Whose line is it anyway? De-signing organisational change in the case of MyAirport moving to become more sustainable

The article draws on an ongoing ethnographic study of an international airport, known as MyAirport, and its desire to become a more ‘sustainable’ airport. By employing frame analysis, inspired by the tradition of Goffman’s social interactionism, we attempted to identify the multiple ways in which ‘sustainability’ was framed by a variety of social actors at MyAirport. In so doing, we attempted to show the indeterminate nature of changing as we traced the way the ambitions of becoming more ‘sustainable’ was made sense of in everyday occurrences at MyAirport. Therefore, the main contribution of this article lies in the treatment of organisational change as an ongoing process of changing and sense-making. By following our social actors, observing their daily practices, and articulating their multiple frames of ‘sustainability’ work, we provide richer accounts of how changing in organisations are mobilised, often through conceptualisations of the present and re-conceptualisations of the ever growing past. Change is therefore not a static and stable point of destination, waiting for the researcher to analyse; rather changing demands getting close to the actions as organisations constantly move, get moved and evolves.