted by the client, the Swedish Transport Agency. The other is the formal quality management system adopted by the client, consultants and contractors. It is then analysed how these devices unify and separate characteristic quality cultures. The client´s contracting approach is assigned several different meanings in creating several quality cultures. The formal quality management system is unable to bridge a major decalage, the one between project and headquarters. The system is the assigned meaning to produce another set of quality cultures. The constellations of quality cultures in civil engineering in Sweden are thus in internal contradiction and continual unrest. The resulting antagonistic dynamics resembles that of an orchestra of dissonances.