Navigating the Logics of Changing Public Facilities Management

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Growing cities, new governmental sustainability directives, and a large building stock in need of acute measures put pressure on public facilities management organizations to transform their operations. However, the complex organizational context encompasses multiple, sometimes competing, institutional logics where long-term demands on sustainability often are at odds with short-term financial goals and politics. The aim of this paper is to increase the understanding of how actors navigate within such complexity in order to translate governmental energy efficiency directives into local practices. Data was collected through an ongoing case study of a facility management organization in Sweden. Focus is on a single institutional actor, a project manager and his (institutional) work of creating and implementing new energy directives. Findings show that translating energy-efficiency directives into practice is not a straight forward process and, together with other issues, requires considerations of the interplay between different logics. In order to manage this, the project manager was switching between strategies of 'zooming in' and 'zooming out' i.e. either focusing on single and narrow logics or integrating them at different stages of the process. By elucidating the more practice-based simplifications that also is adopted by the project
manager, we instil the need for more nuanced conceptualizations of complex institutional landscapes, being a central concern for researchers and practitioners engaged in the sustainability challenge in the built environment sector.