The selection criteria of collective bricolage: the case of the Listed-Buildings Institution

The paper studies the role of collective bricolage and material artefacts in the maintenance of an institution. It investigates the selection criteria that guide actors in their collective choice of resources, which they combine through bricolage in order to shape or reshape a material instantiation of an institution. The present case study concerns the Institution of Listed-Buildings, i.e. buildings protected as national patrimony. Through a Grounded-Theory Methodology, I analyse how actors and different stakeholders of construction works maintain the legitimacy of a listed building while modernizing it without distorting its embodied cultural heritage. Based on six selected listed buildings – three in Denmark and three in France – I identify a key dynamic of collective bricolage, notably how actors select material resources they have at hand. The findings point to their use of 1) a meta-resource that captures the essence of an institution, and 2) six different criteria that enable the selection of material resources complying with this meta-resource: individual preference, collective and field alignment, technical features, economics, time and space. These selection criteria facilitate collective decision-making among actors who seek to instantiate an institution through a shared meta-resource. In my empirical case, the actors instantiated the Listed-Buildings Institution through the meta-resource of authenticity, whose leitmotiv is " keeping the heritage above all ". The notions of meta-resource and selection criteria help us comprehend how actors collectively maintain an institution by instantiating it.