ORGANIZING SPACES FOR INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIZING IN THE CONTEXT OF GRAND CHALLENGES – The case of Smart Cities – PhD dissertation Madalina Pop Aarhus BSS Aarhus University Department of Management 2020 Acknowledgments Being engaged in this 3-year journey has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. I not only got a crash-course into being a researcher but also got pushed to grow as a person and develop in all the aspects of my life. With all the sweat, tears, excitement and joy that went into this work, the whole process would not have been possible without the amazing support from a large number of people. Below I would like to say thank to only a few of the many people that help make this thesis a reality. First of all, all this thesis could not have been possible without the close collaboration of all the actors within the two smart cities that opened their doors for me to observe, record and ask too many questions. I would like to thank especially the two smart city municipalities and Tine, Line, Birgitte, Martin, Niels, Jacob and Steffan for their support, friendship, welcoming me in their meetings and always being open to me. Additionally, I will always grateful to all the other participants to this study - the CEOs, entrepreneurs, professors, managers and other employees - for the extended time you offered me for interviews, allowing me to pry with the camera on conversations and meetings and taking the time to talk and socialize with me. I would also like to thank my two supervisors, Professors Ingo Kleindienst and Jesper Rosenberg Hansen for their continued support. Ingo, thank you for being not only a great collaborator on our joint paper but also a friend that I could share a laugh with, joke on annoying reviewer comments and talk about the more irritating realities of academic life. You have always been there to support not only my successes but also to get me out of panic attacks and answer late exasperated emails and Skype calls. I will always be indebted for all of this. Jesper, thank you for all the support as well, for standing alongside me in my most stressful moments and also taking meetings at any time of the day or week to work on my projects. Thank you for all the laughs and doing everything you can to support my career. I would also like to thank Associate Professor Toke Bjerregaard for taking an interest in my research and for always having an open door to answer my many theoretical questions, discuss research ideas and for many interesting discussions. Thank you for always challenging me with interesting questions and comments and for your continued support for furthering my academic I career. Marta and Kenneth, thank you for the talks, the jokes and the fun that got me out of my seclusion from time to time. A special thank you goes to Professor David Seidl and the entire OM team at Zurich University. David, I will always be indebted to you for the opportunity to work together on our joint paper, for the time you have spent with me every week, and for the amazing chance to learn from you. Thank you for your amazing support even in my most stressed times, for your amazing friendship to both my husband and me and for the invaluable moments of inspiration and learning that talking to you offered. To Tania, Violetta, Shenghui and Theresa, I thank you for always taking the time to discuss research with me and for making my husband’s and my stay in Zurich an amazing experience. I will always be grateful for the academic support but also the fun times you offered me both during my stay abroad and afterwards. All of you and David will always have a very special place in my heart for the amazing experience you provided and for opening the doors to a wider research community for me. To my husband, Ovi, you deserve the biggest thanks. You have always been my rock, as this Ph.D. would definitely not have been possible without you. You took on the challenge of being a “Ph.D. husband” and suffered and rejoiced with me every moment of the way. Thank you for all the specially prepared food even when you were working, for the flowers celebrating the smallest victories, for the stress-relieving hugs when I was on the brinks of collapse. Thank you for reminding me every day to enjoy life and for making every moment of the day worth enjoying. Taking on the Ph.D. together made it not only bearable but also fun and worth doing it. For all of this and an abundance of other reasons, thank you and I love you. Lastly, I will like to thank my family. To my father and grandfather, thank you for inspiring me towards this academic career. I can see now that the long walks and talks on politics, history, and even the world of bees and ants were the starting point for me to be interested in this path even at a very young age. Mom, thank you for instilling in me the strong work ethics that I needed to reach this point. You will always be an inspiration to me as a strong career woman. Mom and dad, thank you for always being there for me and supporting me through thick and thin, through disappointments and successes. You always extended a helping hand and sympathetic ear despite my moments of anger, indecision and despair. For all of this and many more, I will always be indebted to you. II With all my gratitude, Madalina Pop Aarhus, 31.01.2020 III Executive Summary Grand societal challenges such as climate change, migration, income inequality and an aging population challenge traditional ways of organizing. Through their inherent scope, scale and complexity, grand challenges are incredibly difficult to understand. Accordingly, grand challenges need the collaborative effort of a wide variety of actors with sometime diverging perspectives in order to tackle them. Grand challenges create paradoxical requirements on the organizing of actors needing, for example, to balance simplicity and complexity, flexibility and control, openness and closure. Aiming to investigate how this is achieved, the thesis uses the notion of space— understood as a multi-dimensional construct—to study how actors create spaces to organize towards grand challenges. While scholars have always been interested in the effect of space on social life, only recently have organizational scholars began to take seriously its role in organizational life. By looking at space as a practice, this thesis proposes that creating spaces is a situated practice of organizing understandings, interactions and experience. Today, more than half of the world population live in cities. As such, municipalities have become the main ground in which grand challenges have to be tackled. Through collaborative smart city initiatives, municipalities try to tame such challenges using new technologies. The thesis draws on a two-and-a-half-year ethnography of two municipalities with smart city initiatives to study the following overall research question: How do actors use space to organize inter-organizational strategizing in the context of grand challenges? To answer this question, the thesis is structured into three papers. The first paper investigates how grand challenges change the requirements for organizing. To investigate this, I engage in a literature review of the grand challenge literature within organization and management literature to study not only how the challenges have been conceptualized in literature so far, but also how organizations have been shown to make sense of and collaboratively act towards addressing grand challenges. The paper identifies multiple tensions and paradoxes that appear when trying to understand and collaboratively tame grand challenges including the simultaneous need to simplify the challenge while maintaining its complexity for understanding and the need to for both high levels of control and high levels of flexibility in the collaborative process. IV In line with the findings in the first paper, the second paper of the series investigates how actors complexify and simplify the space for making sense of grand challenges by using boundary work. By drawing on the ethnographic work in both of the Smart City cases, the paper finds that actors use three types of boundary work to adjust the complexity of the space to suit their sensemaking needs by simplifying, complexifying and “simplexifying” – i.e. the simultaneous increase and decrease of complexity – the spaces. The paper builds a temporal model with different patterns of how the boundary work plays out over time, each with different implications on the final understanding achieved. The third paper, builds further on the findings of the first paper, looking into the creation of spaces towards tackling collaboratively the grand challenges. More specifically, by drawing on one of the cases, the paper investigates how actors use space to structure the open strategy process of the smart city initiatives. Looking into the multiple spaces created and how they were arranged, the paper identifies the structuring practices - arranging, enclosing and reciprocal opening - that create different degrees of openness and closure within spaces. Additionally, the paper presents a process model of how organizing of the open strategy is achieved through the dynamic interplay between four distinct types of spaces: roundtable, public, workshop and one-on-one. Through these findings, besides the contributions of the individual papers, the overall thesis brings two main contributions to literature. First, the thesis adds to the literature on spaces, going into the black box of how space organizes organizational life through arranging and boundary work.