Institutionalization of Sustainable Building

by Lara A Hale, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

My research is qualitative, based significantly on primary data from semi-structured interviews, but also supplemented with event attendance, observations, and secondary data such as marketing materials. The topic is the institutionalization, and I have focused within this area on standards, in particular on the Active House approach. The overarching question guiding the research is: How are demonstrations strategically used support the institutionalization of sustainable building standards based on both quantitative and qualitative values?

VELUX has been instrumental in forming a research project based on the study of Sunlight House in Pressbaum, Austria; LichtAktiv Haus in Hamburg, Germany; and RenovActive in Brussels, Belgium (pre-construction phase). I’m a little over halfway through a three-year program (21 months as of April) and am currently moving from the data collection process to the follow-up interviews and data analysis. Data collection involved three-week research stays in each of the areas, allowing time for setting up appointments and “snowballing” – seeking out interesting actors to speak with based on the recommendations of interviewees. In total, I conducted 24 interviews, participated in the Active House Guidelines workshop and the 2013 and 2014 Active House Symposiums, and attended four building conferences: the 2014 Passive House Conference in Brussels; the 2014 Passive House Conference of Northern Germany outside of Hamburg; the 2015 Bauz! Conference in Vienna; and the 2014 World Sustainable Building Congress in Barcelona.

I have written a paper entitled “Commensuration and Legitimacy in Standards” which I will be presenting at the European Group for Organizational Studies Conference and the Academy of Management Conference this summer. Daylight has been a regular theme in my research, and surfaces also in this paper. Commensuration, the conversion of qualities into comparable quantitative data, is a ubiquitous but opaque process in standards. Daylight is commensurated in the Active House specifications, and it has been enlightening to hear discussions on the measurement and value of daylight from interviewees and conferences alike. Daylight is also an important dynamic in the relation between technology, people, and standards, the topic of my working paper – relating the building demonstrations to Science and Technology Studies (STS). It represents a pivotal point among comfort, health, aesthetics, and energy use. In preparation for the symposium, I have been coding my interviews for daylight, and hope to be able to share these insights with other researchers. I’m also curious to see the different ways other researchers perceive and apply daylight as a concept; and how they deal with measurement.