Place and Institutional Work: Creating Housing for the Hard-to-house

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lawrence, Thomas B.; Dover, Graham
• 署名单位: University of Oxford
• 刊物名称: ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-8392
• DOI: 10.1177/0001839215589813
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 371-410
• 关键词: ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY; strategy; IDENTITY; SPACE; entrepreneurship; TRANSFORMATION; ORGANIZATIONS; emergence; community; emotion

摘要

The places in which organizational life occurs can have profound impacts on actors, actions, and outcomes but are largely ignored in organizational research. Drawing on ideas from social geography, we explore the roles that places play in institutional work. The context for our study is the domain of housing for the hard-to-house, within which we conducted two qualitative case studies: the establishment of Canada's first residential and day-care facility for people living with HIV/AIDS, and the creation of a municipal program to provide temporary overnight accommodation for homeless people in local churches. In examining these cases, we found that places played three key roles: places contained, mediated, and complicated institutional work. Each of these roles was associated with a distinct ontology of place: places as social enclosures, as signifiers, and as practical objects. Our findings have significant implications for how we understand the relationship between location and organizations and allow us to develop a process model of places, institutions, and institutional work.