Seminar – Building Meaning: City Identity and the Built Environment

Dr Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh

Meaning is at the heart of identity – who we are and what we do. We focus on a specific form of collective identity – city identity – and build on Cerulo’s research (1995, 2005, 2009) that collective identity and shared experiences are encoded into material form. We extend collective identity by focusing on space and the built environment, which in contrast to national symbols, are in constant process of revision, including both change and stability. This combination of stability and change in material form enables us to examine the dynamic, interactive processes of collective identity. We engage in an inductive case study of Boston from 1930 through 2014 to explore how city identity and meaning is expressed, co-constructed and contested in the construction and removal of the elevated freeway. We trace the discourse and relations among key stakeholders: government policymakers, the Mayor, trade associations (private business interests), architects, architectural critics and the lay public. Our tentative and initial findings reveal how the built environment serves as a mnemonic device, triggering some historical memories and narratives to construct meaning and the city’s identity.

Speaker bio

Candace Jones research interests include creative industries and professional services from the lenses of networks, vocabularies, institutional logics, and materiality.

She has published on range of creative industries, including film, music, architects and architecture, in a variety of top journals, including the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Annals, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Organization Science, and Organization Studies and Poetics.

In 2015, she co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries with Jonathan Sapsed and Mark Lorenzen.

She is on the Editorial Review Boards of Academy of Management Review, Journal of Professions and Organization, Organization Science and Organization Studies.