“It looks like a proper business school now!” : Legitimating Buildings and Building Legitimacy

Abstract

This thesis explores the design process and spatial practices of the new building of UK business schools. In the past few decades, many business schools became the cash cows of universities, funding other disciplines such as art and history. Some of their growth strategies involved providing “customer experience” by constructing new buildings. Exploring organisational spaces of several business schools, my study examines how multimodal representational strategies are used to maintain business schools’ legitimacy and provide a competitive advantage in the global market for higher education. I turned to Lefebvre to understand the interplay between the social and the physical. Most known through ‘the social production of space’, Lefebvre emphasises the embodiment of social space which dominates society and characterises ‘organised space’. Then, I tried to combine the work of Lefebvre with an institutional theory to produce a theoretical frame which is attentive to power, legitimacy, isomorphism and rhetoric. This thesis critically explored varied spatial strategies and practices and looked for incongruence, inconsistency and contradiction in organisational space. I found that the business school building projects in the neoliberal university are legitimised with “managerial discourse” of merit. I also looked for both architectural and discursive rhetoric for humanising managerialism. I did so by conducting interviews, assembling ethnographic accounts and consulting secondary data. I found that a new building not only displays organisational value but actually changes the embodied experience and identities of building users without overt organisational coercion. This silent change was not always welcome, but a chance for resistance was suppressed too easily. After the global financial crisis, some management scholars realised that business schools were also responsible for the shaping of the global economy. Still, when I examined my data during the fieldwork, I did not see much evidence of accountability and humility. Business schools still enjoyed a ‘golden age’ after establishing a new academic culture based on auditing, ranking and competition, and they are still building and expanding the campus. The new status of business schools needed a new organisational identity, and all of these changes in organisational space happen with little notable resistance. Architecture becomes rhetoric, built to inform, afford and symbolise the legitimacy of business schools.