Seminar – Institutional Disruption through the Redesign of Space

Professor Sabina Siebert, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow

This presentation addresses a question of institutional change with a particular focus on the role of the building as a site of contestation and a place where the conflicts over the nature and extent of institutional change are played out. I draw on my ethnographic study of the UK Parliament, specifically the restoration of the Palace of Westminster, in an attempt to answer two questions: How do various actors use buildings to drive or resist institutional change? To what extent are the workings of the UK Parliament as an institution intertwined with the buildings and their current design? I locate the study in the theoretical framework of institutional disruption (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Rodner, Roulet, Kerrigan & Lehn, 2019) and draw on the concepts from organisational geography and sociology of the place. I attempt to capture the notion of “the ghost of the place” (Bell, 1997), how it is created, maintained and disrupted, and I throw some light on the social magic (Bourdieu, 2014) sustained by the physical surroundings.

Because the restoration of the Palace of Westminster has not happened yet, the analysis will remain in the realm of possibility. In line with the sociological approach of “possibilism” (Appadurai, 2013; Mica, 2018; Mische, 2009), I intend to understand the perspective of institutional actors surveying the future in terms of multiple possibilities, in contrast to the commonly adapted perspective of the institutional actors who interpret the past.

Speaker bio

Sabina Siebert is Professor of Management at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. Her research interests include institutional change, organisational trust and distrust, and organisations and professions. She employs a range of qualitative methodologies including discourse analysis, narrative analysis and organisational ethnography. She researched an ancient profession – Scottish advocates (a paper based on this study was published in the Academy of Management Journal). She has been an academic fellow of both the UK Parliament and the Scottish Parliament. In collaboration with Barbara Czarniawska, she is also researching the careers of secret service agents drawing on spies’ biographies.