Shaping the buildings that shape us: Restoring coordination following a disruption

Abstract

The move to a new, state-of-the-art building is a momentous occasion in the life of an organization as it offers the rare opportunity to establish novel ways of working and organizing. However, when long established coordination practices can no longer be carried out in the new space, costly breakdowns may occur, necessitating effortful repair work to re-establish coordination. Through a two-year ethnographic study, we examine how coordination was disrupted and restored following the relocation of a leading hospital into a newly built and equipped state-of-the-art building. We show how established care coordination practices could no longer be sustained in the new setting and how the urgency of addressing situations of breakdown forced a reconstitution of coordination arrangements to better align with the new space. Our findings highlight the importance of the situation, rather than external environments, in guiding shared action and the importance of organizing boundaries and scripts in reassembling a novel coordination ordering. Thus, we suggest a move away from the notion of “coordination as social structure” toward a performative view of coordination that foregrounds the situation, the joint effects of material arrangements and boundaries and scripts.