Organizational Spaces: Rematerializing the Workaday World

This insightful book poses interesting theoretical and methodological questions for the processes of spatial design and the treatment of workspaces in organizational settings of various kinds. The contributors expertly answer the need for practical field research on spatial settings and materiality in organizations of various sorts. Organizational Spaces explores a wide range of interfaces between built spaces and organizational actors, including the ways the former can potentially affect and shape the behaviours and acts of employees at all levels, as well as clients, other visitors and onlookers. Using innovative interpretive methods, the book provides detailed empirical and theoretical analyses of field research that focus on the meanings that organizational spaces can communicate to multiple audiences. Scholars and graduate students in the areas of organizational culture, cultural change and intervention in organizations, international business, design sciences, as well as in organizational studies more broadly, should not be without this important and highly original resource.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction: The Spatial Turn in Organizational Studies Alfons van Marrewijk and Dvora Yanow PART I: SEEING ORGANIZATIONAL SPACES 1. ‘All Together, Altogether Better’: The Ideal of ‘Community’ in the Spatial Reorganization of the Workplace Karen Dale and Gibson Burrell 2. Corridor Communication, Spatial Design and Patient Safety: Enacting and Managing Complexities Rick Iedema, Debbi Long and Katherine Carroll 3. Bendable Bars in a Dutch Prison: A Creative Place in a Non-creative Space Patrick Kenis, Peter M. Kruyen and Joan M.J. Baaijens PART II: LIVING ORGANIZATIONAL SPACES 4. What do Buildings do? How Buildings-in-use Affect Organizations Marja Gastelaars 5. The Beauty and the Beast: The Embodied Experience of Two Corporate Buildings Alfons van Marrewijk 6. Space as Context and Content: The Diwan as a Frame and a Structure for Decision-making David Weir PART III: THINKING ORGANIZATIONAL SPACES 7. Giving Voice to Space: Academic Practices and the Material World Dvora Yanow 8. Virtual Worlds for Organizational Spaces Mark Mobach 9. Firms in Film: Representations of Organizational Space, Gender and Power Alexia Panayiotou and Krini Kafiris Afterword: Organizational Spaces: From ‘Matters of Fact’ to ‘Matters of Concern’ Kristian Kreiner Index

About the Author :
Edited by Alfons van Marrewijk, Professor of Construction Cultures, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, Adjunct Professor of Project Management, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway and Dvora Yanow, Guest Professor, Wageningen University, the Netherlands

Review :
‘Space and spatiality have been “present absentees” of organization studies for decades. Since the early days they figured prominently in studies of organizations yet important conceptualization of their nature and import has not been begun since recently. Improved understanding of contemporary management and organization cannot circumvent a more profound questioning of space and spatiality. An important stepping-stone in that work is to do away with the assumption of separation between a space “out there” and actors’ experience “in here”. The papers in this volume represent such a break by showing us how space may become not just embedded, but also embodied in a range of different settings. The volume thus contributes importantly towards a badly needed yet historically neglected area of organization and management.’