Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the spatial intervention of open-plan offices in a university, the consequential change in work practices of faculty members and how these practices appropriate the designed space.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors executed a two-year longitudinal ethnographic study following the case of the science faculty, which moved from a traditional office setting to open-plan offices. The authors studied the space and interviewed staff before, during and after the introduction of open-plan offices.
Findings
Findings show that the new spatial setting triggered staff members to attribute certain meanings and practices of adaptation which were, partly, unintended by the design of the open-plan offices.
Research limitations/implications
This paper contributes empirically grounded insights into the (un)intended consequences of a spatial intervention in terms of how staff members, far from being passive, attribute meaning and alter their work practices leading to unprecedented organizational changes.
Practical implications
For change consultants, facility managers and university managers the outcomes of this paper are highly relevant.
Social implications
Large budgets are spent on new office concepts at universities but the authors do know little about the relation between spatial (re)design and organizational change.
Originality/value
The introduction of new office concepts, spatial redesign and co-location is for many academics highly emotional.
The last decades have witnessed an increasing prevalence of community resistance against large-scale infrastructure projects that pose serious threats to their environment, calling for further empirical scrutiny. Hence, this paper applies a neo-institutional lens to investigate how project actors who plan and implement large-scale infrastructure projects respond to community resistance in their attempt to legitimize and embed these projects in their environment. To do so, we draw from a longitudinal study of two subway projects in Amsterdam; the East line (1965-1980) and the North-South line (1995-2018). While considered crucial for urban development, both projects encountered severe community resistance by locals protecting the historic city. This resistance, in turn, prompted 'institutional work' by project actors to socially (re)construct the projects in pursuit of legitimacy from the Amsterdam community. The twofold contribution of the paper to the field of project studies is (1) the application of a neo-institutional lens showcasing the dynamic interrelation between projects and their environment, processes of institutional transformation, and practices of institutional work; and (2) the longitudinal empirical account exhibiting the contextual dialectic of resistance and accommodation with an emphasis on shifting approaches of institutionalization, the constant struggle to acquire legitimacy, and the local embeddedness of projects.
Organization scholars call for a more critical approach to the field of Strategy-as-Practice. Particularly, more interpretive and micro-level analyses of strategy from a performative perspective are endorsed. This paper addresses this call with an ethnographic study of rituals that mark kick-offs, launches, milestones, and deliveries in project organizations. Using a performative approach, the aim is to investigate how rituals are sociomaterially orchestrated and the implications this has for strategy making. To collect data, fieldwork was conducted during eight ritual events in four infrastructure projects in the Netherlands, and 46 in-depth interviews were held with ritual participants. Our study reveals the often overlooked strategic role of rituals in terms of (1) engaging an audience, (2) legitimizing project plans, and (3) catalyzing transitions via a 'point of no return'. The contribution of this paper is a performative analysis of rituals offering insight into the understudied aesthetic, corporeal, and material nature of strategizing.
Cross-cultural cooperation in joint ventures does not take place in a power-free context but is threatened by struggles between partners over cultural differences and conflicting interests. All project partners have their own perspectives, interpretations, intentions and practices, which challenge the undertakings of cross-cultural collaboration. Therefore, it is the aim of this paper to study how employees make sense of their cultural differences in a multinational joint venture. To do so, the cross-cultural collaboration between joint-venture partners Gazprom and Shell is studied over three months of fieldwork during the Sakhalin Energy II megaproject in Siberia. The contribution of this paper is the theorization of culture as socially constructed and the exhibition of how cultural differences are negotiated to create a system which is a cultural hybrid, securing Shell-based management practices and values while simultaneously localizing the project in the Russian framework. As such, hybridization can represent an antidote to power struggles and cultural discrepancies.
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