Abstract

In advancing the intellectual debate in gender equity and diversity in the construction industry, feminist institutionalism is being used as a new lens to understand the failure of formal policies to shift the intransigent gender imbalance. Feminist institutionalism allows new insights into how hidden informal organisational rules, practices and narratives operate in conjunction with formal rules in achieving gender diversity and equity. However, the adoption of feminist institutionalism as a conceptual framework raises new methodological questions. While formal rules are created, communicated and enforced through official and highly visible channels, informal rules, norms and procedures are created, communicated, and enforced outside officially sanctioned channels and are often 'hidden' from view. The power of ethnographic methods to reveal such 'under-the-surface' institutions is well established in the social and political sciences but not in construction. This paper makes a methodological contribution in response to the practical constraints of doing ethnography in the construction industry, by describing the merits of rapid ethnography within the context of feminist institutionalism. It concludes that while rapid ethnography has its limitations, it has significant potential as an unexplored methodology to tackle the persistent problem of gender equality in the construction industry and other social issues in construction management research.