Abstract
Despite the impressive growth of smart city initiatives worldwide, an organizational theory of smart city has yet to be developed, and we lack models addressing the unprecedented organizational and management challenges that emerge in smart city contexts. Traditional models are often of little use, because smart cities pursue different goals than traditional organizations, are based on networked, cross-boundary activity systems, rely on distributed innovation processes, and imply adaptive policy-making. Complex combinations of factors may lead to vicious or virtuous cycles in smart city initiatives, but we know very little about how these factors may be identified and mapped. Based on an inductive study of a set of primary and secondary sources, we develop a framework for the configurational analysis of smart cities viewed as place-specific organizational fields. This framework identifies five key dimensions in the configurations of smart city fields; these five dimensions are mapped through five sub-frameworks, which can be used both separately as well as for an integrated analysis. Our contribution is conceived to support longitudinal studies, natural experiments and comparative analyses on smart city fields, and to improve our understanding of how different combinations of factors affect the capability of smart innovations to translate into city resilience, sustainability and quality of life. In addition, our results suggest that new forms of place-based entrepreneurship constitute the engine that allows for the dynamic collaboration between government, citizens and research centers in successful smart city organizational fields.
Highlights
The multidisciplinary scholarly community that studies the dynamics of sustainability transformations often complains that social phenomena such as intractable ideological conflicts, lack of coordination, cultural habits, or normative inertia, hinder positive change [1]
The integrated analysis of the sources led to the identification of five key aspects that are relevant for mapping the configuration of a specific smart city, viewed as an idiosyncratic and dynamically evolving organizational field
These five aspects are: 1. the Actors that play an active role in the co-creation of city resilience, sustainability and/or quality of life through information and communication technologies (ICT)-enabled innovation; 2. the City Sub-Systems in which the actors play an active role in the co-creation of city resilience, sustainability and/or quality of life through ICT-enabled innovation; 3. the Activity Layers, i.e., the specific levels in which actors contribute to the city sub-systems; 4. the Roles played by actors at each activity layer; and 5. the Institutional Logics enacting and enacted by the key actors of the smart city field
Summary
The multidisciplinary scholarly community that studies the dynamics of sustainability transformations often complains that social phenomena such as intractable ideological conflicts, lack of coordination, cultural habits, or normative inertia, hinder positive change [1]. Studying the organizational field and the dynamics of institutional logics enables us to better understand the interplay of all the relevant social actors that (are expected to) play an active role in a specific sustainability transformation, such as businesses, start-ups, research centers, government bodies or social movements. Even more importantly, this approach provides effective tools to understand how, and under what conditions, a sustainability-oriented distributed activity system can emerge from actors’ interplay at the field level
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