The project examines the transformation, in 2007, of the Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC) into the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK).
RUCOLA has been commissioned to explore the institute’s transformation using a reflexive approach, and to analyse its effects on decision-making, planning documents, negotiations with the personnel, and projects to develop the new foundation’s research. The aim of the project is to identify and provide feedback on processes begun by the Foundation or rooted in the previous organizational culture.
The research is based on three theoretical reference frameworks:

1. Narration from the onset of the organizational change. This approach analyses turning-points in the organizational process, significant plots, situations of stalemate, and long-period representations. Also considered are the anecdotes and narratives that aid understanding of how the new organization speaks to the previous one (and vice versa) and how this transition is recounted in regard to both the past and the present.
2. Narration of the ongoing organizational change. This second approach considers the organizational cultures, and the rational and irrational factors that drive decision processes at all levels, seeking to show how contexts converse with each other and communicate knowledge. At the same time, the focus is on the processes that produce knowledge, communicate it, or obstruct it.
3. Aesthetics and organizational change. Analysis of this kind concentrates on the particular mix created between the rational representations of the organization and the ‘irrational’ yet sensorially measurable ones. A logo, for instance, is replete with meanings, representations, sensory and emotional reactions that evade direct analysis, and with the prior projects which produced it.
   After the logo, it is possible to progressively include all other sensorially meaningful dimensions: the layout of offices; rituals at meetings; rhetorics employed, and so on.
4. Dynamics of the change process. This line of inquiry investigates the values underlying organizational choices and the differentiations which the Foundation’s various sections establish in order to reinforce their identities. Specific actions like drawing up the programme and reaching agreement on the personnel’s working conditions are also symbolic spaces in which cultures and organizational representations are compared and developed. This approach to the new organization will consider events of this kind as processes of organization-building but also as sources of potential conflict, because they negotiate among competing interests difficult to reconcile.

Researchers: Rino Fasol (coordinator), Barbara Poggio (line 1), Michela Cozza (lines 1 and 2), Silvia Gherardi (line 2), Antonio Strati, Gessica Corradi, Laura Zamparelli (line 3), Paolo Tomasin, Alberto Zanutto, Annalisa Murgia, Luca Salvaterra (line 4)
Period: 2008-2010
Funding: Fondazione Bruno Kessler