Construct · 8 fields · 10 citations
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A mode of thought that works with a closed, heterogeneous set of leftovers (tools and materials kept because they might come in handy) and builds by rearranging what is already there, where the engineer conceives a project and then procures the means for it. Lévi-Strauss introduced the bricoleur in 1962 as an analogy for mythical thought: myths are assembled from fragments of earlier myths and the debris of events, so the set of elements comes before the purpose and constrains it. It is a theory of signs and of how a culture reasons, not of how a person gets things done, and Lévi-Strauss said the science of the concrete is no less rigorous than the science of the engineer. Everything downstream turned an epistemology into a behaviour.[1]
A legitimate style of building knowledge by arranging and rearranging concrete materials in conversation with them, set against the planner's top-down style of specifying and then implementing. Turkle and Papert borrowed the bricoleur in 1990 to describe how some children and adults program computers, and argued for epistemological pluralism: schools and computer culture privilege the planner, and bricoleurs (disproportionately women and girls in their studies) are marked as deficient when they are simply different. The construct is a cognitive and affective style of the learner, aligned with Papert's constructionism, and its enemy is the curriculum, not scarcity. It differs from every management meaning in that the bricoleur is not short of anything.[2]
Local, improvised adjustment of systems and organisation by people close to the situation, which Ciborra argued is where strategic information systems and organisational form actually come from. His 1996 platform organisation is a firm that keeps recombining structures in response to surprise rather than executing a design; his 2002 book made tinkering, drift, and hospitality toward technology the alternatives to the planning and alignment models that dominate IS. Bricolage here is an organisational practice with an argument attached: the systems that became strategic advantages were tinkered into existence, and formal methods take credit after the fact. What differs is that Ciborra's bricoleur is inside a large firm with plenty of resources and no plan worth following.[3][4]
The capacity to create order out of whatever materials are at hand when the expected order collapses. Weick's 1993 reading of the Mann Gulch fire, in which thirteen men died after their sensemaking and their role structure fell apart together, named bricolage as one of four sources of resilience: the foreman who lit an escape fire in the grass and lay down in its ashes improvised a tool from the thing that was killing him. Bricolage here is a property of a group under threat, paired with improvisation, virtual role systems, wisdom, and respectful interaction. It is about sensemaking in minutes, not resource strategy over years, and its outcome is survival.[5]
Making do by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities, Baker and Nelson's 2005 definition, built from a field study of 29 resource-constrained firms and fixed on three elements: making do, combining resources for new purposes, and using resources at hand. They found firms that refused to accept the limits others accepted, and that bricolage could either sustain a firm or trap it in parallel bricolage across every domain at once. Senyard, Baker, Steffens, and Davidsson turned it into an eight-item scale in 2014 and found it predicted innovativeness in new firms. The construct is a firm's behaviour under scarcity, scored from founder self-report; the myth-making and the epistemology are gone.[6][7]
In urban design, bricolage refers to making the city by collage, combining fragments of different times instead of following one total plan. This meaning comes from Rowe (1978) in Collage city.[9]
In cultural studies, bricolage refers to how subcultures rework everyday objects, such as safety pins, into a new style that carries new meanings. This meaning comes from Hebdige (1979) in Subculture: The meaning of style.[10]
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Social innovation and development
making do with resources at hand, extended by social enterprises to include creating social value, stakeholder participation, and persuasion.Bricolage as social enterprises practise it, defined by Di Domenico, Haugh, and Tracey in 2010 from eight UK cases as Baker and Nelson's three elements plus three more: creating social value, stakeholder participation, and persuasion. Social enterprises make do because their markets do not pay, and they extend the resources at hand to volunteers, goodwill, and the political leverage of their cause. The added elements change the construct from a resource behaviour into a mission-driven practice with legitimacy as an input, which is why the scale for the entrepreneurship meaning does not carry over. What differs is that the constraint is structural and permanent, and the value counted is social.[8]