Property PhD Spotlight Seminar examines the organisational dynamics behind net-zero office buildings

The Department of Property held its latest Property PhD Spotlight Seminar on Monday, 3 August 2026, with PhD candidate Gishan Abhayagunarathna presenting his research on sustainable maintenance and net-zero-oriented energy performance in office buildings. The seminar was held in Room 260-6115 at the Sir Owen G Glenn Building and was also available online via Zoom.

Presenting under the title "Illusion of Routine: Organisational Dynamics of Sustainable Maintenance for Net-Zero-Oriented Energy Performance in Office Buildings", Gishan set out why existing office buildings are critical to decarbonisation. Globally, buildings account for approximately 30 percent of final energy consumption and 26 percent of energy-related emissions, while around 70 percent of New Zealand’s projected 2050 building stock already exists. Sustainable maintenance, he noted, remains comparatively underexamined as a factor shaping how buildings actually perform in use.

His study addresses three interrelated problem domains. Coopetitive coordination may increase visibility while allowing symbolic decoupling between net-zero commitments and everyday maintenance practice. Pride and moral commitment may energise maintenance work while also contributing to moral self-licensing, emotional labour, silence, and constrained learning. Data-informed and procedurally rationalised maintenance investment may appear to strengthen decision making while producing short-term, uneven, or weakly sustained follow-through. The research also examines how sector-level diagnostic patterns may help contextualise these organisational pathways.

The theoretical architecture of the study is grounded in critical realism and abductive reasoning, with paradox theory serving as the primary integrative lens, supported by institutional theory, affective organisational theory, and behavioural decision theory. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitatively driven mixed-methods design centred on semi-structured interviews with 15 to 20 organisational actors involved in office-building maintenance, energy performance, and sustainability decision pathways in Auckland. Interview data will be analysed through NVivo-supported reflexive thematic analysis, complemented by Python-based computational text indicators and diagnostic analyses of New Zealand commercial-sector secondary data.

Gishan explained that the originality of the study lies in reframing sustainable maintenance as a socio-technical organisational capability and in advancing the Illusion of Routine as a bounded explanatory construct. The work is expected to carry theoretical, methodological, practical, and ethical-governance implications, including for explaining maintenance fragility, supporting clearer accountability, improving follow-through, and promoting more responsible use of maintenance and sustainability data.

Gishan Abhayagunarathna is a PhD candidate in the Department of Property, Faculty of Business and Economics, at the University of Auckland. He has more than seven years of experience spanning academia, research, and professional practice, including work in higher education in Sri Lanka across undergraduate, postgraduate, and transnational degree programmes delivered with partner universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. Before entering academia, he began his career in Corporate Finance and Deal Advisory at KPMG Sri Lanka. He holds an MSc in Professional Accountancy from the University of Dundee, Scotland, graduating with Distinction, and a BSc in Finance from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, graduating with First Class Honours. His broader research interests include sustainable building operation and maintenance, energy efficiency, organisational governance, behavioural decision-making, sustainable finance, and investment behaviour.

The Property PhD Spotlight Seminar series provides doctoral researchers in the Department of Property with a regular platform to share work in progress with staff, fellow students, and colleagues joining online, and to receive feedback at an important stage of their research development.