Transforming the City of Kiruna : Stabilizing Change and Changing Stability

Abstract: 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 transform.” This concept is anchored in a duality perspective, which promotes the understanding that there is a facilitating and reconstituting interplay between stability and change that dialectically synthesizes and transforms the interdependent contradiction over time. Moreover, the concept reveals that stability is something that needs to be recurrently accomplished through the agency of and interaction between practitioners in organizations, because although it guides practitioners to be able to adapt to the context and enact change, their actions and interaction change stability.