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This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

Miller McPherson's approach to measuring the inherent duality of organizational forms and the environmental niches that they occupy is adapted and applied to an analysis of the institutional field of (outdoor) poverty relief organizations operating in New York City (1888–1917). In contrast to McPherson's approach that emphasizes how organizations are differentially arrayed within “Blau space,” this chapter focuses on how organizational forms are distributed across an institutional “logic space” that is itself dually ordered and defined by the kinds of organizational forms that are understood to exist. The resulting niche maps are employed to trace out the jurisdictional conflicts that erupted during the Progressive Era between two competing organizational forms – scientific charities and settlement houses – each of which embodied a particular vision and practice for delivering social relief to the poor.

Studies of the social construction of markets have not determined which social environments, which we refer to as proximate social space, are most likely to trigger social construction processes. We find that U.S. nonprofit fiscal sponsors respond to greater potential for category emergence when proximate social space is defined by geography but not by market segment. Further, in addition to responding to potential claimants based on geographic peers, organizations also respond to actual claimants based on peers in the market segment. The pattern suggests that geographic social proximity triggers initial label claiming, which in turn triggers responses from market segment peers.

This chapter describes public space exploration services’ business goals, purpose, and strategy. It reinforces space exploration organizations’ fundamental bureaucratic administrative culture (Tier 1). The authors describe the influence that political appointees as leaders may play in shaping public sector cultures. Next, the public service culture (Tier 2) is deconstructed, and each of the five layers is described in detail. Additionally, the authors explain why focusing on the beliefs layer is the dominant layer and the essential starting point for analysis in space exploration cultures. Next, the chapter outlines the landscape of external influencing cultures (Tier 3) in the space exploration landscape. Finally, the potential value and challenges of developing internal KLC cultures are explored.

While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional labor is less understood. With this contribution, I aim to unveil “the good, the bad and the ugly” of emotional labor as a dynamic theatrical performance.

Focusing on three geriatric long-term care units within a French public hospital, this qualitative study relies on two sets of data (observation and interviews). Deeply rooted within the field of study, the chosen methodological approach substantializes the subtle hues of the emotional experience at work and targets resonance rather than generalization.

Using the theatrical metaphor, this research underlines the role of space in the practice of emotional labor in a unique way. It identifies the main emotionalized zones or emotional regions (front, back, transitional, mixed) and details their characteristics, before unearthing the nonlinearity and polyphonic quality of emotional labor performance and the versatility needed to that effect. Indeed, this research shows how health-care professionals juggle with the specificities of each region, as well as how space generates both constraints and resources. By combining static and dynamic prisms, diverse instantiations of hybridity and spatial in-betweens, anchored in liminality and trajectories, are revealed.

This research adds to the current body of literature on the concept of emotional labor by shedding light on its highly dynamic and interactional nature, revealing different levels of porosity between emotional regions and how the characteristics of each type of area can taint others and increase/decrease the occupational health costs of emotional labor. The study also raises questions about the interplay of emotional labor performance with the level of humanization/dehumanization of elderly people. Given the global demographics about an aging population, this gives food for thought at a social level.

With increasingly precarious work contracts, more remote work, and additional flexibility in the timing of the workday, the new world of work is creating both relational opportunities and relational challenges for modern workers. In this chapter, we pair recent research on human thriving with trends we observe in organizations' efforts to create and maintain a sense of community. Key in these efforts is a new kind of built environment – the coworking space – which brings together remote and independent workers and, increasingly, traditional employees as well. We show that in curating community, or perhaps even the possibility of community, coworking spaces may support the interpersonal learning and vitality that help workers to thrive.

In their contribution, Maja Apelt and Jana Hunnius ask how the physical proximity of organizations in a network impacts the creation of organizational boundaries. They assume that against a background of shared experiences, members of organizations can develop a community and cooperate on a basis of trust, but that this is not tantamount to organizational boundaries becoming permeable. Here, Apelt and Hunnius draw on Lefebvre’s (2006) concept of space and adapt this to the practice of organizations by drawing a distinction between three dimensions of spatial practice: spatial practice in the narrow sense, in other words, how the organizations structure the space; organizational practice or, in other words, which formal and informal structures they establish; and representative practice, that is, how they speak about space, legitimize their actions, and thus give them meaning. Empirically, the chapter is based on case studies at two German airports. Using the evidence provided by these studies, Apelt and Hunnius are able to show that the organizations develop different practices. While at one of the airports the community is strengthened, but the organizational boundaries are protected at the same time, the other airport establishes cooperative structures through which the organizational boundaries are weakened. The airport community plays a less important role here.

The authors are a finance professor and an administrator in a major suburban independent school district who minored in finance while working toward his doctorate in education. We have used the case of shell space to discover the different incentives non-profit administrators have in the acquisition, recognition, and rational exercise of real options by their organizations (compared with managers of for-profit businesses). Shell space is space within a new building that has been enclosed against the elements, but not yet finished for its intended future use. The shell space can be viewed as a set of complex options (along the lines of the Stulz–Johnson options to choose among a group of several possible finished outcomes with different costs of exercise). A business executive could be expected to make the acquisition decision based on the value drivers know to impact such options. In the not-for-profit arena, though, decisions about the acquisition and use of options are driven by incentives that arise from within the organization or emanate from the politically elected (or appointed) board of trustees.

Organizational theorists and strategy scholars are both interested in how organizations deal with ambiguity, especially in relation to implementation. This chapter examines one source of ambiguity that organizations face, which is based on their efforts to implement moral mandates. These mandates, which are related to areas such as environmental sustainability and diversity, are inherently ambiguous, as they lack a shared understanding regarding their scope and associated practices. They are also often broad and systemic and may be unclearly aligned with an organization's strategy. Due to these challenges, in this chapter, we theorize that collective action at the field level is necessary for organizations to advance and concretize moral mandates. We examine this theorizing through the case of the implementation of sustainability in higher education. We hypothesize and find support for the idea that when an organization's members engage in collective action at the field level, those organizations have an increased likelihood of achieving sustainability implementation. To gain insight into this field-to-organization relationship, we qualitatively examine 18 years of conversations from an online forum to develop a process model of moral mandate implementation. We theorize that collective action functions as a field-configuring space, in which actors from a variety of organizations come together to (1) refine the scope of the mandate and (2) create an implementation repertoire that actors can draw on when seeking to bring sustainability to their own organizations. Overall, our study provides a model of how ambiguous moral mandates can be implemented by highlighting the important role of collective action across organizations in concretizing those mandates and providing actors with the tools for their implementation.