Transforming the City of Kiruna : Stabilizing Change and Changing Stability

• Main Author: Huisman, Chelsey Jo
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Företagsekonomiska institutionen 2021
• Subjects: Change; Changing; Dialectical Process; Duality; Interaction; Interdependent Contradiction; Interorganizational Projects; Interorganizational Relationships; Process Perspective; Stability; Stabilizing; Transformation; Social Sciences; Samhällsvetenskap; Economics and Business; Ekonomi och näringsliv; Business Administration; Företagsekonomi; Kiruna; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-455312

With so much focus on change and transformation in the organizing of projects, stability is commonly separated from change and relegated to be a static characteristic. This gives the impression that stability is not even a part of the process of organizing a project. Consequently, this strengthens the assumption that to achieve a massive change process, dynamic capabilities such as responsiveness, innovation, and flexibility are required. The thesis introduces a more relational, dynamic, and action-oriented understanding of stability in relation to change when organizing projects. It is shown that not only change but also stability has a necessary function in projects. Stability includes the organizing practices that guide the process of the project toward its purpose through planning, coordinating, and direction-setting. To theoretically explore the interdependencies between stability and change, the thesis draws from theoretical insights in organization studies on duality. When the interplay between stability and change is seen through the lens of a duality perspective, the dynamic between stability and change becomes both contradictory and complementary rather than opposing and conflicting. To empirically explore the interplay between stability and change, the thesis features a single process-based case study. The case study deals with the large-scale, nonroutine task of decommissioning, relocating, and rebuilding the city of Kiruna in northern Sweden. Within this overarching transformation process, three units of analysis are in focus, i.e., three empirical subprocesses of three interorganizational infrastructure projects. What is iteratively practiced to organize each infrastructure project cumulatively constitutes how the large-scale infrastructure project that is the city transformation process is organized and accomplished. The key theoretical insight extends our understanding of stability in relation to change by contributing with the conceptualization of “stabilizing change and changing stability to ...