Responsibility Without Owners: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Industrialised Building Adoption

Abstract

Research on industrialised building (IB) adoption has extensively documented technical, organisational and market barriers but has paid less attention to how responsibility for addressing them is organised. The purpose of this study is to examine how responsibility, trust and actor-positioned risk are constructed in Australian practitioner accounts of IB adoption. A critical discourse analysis of interviews with 23 practitioners provides the primary empirical evidence. A secondary corpus of English-language YouTube comments provides a bounded contrast with public discourse. Responsibility-void discourse was most evident around shared functions including training, certification, inspection, industry coordination and design-to-delivery integration. Trust helped interpret why some firms sought greater control over functions they considered insufficiently assured externally, while risk differentiated the delivery, compliance, capital and purchase-related forms of exposure described across the two corpora. The analysis also identified distinct information conditions, including knowledge-infrastructure absence and bounded cases of strategic opacity and interoperability failure. The illustrative public corpus foregrounded purchase conditions, tenure and category credibility, whereas practitioner accounts focused on institutional delivery and coordination. The study develops a framework for responsibility in IB adoption that distinguishes fragmented responsibility, responsibility shifting and responsibility voids. It conceptualises ownership as accountable coordination of work distributed across actors, reframing persistent adoption barriers as problems of institutional organisation, coordination and follow-through.