Pretending the Mine Won’t Close: How Community Actors Unintentionally Exacerbate Institutional Infrastructure Attrition

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ABSTRACT

I develop an ex-ante understanding of the critical moments, people, and actions that occur during the attrition of an institution. In doing so, I further our understanding of how and why actors fail to maintain the institutions that they rely on. I conduct a multi-year longitudinal case study of the unexpectedly expedited closure of a large coal mine near a small town in rural Alberta. I find that actors attempt to maintain institutional infrastructure, but that their actions unintentional result in further erosion through mistargeting, maintaining the wrong infrastructure, and avoidance, failure to maintain infrastructure at all. Indeed, I find that the intention of actors does not correspond with the outcome of the activity: their actions intended to bolster institutional infrastructure unwittingly erode it. This results in the failure to maintain institutional infrastructure against ongoing erosion processes.

BIOGRAPHY

Maggie Cascadden (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in her final year at the Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta. She has a Master’s in resource and environmental management (planning) from Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of organizations and communities and include community, institutionalism, sustainable development, and how institutions survive and decline in the Anthropocene. Maggie asks questions about how institutional perspectives can help us tackle grand challenges and is especially interested in how communities interact with grand challenges and organizations. She co-founded and co-coordinates the ONE-SIM Outreach Award, an award recognizing excellent efforts of academics to communicate the insights of their papers to non-academic audiences. Her work has been published in Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Research on the Sociology of Organizations, and Resources Management.