Based on the trend of openness and increasing involvement of various actors in organizational activities, this dissertation analyzes civic engagement in an urban strategy process. Specifically, it examines the role of emotions on actors when multiple institutional orders intersect, the role of the atmosphere in future-making, and the impact of stakeholder engagement in tackling grand challenges. The findings show that diverse actors employ emotive tactics to improve their agency, such that emotions themselves become actors that affect the institutional process of finding common ground. They also highlight that future-making practices and the atmosphere influenced each other, as the atmosphere increasingly enabled actors in future-making over time as they appropriated an innovation lab’s tools. And the findings also reveal that diverse actors were both engaged and disengaged in the strategy formation. The engaged actors’ elaboration of grand visions for tackling grand challenges were condensed into seizable measures because of the democratic city principles that established the city council’s decision-making power over the new urban strategy. With these findings, this thesis contributes to the literature on emotions and institutions, atmosphere, future-making, and labs, and stakeholder engagement, and grand challenges.
«Based on the trend of openness and increasing involvement of various actors in organizational activities, this dissertation analyzes civic engagement in an urban strategy process. Specifically, it examines the role of emotions on actors when multiple institutional orders intersect, the role of the atmosphere in future-making, and the impact of stakeholder engagement in tackling grand challenges. The findings show that diverse actors employ emotive tactics to improve their agency, such that emoti...
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