A 2015 survey of LGBT construction professionals in the UK carried out by the Architects’ Journal revealed that homophobia has remained at a high level when compared with other professions.1 It revealed the relative contrast between the office workplace, where professionals felt increasingly comfortable about their sexual orientation, and the construction site, where the idea of openness about sexual identity was met with widespread reluctance. The construction site is an exciting and dynamic place, but for LGBT professionals, perceptions and experiences are less than positive and are having a direct impact on professional life.
The Performance of Professionalism
This theoretical analysis of the site visit aims to inform practical efforts such as diversity awareness in architectural education and workplace policy and mentoring, referencing existing anthropological research into masculinity, gender and sexuality in construction.2 3 It focuses on the challenges to LGBT professionals posed by the heteronormative masculine identities that dominate the social space of the building site with its culture of risk-taking, hard work, and long hours.4 The analysis considers the performative nature of the site visit in the light of Erving Goffman’s work on social interaction, and the embodied nature of professional values, developed from Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice.5 6
Professionalism = Trust
Integrity and honesty govern professional conduct and it has been argued that these values and the trust gained through outward appearances and manners reflect ‘socially accepted standards of repute and respectability’.7 8
Professional knowledge reflects these ethics because the exercising of principles and ideas in practice requires trust in the practitioner and in the decisions made in the activity of practising.9 This professional knowledge is less a ‘know-how’ type of expertise and more an abstracted resource that, when applied in practice, requires trust and ethical judgment in order to be credible. Therefore being a virtuous professional involves practising with transparency and as a singular trustworthy individual rather than an agent of others: personal and professional integrity become one and the same through the presentation of character. The demonstration of these professional virtues is embodied in practice traditions that are intentionally transparent with professional values grounded in personal probity.10
Embodied Trust
LGBT architects are particularly challenged by this character definition of the professional: working spheres overlap personal lives through the long hours culture and close-knit social activities, and a general lack of diversity awareness and training.11 There is pressure to connect work and private life, and personal values of openness and integrity with professional capacities, in order to build trust between colleagues and foster an environment of mutual cooperation.
For an LGBT person, coming out is not a one-time event but continuous process of declaring sexual orientation in social and professional interactions. Being questioned about family or social life, or listening to homophobic banter, forces an active decision about whether to disclose sexual orientation. In these situations, acting with integrity and honesty means having to challenge such heteronormative assumptions and, in so doing, to ‘come out’.12 This is an issue when the continuous brokering of new social relationships is intrinsic to work, such as dealing with contractors and doing site visits.
Bourdieu’s theory of practice offers a useful means to examine practitioner activities because it connects the social dimension of practising with individual dispositions and embodied practices.13 In his theory, ‘habitus’ describes values and habitual ways of doing things, and how abstract or theoretical knowledge relates to the everyday activities of the discipline.
For the architect, this knowledge is less about practical skills than about ways of being a professional, such as bringing to bear conceptual frameworks or reflective thinking. Nevertheless, these practices have an embodied dimension through drawing, writing, and communicating, and holding values of creativity, public service and common good.14 So professional habitus is as much about doing things in particular ways as it is about ways of being. Within Bourdieu’s model, acquiring and displaying habitus is a way of distinguishing oneself from others as well as allowing oneself to identify with a distinct group – in this case, a profession. This professional field confers values and its own cultural capital and is carried by the architect’s habitus into the construction site where it confronts competing fields and practices.
Building Site = Continuous Construction
In contrast with this professional field is the construction site: a place of physical and ‘know-how’ capital generated through a distinct habitus of construction work. However, the fragmented labour relations, difficult and messy work, contractual relationships and irregular working patterns of the site suggest that this capital does not exist in a unified or organised state as it might in a factory or other workplace. Rather, the acquiring of capital on site goes on through a distinctive display of established masculine cultures of site talk and physical posturing. Darren Thiel’s participant observation research described the relationships, working patterns and organisation of builders on a London building site and revealed that trust existed between close colleagues only and, despite a pub culture, friendly (sexist) banter and the sharing of working class identity did not make up part of a more general site habitus.15 Although there were complex ethnic and cultural differences, the common capital was of masculine identities of entitlement and embodied physical strength that, in the constantly changing environment of the site, presented repeated opportunities for homophobia and sexism.
Site of Performance
Any professional visiting a building site negotiates a three-fold dynamic: the changing cast of characters and spaces; a field of play challenging their professional habitus; and site values grounded in masculine heteronormative actions and responses. For the LGBT professional, the matter of identity is an additional dimension. The process of being ‘out’ on site is not just a continuous interpersonal process but one bound up with professional expectations and the impact of the place as a dynamic and contested space.
The professional on site is a continuously observed figure, yet one that needs to have some influence over those observers. On a site visit or inspection the professional must move around, exercise their habitus through discussions and demonstrations of knowledge, and dispense decisions through language (contractual) and sometimes drawing.16 Applying Erving Goffman’s analysis of public performance in his text The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life suggests the following: a performer in the form of the professional, an audience of other professionals, site agents, sub-contractors, and other onlookers for whom the site visit is an entertaining diversion.17
In a typical scenario the physical setting is in the hands of the performer, whereas the building site setting has been quite literally made by the audience themselves. The performance might involve a parade around the works, so even the route and its points of interest are shaped by interplay between the audience and the performer.
Goffman differentiates between, on the one hand, a personal ‘front’ required to maintain the performance with the impression of self given to the audience through processes of impression management and, on the other, a ‘backstage’ where the performer can let the act drop and disclose doubts to team members. Jacqueline H Watts’ study of women professionals in construction describes the emotional work demanded by this impression management, and the need for the performance to be truly expressive for it to be believable.18
There is therefore potential for a tension between the values of honesty and integrity that underpin professionalism and the capacity of the professional to pull off a convincing performance. For the performance to be believable it must be expressive and dramatically realistic. The performer must play to the script, as Goffman puts it, which is in this case a story of integrity and true honesty. Backstage, be that outside of professional life or in an office environment, the line of the performance does not need to be maintained: it is a place where the qualms of the professional may be shared openly.
Performance = Habitus
The performance of professionalism therefore means having, keeping, and disclosing secrets. Goffman’s categorisation of secrets is complex and multi-layered so I have identified three types relevant for this analysis. Dark secrets are facts that might harm the image of the performer, may not have been disclosed to the team, and must be kept hidden. Strategic secrets, like those pertaining to the business in hand, are entrusted to the performers but can offer strategic advantage to the audience if disclosed. And lastly, inside secrets, which may have no relevance or bearing upon the performance.19
Architect Dieter Gockmann’s interview in the Architects’ Journal highlights the consensus ambition that sexual orientation should not be a dark secret but a shared one entrusted to the team, leading to a professional identity grounded in personal integrity.20 Elizabeth Cavalier’s study of gay men employed in the field of sport reported the ease with which knowledge of sexual orientation, once disclosed, spread among close work colleagues.21 These entrusted secrets become part of the collective expression and habitus of the team: in this case underpinning professional values of integrity and honesty.
Goffman includes both appearance and manner in his definition of ‘front’, thus covering the outward characteristics of sex, language, manners, and bodily demeanour. Linking this broad definition with Bourdieu’s schema of habitus allows us to start considering how personal traits have to bear a professional dimension. Professional habitus is carried out through the presentation of self: on site, the architect must dispense practical knowledge with integrity and honesty through this ‘front’, and hence through a combined identity of self and professional. Extricating the personal from the professional would be impossible because of the way ethical values are tied with the personal moral dimension. The habitus of the professional thus entails personal practices that carry and maintain identities of both the self (gender and sexual identities) and the profession (ethics).
Trusted Identities
The strategic secrets of Goffman’s schema outlined above may be a key part of what makes up the capital of the architect: it is the expertise and abstract knowledge that guides practical decision making. Strategic secrets distinguish the role of the professional, shaping the social closure that frames the formation of their profession and, for the architect on site, they form the basis for their credibility and influence. The architect brings this deep knowledge to bear on the situations in hand, sharing it and interpreting it to inform practical decisions. But what happens when this kind of strategic knowledge is so closely tied in with identity, and that identity is itself closely held as a kind of dark secret? The construction site is a space of contested identity where mutual reliance is hard won, so the process of entrusting strategic secrets is difficult when it is bound up with the added dimension of sexual orientation.
On the construction site, the performance of the architect’s habitus is played out against the multiplicity of other performances: from surveyors to site agents, site agents to contractors and sub-contractors, down through suppliers, day workers, scaffolders and so on, forming a rich and uncertain dynamic of interconnected or fragmented performances. It is therefore not only a space of constant physical renegotiation but also a space where identities are asserted and reasserted through work, social interaction and language.
Site Language
Peter Medway’s research into communication on site reveals the importance of interaction through spoken language.22 Words are used to communicate requirements, clarify, and translate drawn and written information. The spoken word is also a function of habitus, the means by which identity and position can be articulated as part of the performance of interactions on site. So whilst the language of site is clearly instructional and technical, it is also a means of enacting relationships and maintaining and building on them. As these relationships are already fluid and contested, words provide a dynamic realm in which these two operations merge. What appear to be instructional and task-based communications are at the same time interpersonal operations, exerting authority and expertise.
Studies by Darren Thiel and Kris Paap reveal that site workers, including site managers, identified themselves as working class, with the builder’s life one of adapting and reacting to economic, political, contractual, and management changes brought from without.23 Working class culture functioned as an interactive resource, uniting site workers and building an easily recognisable identity. Masculine characteristics provided a means of cohering and building up site capital and distinguishing them from other fields like those of the professional. Workers from a range of ethnic backgrounds were brought into this identity and habituated into using a common language of masculinity.24
This language of site, with its sexist and homophobic humour, and gendered hierarchy of roles, contrasts starkly with architect’s language, which is grounded in creative values, public service and collective good.25 In Thiel’s analysis, language was an opportunity to display heterosexuality and masculine posturing, fuelled through spotting and distinguishing opposite talk. In research on the experience of women professionals working on sites, Watts recounted the strategies used by the interviewees to separate their personal and family lives, keeping to the script of site talk.26 In response to this context, Medway noted the tendency for the architect on site to shift their use of language from direct interpretation of drawings to a manner more akin to site talk. He described the architect’s increased use of ‘site’ language as a way of ‘declaring masculinity’.27
In the context of Bourdieu’s model of habitus, this appropriation of site manners reads as an attempt to shift the architect’s performance, adapting habitus by raising masculine capital, lending credence to their role. As Thiel noted in his study of site talk on a London building site, sincerity amongst site workers was viewed as gendered weakness.28 To cut across this scenario requires trust grounded in both professional and personal values.
Conclusion
The analysis outlined here has served to inform further thinking on the LGBT dimension in professionalism, professional values and ethics, and the practising on site of professional values informed by theoretical frameworks.
At a practical level, large employers have developed significant awareness initiatives that include the LGBT dimension, and the FLUID Diversity Mentoring Programme, developed by RIBA’s Architects for Change forum (AfC) and the Construction Industry Council (CIC), now offers direct support to LGBT students and practitioners. LGBT networks have social capital that can support the nurturing of diverse professional identities. However there is also a need to further develop the theoretical analysis of professionalism, and so respond to the implications of its grounding in the personal. If professionalism is embodied through habitus and then paraded on site, we must acknowledge the difficulties this raises, and the necessity of the intertwined nature of our personal and professional identities.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Christine Wall, from Centre for Research into the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) at University of Westminster, and Dieter Bentley-Gockmann, Architects for Change Forum Member and Director, EPR Architects, for their guidance and insights.