Post.doc project: Organizational change as facilitating climate adaptation of the built environment

The postdoctoral project, conducted by Anne Kokkonen, explores the organizational change that assists climate adaptation of the built environment. Built environment and its maintenance involve multiple organizations from both public and private sectors. These organizations differ in goals, tasks, interests, and knowledge. Together the organizations can assist the built environment to adapt to climate change, but the development does not always occur automatically. Whereas new technology and pilot projects introduce solutions for specific problems, the new solutions require still an implementation in the multifaceted work of organizations and their business models.

In this postdoctoral project, organizational change will be studied with empirical cases connected to Klima 2050. These cases will include organizational change processes that either are seen from the perspective of one organization or within the collaboration of many organizations. The project addresses the following research questions:

• How does the adaptation to climate change differ from other change processes, when performed by the organizations connected to the built environment?
• How do the value creation processes change in organizations, when adapting to climate change? - What is relevant for different organizations when they adapt to climate change? How does the industry act towards societal goals that might change value creation processes, and possibly hinder the existing ones?
• How are the increased possibilities of using data as part of managing climate adaptation? New digital tools enable new ways of managing organizations since an increased amount of data is gathered while algorithms offer growing opportunities to analyze this data. Nevertheless, there are sometimes barriers to use the data. These barriers may include, for example, lack of access to the data possessed by other organizations.

The questions mentioned above will be studied with the methods from social science. These methods will include qualitative data collection that contains extensive interviews and observations on connected practices of the organizations. Also, quantitative methods will be used to gather knowledge on the systemic actions.

The postdoctoral project is part of the work package four in Klima 2050. Anne works in BI, Norwegian Business School, with professors Lena Bygballe and Ragnhild Kvålshaugen.