How Social-Symbolic Work Changes Places

Abstract

We advance the social-symbolic work perspective by developing an understanding of places as objects characterized by location, materiality, function, and symbolic meaning and which can be changed through social-symbolic work. Drawing from a longitudinal study of the ‘Empty Homes’ Programme in England, our analysis identifies an unfolding process of social-symbolic work through which organizational actors change three distinct places – a historic chapel hall, a village public tavern, and derelict terraced houses – into social housing. Our findings develop a theoretical model of how social-symbolic work changes place objects through a process involving dislodging functionality of how a place is actually used, inscribing liminality, and consolidating coherence across new function, new symbolic meaning and reconstructed materiality at a fixed geographic location. This process creates a new place as a social-symbolic object that is both stable and dynamic. Our findings and model contribute to the social-symbolic work perspective and have broad relevance within the management studies literature to research on place and organizational and institutional change processes.