On institutions, paths, and routes set in stone ; The construction of a bridge as a case of path instantiation ; Institutionen, Pfade, und Straßen wie in Stein gemeißelt ; Der Bau einer Brücke als Fall einer Pfad-Instantiierung

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Abstract

This doctoral thesis reports on an organizational history of the city of Dresden, with respect to the conflicting construction of a new bridge at Waldschlösschen. This project finds its origins in the late 19th century and culminated in a highly polarizing conflict in 2009, opposing various local, national and international institutional constituents. The core of the conflict was the City's decision in 1996 to proceed with the planning and construction of the four-lane bridge in the middle of what eventually became known in 2004 as the UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Landscape "Dresden and the Elbe Valley". The project was criticized due to its impact on the landscape, to its questionable effect on traffic reduction, and its expensive nature, and provoked the withdrawal of the site from list for WH sites, a premiere in Europe. I draw upon this case to make a few points in the broader field of organization research. First, I propose to consider the interplay of institutional effects and of path dependence in the analysis of an organization and its subsequent decision-making. Secondly, I suggest considering "paths" as mere virtual schemas of solutions to collective problems, and to label their actual manifestations "path instantiations". In this respect, I claim that path-researchers could learn from institutional accounts by observing how actors in organizations draw on their institutional context to nest these instantiations. A last point is made by stressing the potential for actors to disrupt path-dependent developments, and how such disruptions may actually reinforce the path under scrutiny. Drawing on the Dresden case, we see how members of the City, under the path-like influence of a technical solution, contributed to instantiate the idea of a bridge at Waldschlösschen by drawing on the institutional logics of democracy and of state-bureaucracy. Strategies of power retention, myth development, and legal binding were employed to support the development of the project. This institutional effort was rewarded by ...