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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.

This paper aims to determine the advantages and disadvantages associated with integrating a coworking environment into the real estate portfolios of large office-based organizations. The study discusses both external and internal coworking solutions.

This paper is a literature review and qualitative research based on 12 semistructured interviews with high-level real estate practitioners, including users, suppliers and consultants.

The authors examined the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating coworking environments into the real estate portfolios of large organizations from the four perspectives of Krumm et al. (2000). These perspectives were operationalized through the 12 real estate added value parameters of Jensen and Van der Voordt (2017). The findings show that improved adaptability is the greatest advantage of external coworking solutions (facility management perspective). The most significant advantage of internal coworking is related to stimulation of innovation, creativity and knowledge sharing (general management perspective). The disadvantages of external and internal coworking partly overlap and are mainly the negative effect on the corporate culture (general management perspective).

The findings contribute to the understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating both external and internal coworking solutions from multiple perspectives and allow to compare them. The authors developed and tested an operationalization of the four perspectives of Krumm (2000) through the 12 added values of Jensen and Van der Voordt (2017). Opinions and perceptions of professionals regarding internal and external coworking models are presented in a framework and related to earlier findings.

This paper aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on office space in Johannesburg. This study further explores the role of changing work practices in the office sector in South Africa because of the pandemic and its impact on future office space use planning and management.

To understand the footprints that the COVID-19 pandemic has left on the office space market in Johannesburg, this study uses semi-structured interviews, which were administered to corporate office users, and a thematic analysis was adopted to understand the views, perspectives and expectations of office users.

The study showed that space users perceive COVID-19-induced remote working as having benefits, opportunities and challenges. A notable shift in office space utilization has emerged, with employees increasingly opting for roles that permit remote work. This newfound flexibility, accommodating both on-site and remote work, often makes working from home more appealing than traditional office environments that may no longer align with users’ preferences for office spaces.

The study is limited to Johannesburg, South Africa, and may not apply to other African markets. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, and analysis and results were deduced; this may be considered a limitation of this study.

The pandemic’s impact has brought about irreversible changes, compelling policymakers and business leaders to strategize and prepare. This proactive stance aims to prevent avoidable challenges for employees and companies during future pandemics. A thoughtful approach to the post-pandemic world can usher positive changes in the office and property sector. This includes the coexistence of both remote work and on-site working models.

This paper provides valuable insight into some of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa that are essential for future office space use planning and management. The insights from this study extend the literature and provide novel knowledge based on an office sector in the “global south.”

Meetings with colleagues are an essential activity in workplace collaboration. The iterative nature of collaborative work demands spaces that team members can access quickly and easily. Creating suitable meeting spaces will become more critical if the hybrid work model continues and the workplace environment becomes the hub for face-to-face collaborative time, learning and training. Workspace and fit-out is expensive so it is crucial that the investment in meeting spaces supports employees’ collaboration activities.

This paper presents a case study of a corporate organisation undertaken in New Zealand to investigate how employees from two business units use their workspace to collaborate within their own team and across other teams in their organisation. The study uses ethnographic techniques, including participant observation and in-depth face-to-face interviews.

The findings show that the frequency and nature of small group work in collaboration was underestimated in the initial planning of the new workspace. Although participants found the design and fit-out of the formal meeting rooms supportive of collaborative work, the meeting rooms were in high demand, and it was difficult to find a room at short notice. The breakout spaces were confusing because they lacked key design attributes identified by the participants as conducive to small group work. Design shortfalls together with fit-out features perceived as supportive of collaborative work are identified.

The research reports on employees’ perceptions and experiences across two functionally diverse business units, reflecting their different needs and concerns.

Fun at workplace is considered an important initiative to build co-working communities, and this study aims to study its role in promoting the innovative behaviour of co-workers [members of co-working spaces (CWS)] and the mechanism of its influence.

Based on the theory of social exchange and resource conservation, the authors conducted a qualitative study to explore the four dimensions of workplace fun and a quantitative study to empirically analyse the relationship between community embeddedness, organisational embeddedness, workplace fun and creativity of co-workers, taking K-space as an example.

Workplace fun is positively correlated with co-workers' creativity. Community embeddedness plays a complete mediating role between workplace fun and organisational embeddedness. Community embeddedness and organisational embeddedness play a chain-mediating role between workplace fun and creativity.

This study explores the process and impact of fun on employee creativity in a shared office environment by clarifying the composition of fun in CWS workplaces and the transmission mechanism of fun through informal community embeddedness and formal organisational embeddedness, expanding the research perspective on the factors influencing employee creativity in the new office model and enriching the research findings on the impact of fun at work on job performance.

This paper introduces a conceptual lens for leading social change in slums and informal settlements. In line with this aim, the purpose of this case study is to describe the public problem-solving approach of a social change organization situated in an informal settlement through the lens of adaptive leadership, complexity theory and social change leadership (SCL).

This paper follows an engaged reflection tradition. First, the author-practitioners describe an informal settlement case hereafter called ISC in southeast Iran where many people have historically remained undocumented and uneducated. Using complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive leadership and SCL as the conceptual lens, the paper analyzes ISC as a complex adaptive context in which the community and the government are in tension in solving problems, particularly illiteracy. The instrumental case study draws from participant observation and document analysis to describe and examine the endeavors of a community office operating within ISC. Through this reflective analysis, the authors illustrate how a social change organization can effectively tackle public issues like illiteracy within informal settlements.

This paper applies complexity leadership theory to a social context. The study illustrates how social change organizations can support the transformation of informal spaces into adaptive spaces to enact social change.

This paper reflects on engagement activity near the insecure borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By extending an organizational-level theory to the public sphere, this paper contributes theoretically to the complexity theory literature. Moreover, it provides a practical insight for community development and slum upgrading projects.

This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE).

The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.

The paper describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central to management and its research.

The paper proposes that adopting an arts-based approach that challenges control can create a research instrument sensitive to similar tendencies in case studies, thus highlighting what is different and alternative about them. This responds to concerns about the diminishing centrality of SE’s democratizing ethic expressed in its scholarship, about creativity in its research and about its socially transformative potential.

The practice, by SEs of an approach welcoming chance, encounter, meandering paths and place-making with porous boundaries, proliferates transformative possibilities and is linked to democratization and participation.

Though dangerously challenging to accepted notions of academic rigour, this paper proposes an unusual thought experiment tied in with lived experiences, in themselves experimental in practice.

This paper aims to highlight a broader definition of good building performance that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on technical aspects, only adopting the lens of the social construction of technology (SCOT) in the empirical space of the workplace sector. Several building performance evaluation (BPE) methods focus on technical aspects such as energy consumption, indoor environmental conditions and compliance with building regulations and standards. Technical aspects, albeit important goals, only embed a partial component of what buildings are expected to deliver. There is growing interest in considering the organisational and experiential expectations of building performance, particularly integrating various views of performance as expected by different user groups.

The paper adopts an archival research method to analyse the archive of the workplace consultants DEGW, particularly focusing on their work on London’s Broadgate development in the 1980s and the 1990s.

The findings reveal how voices from a pluralistic client organisation can be addressed to articulate a broad definition of building performance that integrates different viewpoints encompassing technical, organisational and experiential expectations. In DEGW’s work, the views on building performance of various stakeholders involved in the everyday use and management of buildings are identified without imposing predetermined agendas or research notions of performance. Particular emphasis is given to understanding clients as not a homogenous entity but consisting of different interest groups, which implies multiple conceptualisations of building performance and the building itself.

The performance expectations of a building vary between organisations and even within any organisation. Moreover, the needs of an organisation will change over time, and the BPE criteria need to be changed to ensure better alignment between organisations and the physical spaces they occupy. A critical reflection on the conceptualisation of “users” and “building” in BPE methods is required to create an integrated approach towards building performance.

The paper offers insights by adopting the theoretical lens of SCOT to explore an integrated approach to building performance that captures the varied needs of building users through the example of London’s Broadgate development.

This study seeks to deepen the understanding of the political process underlying the establishment and evolution of corporate governance (CG) regulations in a developing country.

Drawing on regulatory space concept (Hancher and Moran, 1989) and Oliver's (1991) typology of strategic responses, the authors identify which actor participated in and benefitted from the establishment of a new transnational CG regulation in Pakistan. Data were collected through interviews and from the published secondary sources.

The findings highlighted regulations are being influenced and shaped up by the political process of negotiation, bargaining, manipulation and domination between powerful and resourceful actors in a given regulatory space. National regulators and regulatees can be indeed fervent opponents to the transnational regulations when it comes to protecting their well-rooted national interests.

This study contributes to the accounting literature by illustrating political processes through which internationally recognised CG practices are resisted, negotiated and implemented in the developing countries. The regulator must pay attention that the outcome of the regulatory change process is the result of carefully crafted and conscious strategies of actors in the regulatory space.

New ways of working have rapidly increased in organizations, promising employees a better control over their work time, space, and more autonomy. The present study analyzes the relationship between new ways of working and employee engagement and productivity.

A survey was conducted to evaluate organizational practices developed based on flexible schemes and the relevance of employee engagement for better productivity based on digital tools. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

New ways of work requires an integration of workspaces' design, social interaction, and individual wellness. Organizations need to recognize how employees' trust, commitment, and passion are fundamental to face current and future changes. Flexibility in time and space and digital tools for work are critical.

A personalization of organizational practices to support individual well-being and flexible and hybrid schemes of work are needed. Developing policies collaboratively to work together respectfully in a hybrid environment is necessary.

Hybrid work format is allowing women to balance career and childcare, reducing the wage gap with men. The green imperative has also played a role reducing the amount of carbon monoxide produced via commuter.

The present study exposes how organizational practices must ensure employee well-being and autonomy to perform their tasks. In this regard, employees need to be recognized as individuals, physically and mentally. Attempting to force a one-size-fit-all solution can have detrimental effects on the workforce, particularly on women, people of lower socioeconomic status, and people in less advanced economies. Personalization requests empowerment and democratization at work.