The Chronotopes of Change: Actor-Networks in a Changing Business School

This article investigates how a leading business school is reshaping its identity through a process that includes, but is not limited to, the building of a new facility designed by the Canadian architect Frank Gehry, as well as a major revision of the teaching programmes, ethos and branding. By investigating this process in an actor-network theory fashion, and introducing the notion of chronotope, the article answers three central questions related to the notion of change: How does organizational change happen in the daily life of a project? What gives unity to a chain of small relational changes? How can processual change possibly be managed? Theoretically, the article argues that change emerges in the micro-dynamics of organizing, fragments that are stitched together by macro-dominant narratives, in a constant process of translations that occur between human and non-human actants. The management of change is pursued through a constant micropolitics of network maintenance and enactment.