Paper for the Construction History Conference,
Cambridge, United Kingdom,
September 10, 2021.
Cambridge, United Kingdom,
September 10, 2021.
Actual construction work introduces an element of precarity to any building project. The availability of a workforce, workers’ skills and mastery of craft directly affect projects’ budgets and planning. In the post-WWII period, which witnessed an extensive reconstruction effort across Europe, one of the ways to mitigate these uncertainties and obtain greater control of the ‘human factor’ was through prefabrication. Prefabrication transformed the process of construction from building to assembly, gathering different types of construction specialists under one roof and driving professionalisation, specialisation and process planning. This turn to prefabrication, however, had an ambiguous effect on labour: although a more technologically-driven process required better technical knowledge, it simultaneously diminished the role of craft, deskilling the workers. However, as more recent inquiries focusing on issues of labour in construction show, this was not a zero-sum development, and questions of craft, skill and technical knowledge continued to complicate the production of prefabricated structures.
This paper investigates this duality between professionalisation and deskilling through a study of a Norwegian construction company, Moelven Brug. A former sawmill, in the post-WWII period, Moelven turned to prefabrication, building housing, schools, sports halls and representative buildings from a system of flat-packaged prefabricated timber panels and housing sections. In just two decades between 1950-70, the company evolved from a small local business largely reliant on hand-craft into a large industrial enterprise with high mechanisation levels, profoundly transforming how work was performed. As Moelven incorporated international management models and adapted new technology and process planning, construction work became increasingly fragmented, specialised and professionalised. While this transformation made away with a tradition of local craft, replacing it with a more technological process, it also allowed for a broader pool of workers to be hired, driving regional development. As Moelven employees evolved from ‘workers’ into ‘operators’, the study of the company’s continuous negotiation between craft, technology and scientific expertise at the time of rapid industrial expansion offers new insights into the professionalisation of labour within the prefabrication industry.