0000000000307344
AUTHOR
Linda L. Putnam
Spacing and Organizing: Process Approaches to the Study of Organizational Space
In the past several decades, the research on space in management studies has moved from being an implicit idea to becoming an important generative force in organizational theory. Through this turn, space no longer surfaces as a stable container in which organizing occurs, rather it is a process for enacting organizing. Even with the growth of studies on organizational space, only a modicum of work exists that aims to distill and theorize the notion of space as organizing. This paper sets forth a typology of process studies on organizational space linked to two dimensions and five approaches for conceiving of space as organizing. In offering this typology, it not only provides an overview of…
Process studies of organizational space
The past decade has experienced an increase in the number of studies on organizational space or where work occurs. A number of these studies challenge traditional views of organizational space as a fixed, physical workspace because researchers fail to account for the spatial dynamics that they observe. New technologies, shifting employee-employer relations, and burgeoning expectations of the contemporary workforce blur boundaries between home and work, connect people and things that historically could not be linked, and extend workspaces to nearly everywhere, not just office buildings. Research on these transformations calls for incorporating movement into the physicality of work. Thus, org…
The dialectics of spatial performances: The interplay of tensions in activity-based organizing
Navigating organizational workspace is often plagued with tensions that emerge from the interplay of intended designs with organizational activities and lived experiences. These tensions are evident in research findings, such as inconsistencies in the ways that employees react to new workplace designs. They call on scholars to rethink organizational space, not as a concrete, static, or ready-made ‘thing’, but as a set of ongoing performances that enact particular practices, clashes among opposites, and organizational tensions. Based on research in a Nordic company, this study reveals how tensions and responses to them in an activity-based office generate creative alternatives that enhance …