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Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00104.x
Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation:
From Fragments to Spatial Theory
Susan Halford*
University of Southampton
Abstract
Work organisations are made by the arrangement of space and working lives are
made and lived through these spaces. Yet, explicit interest in space has been
marginal to the development of sociologies of work organisation. Despite this,
spatial analysis has often offered support to established theories of work and
organisation. This paper reviews this contribution, excavating the spatial from
past studies intended to address the labour process; semiotics and discourse; and
the nature of everyday working lives. The second part of the paper emphasises
the importance of making space more central to our conceptual and theoretical
concerns and draws on spatial theory from social and cultural geography to do
so. The paper endeavours to integrate the fragmented insights from different
scholarly paradigms in the sociology of work with this spatial theory and to
promote an enhanced spatial sensibility for the sociology of work and organisations.
This review and fusion contributes to wider calls to develop a new sociology of
work that prioritises the centrality of space to understanding work.
The sociology of work and organisations offers us a well-stocked toolbox
of concepts, theories and themes with which to explore how organisations take shape and how work is constructed and experienced within
them. We are used to thinking about factory life, bureaucracy, organisational cultures and occupational identities, for example. But all of
these are, also, about the organisation and occupation of space. We can
see this most clearly when we think about the establishment of factories
during the Western industrial revolution, when workers who had previously been distributed between many sites under the ‘putting out
system’ were brought together – in particular – to facilitate surveillance
and control and enhance the new capitalist mode of production (Marglin
1974/1982). But there is more to the spatiality of work organisations
than this.
From the moment we encounter a workplace – in person, in visual
representations, or in the imagination – the location and architecture of
the building are implicated in how we understand the organisation and
the work that goes on within it.
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Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
Figure 1. The Swiss Re Tower, City of London (http://www.copyright-free-pictures.org.uk/
london-england/48-swiss-re-tower.htm).
Figure 2. ICI Billingham, looking east across the HP ammonia works. Photograph courtesy
of Stockton Borough Council Library Service (www.stockton.picture.gov.uk).
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00104.x
Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 3
Once we enter a workplace, we encounter another spatial landscape.
From an assembly line, to a corporate board room, a typing pool to an
operating theatre, classroom, sweatshop, restaurant or police station, all are
organisations of space and of work in space. Organisations take form
through these spaces. Working lives are made and lived within these
spaces. At one level this claim should be very familiar because – at least
when we stop to think about it – it is something that we have all experienced, in one way or another. Enter any work organisation and we are,
necessarily, engaged in complex spatialities: engaged with the meanings,
materialities and bodily performances embedded in and produced by these
organisations of space and spatialities of work.
Yet, the spatialities of organisation, and work in organisations, have
been marginal to sociologies of work and organisation. This marginalisation
is sometimes blamed on Elton Mayo’s analysis of the famous experiments
at the Hawthorne Electrical plant, conducted from 1924 –1932 (Homans
1950; Hatch 1997). Although the researchers originally aimed to explore
how changes in the physical setting of work affected productivity, the
interpretation of their findings led them to pursue the effects of social
groups instead, founding the Human Relations School and shaping the
sociology of work and organisation for many decades to come. However,
lack of attention to the spatialities of organisation, and of work in organisations, has certainly not been confined to Human Relations but stretches
across different perspectives in the sociology of work and organisation.
This widespread lack of attention to the spatialities of work and organisation
can perhaps be better explained by the long term lack of attention to
space and spatialities within the discipline of sociology as a whole or, more
properly maybe, to the hiving off of space into urban sociology and
geography, at least until relatively recently (Prior 1988). However, even if
the discipline of geography has been the long-term custodian of space,
there is no tradition of attention to the spatialities of work and organisation
in the sense that it has been introduced above. Indeed, for decades, economic
geographers ignored the spatialities of work organisations, and even
organisations themselves (Walker 1989), preferring to concentrate instead
on ‘macro’ spatial processes of industrial location, economic restructuring,
globalisation and so on (McDowell 2001). Whilst these issues are, of
course, highly significant to sociologists of work and organisation, they
are limited in what they can tell us about workspaces or the lives lived
within these. For instance, from this work we have learnt important insights
about how the division of labour produces uneven local development and
places that are associated with particular kinds of employment (Massey
1984), or how cycles of capitalist investment produce new urban landscapes
(Harvey 1992/1999) but rather less about the working spaces or spatialities
of working lives.
Broadly speaking then, there has been an evacuation of space from
sociologies of work and organisation, even if we pursue our concern
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00104.x
4 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
with the spatial into geography, its’ disciplinary home territory. But
this is not to say that space is marginal to us. One does not have to dig
too deep to find fascinating illustrations describing the spatialities of
work and organisation and, indeed, periodic calls from sociologists for
us to integrate the spatial into our analysis of work and/or organisations
(Boden 1994; Baldry 1997, 1999; Homans 1950; Prior 1988; Rosengren
and DeVault 1963). The first aim of this paper is to synthesise the key
points made about space, work and organisation in this literature. This
review is necessarily selective. To trace the embedded spatialities in
research on work and organisation is a far bigger project, still underway.
Nonetheless, even a selective review is instructive, revealing the multiple
spatialities of organisations and work in organisations. There can be
no doubt that this is a productive place to dig. However, this review also
reveals that space is generally conceptualised as a ‘supporting actor’ to
otherwise established and essentially aspatial ways of thinking. This conceptualisation of space within the work and organisations literature has
two important effects. First, our understanding of the spatialities of work and
organisation is fragmented: with important insights isolated from one
another by the different paradigms to which they are attached. Second,
with notable exceptions, space itself remains largely under-theorised.
The second aim of this paper is to redress these effects by placing space
centre stage. I will endeavour to show that drawing on spatial theory from
contemporary social and cultural geography offers two significant steps
forward. First, there is the potential to integrate the hitherto fragmented
insights referred to above. Rather than being content with adding spatial
insights to existing paradigms, spatial theory offers a way to integrate
apparently diverse insights. Second, drawing on spatial theory in this way
enables us to extend the contribution that a spatial perspective can make
to sociologies of work and organisation. This contribution is timely. Recent
years have seen diverse calls for attention to space in our understandings of
work and organisation, notably from management (Dale 2005; Kornberger and
Clegg 2006; Watkins 2005) and geography (del Casino et al. 2000; Crang 1999;
Conradson 2003; Laurier 1991). Building on similar theoretical roots to those
discussed in this paper, this research contributes to the development of a
spatial sensibility in our understanding of work and organisations. In and
of itself this is worth doing. More fundamentally, however, in this paper,
I want to suggest that integrating a theoretically informed spatial sensibility into our research can make a significant contribution to recent,
and far wider calls, for the development of new sociologies of work
(Glucksmann 2000; Pettinger et al. 2005; Strangleman 2007).
Spatialities of work and organisation
Attention to the spatialities of work and organisation can be found
across the different paradigms that have characterised our subdiscipline.
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 5
In selectively reviewing these contributions, this section traces three
themes, focussing in turn on the labour process; semiotics and discourse;
and working selves.
Control of working bodies and subjects in the labour process
The first significant strand of thinking about the spatiality of work and
organisation belongs to Marxist inspired analyses of the labour process
under capitalism. Here workspace is understood to be rooted in the political
economy of its production. A key moment in the industrial revolution
was the centralisation of labour into factories, facilitating a shift in control
over work processes from the individual worker (who worked without direct
supervision under the putting out system) to direct control by the employer
(Marglin 1974/1982). Moreover, the success of the manufacturing division
of labour was most effectively achieved where workers, each responsible for
one small part of the production process, were located side-by-side in space
facilitating quick and efficient throughput of the product to completion
(Braverman 1972). This principle of co-location achieves it’s apotheosis
in the invention of the modern assembly line, first implemented by
Henry Ford in 1913. Whilst this has been widely interpreted as a temporal
principle of social order (Drucker 1950), since mechanisation enabled
employers to control the speed of production, the assembly line is also a
spatial order, regulating working bodies in factory space:
On the assembly line each worker ... works at a particular station and work
is allocated to him at that station. He is surrounded by stacks of
components ... His job is to attach the components to the body shell as they
come to him. (Beynon 1973/1979, 135)
At the Ford car plants, the line was set two feet above floor level at ‘man
high placing’ regulating even body posture to what was believed to be the
most productive position (Arnold and Faurote 1915; Beynon 1973/1979).
The spatialities of the labour process have also been well documented in
white-collar work. Here, too, ‘managerial control was built into the spatial
relations of employment’ (Felstead et al. 2005, 3), most notably in large
open plan offices where each worker is allocated his or her own ‘veal pen’
(Zelinsky 1997; Kelly 1980). For example, Michael Kelly (1980) describes
the organisation of space in one part of the British Civil Service during
the 1970s:
Records branch in this particular department was divided into one hundred
rooms of six men and women performing exactly the same tasks on one
hundredth of the insured population of the United Kingdom. In a typical
room in these offices, two sections were situated, one down each side with
executive officers at one end. The two sections were divided by a long line of
cabinets ... the clerical officers sat in pairs at desks which stretched down the
rooms in long parallel rows 30 inches apart. (Kelly 1980, 85)
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Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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6 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
Here the division of labour is organised in spatial formations similar to
the assembly line, surveillance is enabled from key vantage points and
hierarchies are underscored by the judicious allocation of space both
quantitatively and qualitatively. How much space white collar staff are
given has long been used to symbolise hierarchy – being given one’s own
office, or a larger office a mark up in the career ladder – whilst the quality
and style of décor and furnishings as well as the nature of the ambient
environment (lighting, heating, etc.) are also clear signs of status (Baldry 1999).
In this way, the built environment sends out constant cues on hierarchy
and status (Baldry 1997, 368). More than the physical control of bodies,
the organisation of work space has ideological effects, here read as largely
intentional strategies of control within a capitalist mode of production.
As such, this literature also offers us examples of workers’ resistance to
capitalist/employer imposed space: both formal campaigns for example
to improve the spatial conditions of work; and informal resistances where spatial
controls are subverted or spaces re-appropriated for unintended activities
(Baldry, Bain and Taylor 1997). Frank McKenna (1980) offers a wonderful
example of this in his historical analysis of signal boxes on the British railways
The directors believed that the signal box should not be a source of comfort
to the occupier. No door was provided ... Bob had, however, stolen a march
on the regulations, for he had grown two huge bushes of tea plant, which met
at the top and formed a complete arch and which ... [with] a little brick
paving, and a few odd pieces of rusty sheet iron interlaced in the top of the
tea trees to make it watertight formed quite a little Robinson Crusoe dwelling.
(McKenna 1980, 70)
Here, Bob brings his own skills as a gardener and handy-man, arguably
gendered and class-based skills, to subvert the intentions of his employers
and assert his right to be warm and dry.
In summary, this strand of spatial analysis in sociologies of work and
organisation is underpinned by an essentially structuralist perspective, in
which space is seen as a key tool used by employers in the capitalist
mode of production. In this account, employers have the power to make
working spaces but, since conflict lies at the heart of the employment
relationship, workers may resist these spaces and, in doing so, come to
remake uses and meanings of space in their own interests. Indeed, the
employment relationship itself is often conceptualised through the use of
spatial metaphor as a ‘contested terrain’ or ‘frontier of control’, an
inherently fluid and dynamic space in which relations between capital and
labour are continually made and remade (Roberts 1993).
Spatial symbolism and discourse
A second significant strand of thinking about organisational space extends
the semiotic analysis of built form introduced above. Whilst architecture,
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00104.x
Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 7
layout, décor and so on may be used as a kind of ideological superstructure,
underscoring the capitalist division of labour, it is also suggested that
architecture sends out more diffuse and less directly strategic messages.
Location, architectural forms and organisations of space may be used to
project distinct aesthetic codes communicating corporate culture and
identity. Space may be used strategically to position organisations in the
eyes of peers, competitors and customers, whether in the private or public
sector, and is tied to trends in architectural and office design, signifying –
for example – that organisations are up-to-date, dynamic, and affluent
enough to invest in new built forms (Hatch 1997). As one of the leading
practitioners of this approach explains
... no other means of communication is more present, more powerful and
more persistent than the physical environment in expressing the values and
aspirations of the organisations that use it. (Duffy 2001)
Sharon Traweek’s (1988/1992) attention to spatiality in the work and
organisation of high energy physicists illustrates this well. The very site of
the Stanford University linear accelerator centre articulates its status:
an English green lawn in an environment of golden dry savannahs, the lab
demonstrates the authority of its own vision of nature and its power to
commandeer water in a land of recurrent drought ... an ecosystem has been
altered to create ... an eloquent tableaux vivant. (p. 24)
As Traweek claims, the organisation of space, and of work in space, may
elicit certain forms of behaviour and subdue or prohibit other forms of
behaviour.
A theoretically extended version of this analysis has been developed
by poststructuralist theorists, inspired by Foucault’s work on hospitals,
prisons and asylums (Foucault 1970, 1973, 1976). For ‘institutional
geographers’ (following Flowerdew 1982) these material built environments
‘seek to restrain, control, treat, “design”, and “produce” particular and
supposedly improved versions of human minds and subjects’ (Philo and
Parr 2000, 513). Whilst there is some attention to location, the particular
focus here is on architecture and internal spaces. ‘Above all’ Prior (1988)
argues ‘a building expresses a discourse’ (p. 91). That is to say, specific
sets of knowledge and beliefs are embedded in the architecture and
layout of buildings. This argument takes us beyond the idea that particular
groups may use workspaces to further their interests, to a wider recognition that workspaces can only be understood within the historically
specific relations that produce them, including planning regulations,
architectural trends, understandings of work, class, gender, hygiene,
morality, discipline and so on. These discourses may chime with the
interests of particular social groups but they are never reducible to these
interests. As, Prior (1988) explains, multiple discursive themes can be
read in the architecture of a building, from the original plans to the built
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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8 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
form and subsequent alterations and additions (see also Larson 1997). In
particular, Prior traces changing ‘forms of medical theorizing and medical
practice’ (p. 110) in the design of children’s hospitals and asylums for
the mentally ill.
Children’s wards for example, correlate with the rise of the child as a focus of
medical practice; the birth of the asylum with the invention of madness; and
the emergence of the pavilion hospital with the diffusion of miasmic theories.
(Prior 1988, 93)
(See also Smith and Bugni’s (2006) similar architectural history of asylums
for the mentally ill.) Whilst Prior’s focus here is not these children’s
hospitals as workspaces, these insights have important implications for
thinking about the spatialities of work and organisation there is clearly an
overlap (del Casino et al. 2000). For example, Prior’s empirical examples
are suggestive of how hospital architectures carry embedded divisions
between medical and nursing work, since they distinguish clearly different
spaces for different professional activities; and of changing conceptions of
gender as separate wards are replaced by mixed sex wards over time. Recent
developments to hospital architecture also mark a shift in prevailing
cultures of public health, as functional and institutional built forms are
replaced with design borrowed from the corporate sector. Reading the
alternative and contemporary architecture of the Starship children’s hospital
in Auckland, Kearns and Barnett (1999) trace both market-driven discourse
and contemporary cultural discourse in the built form (see also O’Neill
and McGuirk (2004) on office design in Sydney’s central business district).
In this account, space is largely conceived in mental terms, as messages
sent which may be more or less intentional and dynamic. Here, spatial
discourse articulates specific notions of what the institution is for and how
we should behave within it. More than this, spatial discourse shapes the
production of working selves – who we are at work and how we understand our working identities. Whilst some emphasise the imposition of
behaviours and subjectivities through organisational space, others argue
that we should pay far more attention to the agency of individuals and
groups in responding to organisational space (Larson 1997; Gieryn 2002;
Smith and Bugni 2006).
Working selves
A third strand of thinking concerns the internal differentiation of organisational space and turns our attention to the working lives lived in and
between these spaces of organisation. Most notably, in Goffman’s work on
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1969/1990), we find extended
attention to the spaces of working lives. Goffman’s particular interest is in
distinguishing between the front stages and back stages of working life,
and the different practices of impression management that workers engage
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 9
in between these two types of region. On the front stage, workers must
perform for their customers/clients: this is the public face of the organisation.
Backstage they may relax a little, get on with their work without the need
to manage the impression they are giving to the customer as they do so
(although of course, there may be all kinds of impression management still
going on, to bosses, peers, etc.) (see also Bone’s (2006) recent study of
direct selling organisations). Significantly, Goffman’s study of work in a
hotel restaurant showed that different groups of workers may define their
front and back stage differently. For example, Goffman noted the daily
struggle between managers and waiters over the boundary between the
kitchen and the dining room.
The maids wanted to keep the doors open to make it easier to carry food trays
back and forth, to gather information about whether the guests were ready or
not ... Since the maids played a servant role before the guests, they felt they
did not have too much to lose by being observed in their own milieu by the
guests who glanced into the kitchen when passing the open doors. The managers
on the other hand wanted to keep the doors closed so that the middle class
role imputed to them by the guests would not be discredited by disclosure of
their kitchen habits. (Goffman 1969/1990, 120)
Similarly, Rosengren and DeVault’s (1963) study of the spaces of work
in an obstetrics hospital showed how different staff had distinctive front
and back stages and added to this ‘interstitial’ areas – such as hallways and
cafeterias – where the usual conventions of status, rights and obligations
were less adhered to and more fluid forms of behaviour were observed.
Traweek’s (1988/1992) laboratory also offers intriguing examples of
identities performed distinctively in the different spaces of organisation. It
seems that ‘[t]heorists eat in small clusters’ (Traweek 1988/1992, 25)
whilst physicists ‘eschew any personal decoration or rearrangement of
furniture ... [creating] a strong impression of stoic denial of individualism
and great preoccupation with the urgent task at hand’ (p. 33). Here, the
users of space draw on a particular version of masculinity, emphasising the
celebration of the cerebral and denial of the material. More generally,
space may be a significant asset in the performance of gendered power
relations. Porter (1995) offers an interesting example in his analysis of
relations between the medical and nursing professions, describing an
incident that took place in a nurse’s office
There, behind the nurses desk, sits a registrar, while the nurse in charge
hovers around attempting to do her work, get at drawers, speak to a relative
on the phone and so on. Does the doctor get up and offer her his seat? No
he continues to sit and write up his notes ... The fact that the doctor continues to remain in the nurse’s chair shows a lack of respect. It says, albeit
indirectly, that she doesn’t matter. (Smith 1987, cited in Porter 1995, 49)
This occupation of space, says Porter (1995) is illustrative of the ‘degree
of arrogance that doctors feel able to get away with’ (p. 49).
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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10 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
In this strand of thinking, users are key to understanding work space.
Here space is conceptualised as a pre-existing context, or set of resources
for the performance of identities that exist already, outside of the spatial
contexts in which they are to be performed, but may be performed in
distinctive ways dependent on the particular setting that the individuals
find themselves in.
Overview
Here then we have three very different ways of thinking about space,
encompassing a variety of theoretical approaches to the sociology of work
and organisation. No doubt, all three are important. However, what we
see are partial takes on the spatialities of work and organisation. These are
slices of space cut to substantiate existing theories or perspectives. Each
seems to be missing something in its account of organisational and work
space. Attention to space in the organisation of the capitalist labour process
reduces space to a tool in the hands of the ruling class and insists that
space is a surface manifestation of underlying structures, of power relations
that are essentially aspatial although they may have profound spatial consequences. Attention to spatial discourse and semiotics gives space the
status of a message (Mandanipour 1996), a mental construct alone (Watkins
2005), devised – more or less intentionally – to communicate to the
audience whether this be the customer, the patient or the worker. Whilst
poststructuralist accounts propose that workers are subjected through spatial
discourse, rather less is known of the effects of this discourse on actual
embodied workers. As Fox (1997) argues, whilst architecture may offer a
‘skein of signs’ from which practices may be formed we cannot simply
read subjects from these signs. Rather, we should explore how meanings
are made and spaces used in everyday practice. For example, as Larson
(1997) claims, in relation to architecture specifically, buildings are ‘actively
interpreted’ in relation to users’ identities and in users’ practices. However,
whilst a focus on working lives brings much-needed attention to this
everyday practice, this is not connected, in explicitly spatial terms at least,
to wider discourses and socio-economic processes, emphasised in the
other strands of thinking.
Furthermore, whilst each of these themes seems lacking – to miss
something from the insights of the other – all are rather slippery in what
is meant by ‘space’. As a concept ‘space’ remains profoundly undertheorised. In some cases, space is simply the surface manifestation of
generative power relations that lie beneath, whilst in others space simply
exists as a set of constraints and resources used in the practices of everyday
working lives. The significant exception to this is in Foucauldian accounts
of institutional geography. Prior (1988), for example, traces a sociological
history of space (although not specifically in relation to work and organisations) that begins with Durkheim’s insistence on space (and time) as a
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 11
fundamental expression of social processes and ends, through criticism
of Durkheim, with an account of space as both a social product and – at
the same time – as productive of social relations: ‘space and society are
not therefore two separate realms of reality but are intertwined in a single
order of existence’ (p. 93). This claim echoes the founding principles of
much contemporary spatial theory in social and cultural geography, to
which the paper now turns in an endeavour to place space centre stage
and consider how we might move forward from the fascinating and
important – but fragmented and under-theorised – accounts of organisational
space that we have glimpsed so far.
Thinking about space
This section makes an analytical shift, turning our attention away from
‘what does space add’ to our understanding of work and organisations to
consider instead ‘what do we mean by space’. In doing this it is helpful
if we start with what might seem like commonsense. As Henri Lefebvre
(1991) has observed, the dominant way of conceptualising space (at least
in the West and since the Enlightenment) has been as an empty area,
something fixed and finite that can be measured, a conceptualisation
sometimes referred to as ‘Euclidian’ (after the Greek mathematician
Euclid, best known for his work in geometry). In this account, space is a
necessary condition for the conduct of social relations and the outcomes
of social relations can be mapped according to their locations in space.
Different societies may configure different kinds of spaces but space
itself remains no more than the area on which these social processes play
themselves out. In this sense, space is conceptualised in absolute terms as
‘a container in to which intrinsically non-spatial things are stuffed’
(Castree 2004, 183).
By contrast, human geographers, at least as far back as the mid-19th
century, have proposed a relative conceptualisation of space. Most influentially
perhaps, David Harvey (1969) has insisted that it is only though the
spatial arrangements of human activities and objects that space is made.
Space is not simply something empty on which activities and objects are
placed – in the Euclidian sense – but rather space arises as a system of
relations between activities and objects which ‘define spatial fields
of influence’ (Harvey 1969, 208). In this phrase, we see a dialectical way
of thinking about space (Soja 1989): human practices and objects make
spaces and – at the same time – these spaces offer resources for human action.
It is not only that space is socially produced, but also that space is implicated
in the production of social relations, practices and materialities. Space is both
the cause and effect of social life (Harvey 1985). Thus, the aim becomes
to trace the processes that give rise to particular spaces and places. Rather
than simply mapping things in space, this conceptualisation of space
demands that we explore how particular spaces are made and remade.
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12 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
Initially, we may turn to planners, architects, marketing advisors, interior
designers or even time and motion or health and safety experts – professionals
whose job it is to produce work spaces. Unpicking the knowledges and
rationalities within which these professionals practice and produce space
would be fascinating in and of itself and – more broadly – in terms of the
underlying discourses and power relations that it may reveal. What do
planners define as in the public interest? How are worker’s rights and
obligations defined? How are messages worked through architectural
styles? Here, no doubt, we would find conflicting and contested accounts
of workspace but could also trace the points of power, compromise and
agreement that enabled factories and offices to be built. But beyond this,
the conceptualisation of space defined above suggests we must take into
account broader social and historical relations in the production of workspace – the operations of the global finance markets for example in producing
slumps and booms in new office construction, embedded meanings linked
with particular sites for example associated with historical events or identities
such as Ground Zero or the City of London. And, at the same time,
unravelling workspace means taking into account the local, the everyday:
the users. Work spaces do not have intrinsic meaning: people give them
meaning (Smith and Bugni 2006) but they do not, of course do so under
conditions entirely of their own choosing. As Doreen Massey argues,
space is made at the intersection of economic, social and material relations
operating at a range of scales ‘from the immensity of the global to the
intimately tiny’ (2005, 9). Thus, exploring particular spaces means tracing
‘the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes
rather than a thing’ (Massey 2005, 141).
A spatial sensibility?
This account of space offers the potential to connect the different iterations
of space that can be traced in sociologies of work and organisation. If, as
proposed, we begin by understanding space as a product of multiple
inter-relations we are acknowledging that all kinds of processes and interrelations contribute to the making of particular spaces. We cannot generalise
about these in advance, but need to explore exactly which processes and
inter-relations contribute the making of which kinds of places and spaces.
To be sure, some spaces may be ‘provisionally ... stabilized out of ... turbulent
processes’ (Murdoch 2006, 4) but our task is to trace how such spaces endure
(for the time being) rather than to assume that space is ever done once and
for all. This is promising, but it comes at a theoretical price. It means losing
the structuralist conviction that organisational and work space can be explained
solely as the surface manifestation of underlying processes. It means losing
the conceptualisation of space as only a message, mental thing, towards
recognising the agentic, material and embodied relations that contribute
to the making of spaces – and the unpredictability of these outcomes. And
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 13
finally it means looking beyond the conceptualisation of space as something
that is already made, and rather that we should pay attention to the processes
of its construction. However, we have far more to gain than to lose from this.
If we begin by asking ‘how is this workplace/workspace made?’ not only
can we (potentially) admit all the different spatialities described above, our
attention may also be directed to new, exciting, and provocative ways of
thinking about work and organisations, as follows. First, this approach to
the making of work space insists that we recognise the placing of work
and organisation. As Gieryn (2000) notes, sociologists have often been
reluctant to frame their research in terms of place. In sociologies of work
and organisation the effect of this has been that research findings could
apparently be anywhere – or at least, in any number of industrial areas,
financial districts, etc. – and are often, at least in the recounting of
the research, apparently nowhere. Nonetheless, as Gieryn (2000) argues,
place ‘persists as a constituent element of social life and historical change’
(p. 463). Understanding how work and organisations are constructed and
lived in place adds the grounded richness of empirical detail. But more
than this, attention to place enables a more theoretical reappraisal of what
we mean by ‘the sociology of work and organisation’ and the terms with
which we understand our subject. In her analysis of the total social
organisation of labour, Glucksmann (2000) insists that we should see the
interconnectedness between what goes on in work organisations and
what outside rather than (to paraphrase Glucksmann) suggesting that the
work organisation itself is a totality (Glucksmann 2000, 164). In other
words, we cannot understand work and organisations by only looking
inwards or at work and organisation in a narrow sense. The approach
outlined above demands that we take into account relations between the
‘inside’ – the organisation – and the ‘outside’ the locale, the region and
even beyond (Glucksmann 2000; Halford and Leonard 2006).
Taking place on board in this way can help is to extend a range of
theoretical debates and empirical questions about the nature of contemporary
work and organisations. In my own research, with Pauline Leonard, tracing
relations between gender, identity and organisation (Halford and Leonard
2006), place became a key concept in understanding how particular
identities are negotiated in specific contexts. Theoretically this was an
important step forward, for us, because it focussed attention on how
individuals negotiate working identities within the range of specific resources
that they encounter in their everyday working lives. Focussing on doctors
and nurses working in the National Health Service, the concept of place
enabled us to understand how gendered discourses of medicine, nursing
and management were differentiated by locale and interpreted through a
repertoire of place specific meanings and practices. In another example
from my own research (Halford 2005) a study of organisational change in
a large insurance company found that workers’ responses to managerial
initiatives could not be explained solely in terms of management/staff
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Sociology Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00104.x
14 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
dynamics, although these were – of course – important. Rather, the complex
and sometimes contradictory responses only made sense once the organisation’s location, the particular town and the region were taken into
account. The nature of local labour markets had led to divisions in the
workforce and to the development of long-term social groups and friendships, which were more significant in explaining workers’ attitudes to
change, whilst regional pride connected to industrial heritage and perceptions
of a North–South division also influenced staff responses and practices.
Here then, the outcomes of an initiative to change the organisation could
only be explained by the particular intersection of labour relations, memories,
emotions and personal ties in this place.
Second, this approach to work space contributes to the animation of
organisation: attending to the performative and dynamic practices that
constitute organisations; and bringing organisations to life, both descriptively
and theoretically (Alvesson and Deetz 1996; Clegg 1989; Halford et al.
1997; Law 1992). The approach outlined above insists that organisational
spaces are not fixed or finished, but made and remade in the practices of
everyday life. Organisational space is not simply a flat, pre-existing context
for social action but is produced and reproduced though social action which
is itself – as the dialectic of space insists – shaped by organisational space.
Workspaces are continually produced at the point of intersection between
multiple relations, performed in the practices of everyday life and shaped
by ongoing social, economic and cultural relations. To be sure, location and
buildings have some permanence and exercise power in the construction
of working spaces but the occupation of these spaces, the meanings
attached to them, our experience of them is not determined once and for
all but continues to be made and is, always potentially subject to change.
This point may be particularly important at the present time, as we see
the emergence of new forms of working spaces and places: shared office
spaces, experiments in office design, remote working and varieties of
cyberspace (Felstead et al. 2005). The possibilities provided by new information
and communication technologies for remote working pose fundamental
challenges to older spatial orders of surveillance and management (Handy
1995), offer new configurations for networked organisations (Jackson and
van der Weilen 1998) and raise new issues about relations between paid
work and domestic life (Baines 2002). Here, in a very obvious sense,
workplaces and spaces are being remade in everyday life. The configurations
that will emerge – both literally, in terms of the kinds of spaces that we work
in, and more broadly, in terms of paradigms of management and organisation
and what it means to be ‘at work’ – are uncertain. Attention to the
ongoing production of workplaces and spaces opens the way for a politics
of change, a way to ‘escape the inexorability which so frequently characterises
the grand narratives related by modernity (Massey 2005, 11). Whilst space
is the product of interconnections, these interconnections are not predetermined, they are never exhausted, finished or done. From this perspective,
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Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation 15
however repetitively and consistently some workplaces and spaces may be
made and remade, and change may be wrought intentionally or otherwise
in surprising and novel ways.
Third, although I am sure not finally, this approach contributes to the
materialisation of work and organisation (see also Dale 2005). I mean this
in two slightly different ways. First, it insists on the significance of nonhuman objects. In this perspective, workplaces and spaces are the product
of inter-relations between people and things. As Smith and Bugni (2006)
state: ‘... physical buildings, places and objects act as agents to shape our
thoughts and actions’ (p. 124). This suggests links with Actor Network
Theory and the interpretation of organisations as ‘the uncertain consequences
of the ordering of heterogeneous materials’ (Law 1992, 390). A hospital
ward, for example, is a space made from the ordering of architecture,
nurses, patients, beds, doctors, medicine, knowledge, instruments, notes,
computers, and so on. Second, the making of space draws attention to bodily
performance and experience. Workplaces and spaces are not just made by
meaning or what people think but also by what they do and how this is
experienced bodily. Phil Crang’s (1994) account of working as a waiter in
a Western-themed restaurant in South East England, captures this beautifully showing how the making of this workplace and the spaces within
it (as well as the making of a space of consumption) relies on bodily
performances securing, for example ambience, the consumer encounter
and the restaurant identity. In a different example, David Conradson (2003)
shows how embodiment and emotion are key to understanding the making
of a particular organisational space and in particular that fleeting, unpredictable spaces flicker in and out of existence in organisations. These
elements are difficult to catch in words and indeed an increasing number
of sociologists interested in spatiality are beginning to draw on the contribution that visual methods cam make in discovering and representing
spatial knowledge (Gieryn 2000; Halford 2005; Smith and Bugni 2006;
see also Strangleman 2004).
Conclusion
This paper suggests a trajectory. That we stop seeing the spatialities of
work and organisation as only supporting actors to other, non-spatial,
sociological approaches – however effectively this can be done – and that
we start taking space seriously as a starting point in its own right. Not only
does this enable us to consider how a range of valuable insights to the
spatialities of work and organisation might be brought together – admittedly
with costs that may be too great for some to bear – but it is suggestive
of a broader contribution that a spatial sensibility might make to our
understandings. Following Soja’s (1996) wider claims, this is not just
about adding space to existing ways of understanding work and organisation
paradigms, but a different way of thinking about work and organisation.
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16 Sociologies of Space, Work and Organisation
This has resonance with wider calls for a new sociology of work. Parry
et al. (2005, 3), for example, call for ‘... conceptual tools than enable us
to understand particular sets of experiences and activities outside a narrowly
employment focussed definition’. Surely, attention to space in the ways
described above offers one such promise. Similarly, this approach to space
insists that we may have to take into account such diverse relations and
experiences as global finance markets and human emotions, noise pollution
and identity, managerial paradigms and industrial heritage, furniture,
friendship, new technologies and memories, for example, if we want to
understand the spatialities of work and organisation. In this way, the
exploration of workplaces and workspaces may be one way to transcend
a tendency to ricochet between macro abstractions and micro empirical
adjustments. This is perhaps a particular feature of our subdiscipline where
grand claims are made, for example about the end of work (Strangleman
2007), followed by intensive empirical work proving, disproving or
modifying the thesis. By contrast, the spatial sensibility suggested here
suggests that we might instead bring theory, methodology and an empirical
focus into a more closely interwoven endeavour.
Short Biography
Susan Halford’s research interests have centred on questions of identities
and power, specifically in relation to gender and organisations. She has
published widely in this field including, most recently Negotiating Gendered
Identities at Work: Place, Space and Time (Palgrave, 2006) co-authored with
Pauline Leonard. Her most recent research builds on this thinking about
organisational space covering a wide range of subjects including new organisations of office space, remote working and, in particular, re-spatialisations
of healthcare work through the application of new technologies enabling
medical interventions at a distance and new forms of record keeping and
organisational management. Susan Halford is Professor of Sociology in the
School of Social Sciences at the University of Southampton and Professor
II at NORUT Social Science Research in Tromsø, Norway. She holds a
BA in Geography and both an MSc and DPhil in Urban and Regional
Studies.
Note
* Correspondence address: Sociology and Social Policy Division, School of Social Sciences,
University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.
Email: [email protected].
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