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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the spatial intervention of open-plan offices in a university, the consequential change in work practices of faculty members and how these practices appropriate the designed space.

The authors executed a two-year longitudinal ethnographic study following the case of the science faculty, which moved from a traditional office setting to open-plan offices. The authors studied the space and interviewed staff before, during and after the introduction of open-plan offices.

Findings show that the new spatial setting triggered staff members to attribute certain meanings and practices of adaptation which were, partly, unintended by the design of the open-plan offices.

This paper contributes empirically grounded insights into the (un)intended consequences of a spatial intervention in terms of how staff members, far from being passive, attribute meaning and alter their work practices leading to unprecedented organizational changes.

For change consultants, facility managers and university managers the outcomes of this paper are highly relevant.

Large budgets are spent on new office concepts at universities but the authors do know little about the relation between spatial (re)design and organizational change.

The introduction of new office concepts, spatial redesign and co-location is for many academics highly emotional.

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.

Over the last four years in Spain, a strong autonomist movement (15M), based on radical democracy and mistrust of any kind of instituted politics, seems to be turning toward statist and institutionalized politics. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following questions: Can we speak of a community fetishism, as opposed to State fetishism? Do autonomist social movements have a spatial project as opposed to a State spatial project? Why do horizontal and self-management-oriented social movements turn to the conquest of the State in the current framework?

The empirical evidence for this study stems from a qualitative methodological approach. The authors used two different types of sources. First, direct observations from the authors’ own engagement in social movements in Spain from 2011 to the present are used. Second, this work is part of a systematic research on spatial dynamics and the evolution of collective action in Spain. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with activists involved in social movements from 2012 to 2015, in which time informal interviews were conducted, and documents and observational notes were also collected.

Social movements have tended to develop alternatives to state spatial projects, partially as a result of an institutional setting that has been progressively closed to political alternatives to the neoliberal state. This last point leads to the posing of politics as completely independent of the political arena of the State (community fetish). From the first square occupations to the subsequent organization in local meetings, the 15M movement was the last expression of this tendency in Spain, while the turn on State political institutions responds to the obvious limitations of community fetishism in the context of the social and political tensions of the Spanish crisis.

This analysis contributes to the current debates on social movements in two ways. First, the authors investigate a usually neglected agent in the production of spatial political projects and strategies such as social movements. Second, the specific case of the 15M movement in Spain strongly shows the contradictions and limitations of the movements, which supposedly do not aspire to replace the State’s sovereign power through the idea of community fetishism.

The article presents research results of an ethnographic survey within the German police. The focus is on practices of spatial production and the functions of spaces.

The article draws on data from the DFG-funded research project KORSIT (Social Construction of security-related Spaces) based on an ethnographic survey in the German police force (https://www.dhpol.de/korsit). Participant observations were conducted in police stations in two large German cities (pseudonymised as “Dillenstadt” and “Rosenberg”). It involved 60 guided interviews with police officers at different levels of the hierarchy, as well as further interviews with local and societal actors for contrasting purposes. The data was analysed on the basis of grounded theory (Strauss and Cobin, 1996).

This paper shed light on institutional spatial knowledge, which is the basis of police practices, is preceded by experience-based narratives. In an expanded perspective, the paper argues that urban spaces themselves can be understood as materialisations of social practices that serve as social demarcation that legitimise unequal styles of action in the different precinct within the German police. In terms of a relational conceptualisation of space, it is shown that the categories of ethnicity and gender interrelate within the institutional production of space.

The article links organisational research with sociological spatial research and provides basic explanatory models on the conditions of emergence and the persistence of discriminatory practices within the police.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the combination of a qualitative shadowing method called “Commentated Walk” and an ethnographic approach, can be used to analyze the spatial dimension of practices, when space is considered as a co-construction and as an active dimension of individual and collective practices.

The approach is ethnographic and the empirical field work concerns the coordination in ephemeral organizations intended to manage emergent phenomena: the social “problems” often named “urban incivilities,” which occur in public and semi-public spaces in some suburban areas in France and are recurrent.

In these organizations, space appears to be part of individual and collective practices, and a key resource for coordination. Shared “spaces of action” between inhabitants and local institutions contribute to coordination. As a method of data collection, Commentated Walks offer relevant insight into how actors “deal with space” in their day-to-day life or their professional practices. Walking with while talking with – the method's principals – make it possible to capture the materiality of problematic spaces as well as the feelings that the space inspires.

The use of this method is still exploratory. In further research, it would be interesting to consider such Commentated Walks in other organizational contexts, in order to explore different ways of “dealing with” space and different types of spatial competencies that people develop in using space as a resource.

This paper proposes an original combination of methodological approaches which allows us to grasp the formation of spatial practices.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing.

The authors briefly review the existing management and organization studies (MOS) literature on legitimacy, space and history; engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore how organizational legitimacy is managed in time and space; and use the case of two Parisian universities to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.

The paper develops a history-based phenomenological perspective on legitimation processes constitutive of four possibilities identified by means of chiasms: heterotopic spatial legacy, thin spatial legacy, institutionalized spatial legacy and organizational spatial legacy.

The authors discuss the implications of this research for the neo-institutional literature on organizational legitimacy, research on organizational space and the field of management history.

This paper takes inspiration from the work of Merleau-Ponty on chiasms to conceptualize how the temporal layers of space and place that organizations inhabit and inherit (which we call “spatial legacies”), in the process of legitimation, evoke a sensible tenor.

Adopting a socio-spatial approach, this study develops a consumer-centric conception of service experience customization. In contrast to existing service customization research, which has focused on company-centric approaches, the purpose of this paper is to examine the practices through which consumers use, abuse, subvert, transform, or complement organizational resources to construct their consumption experiences.

The empirical context for this study is a Meetup group: a consumer network organized around members’ shared interests and activities in theme parks. The research utilized participant observation of members’ face-to-face activities during two years and over 80 events, interviews with key informants, and content analysis of online interactions.

The findings outline how consumers interact across physical and virtual spaces utilizing technologies and material objects. The data are used to propose a new consumer-centric conceptualization of experience customization, distinguishing between three modes: collaborative co-production, cooperative co-creation, and subversive co-creation.

It is argued that the three modes of customization provide a way to understand how consumers mobilize and (re)deploy organizational resources to create experiences that may complement existing service propositions, but may also transform them in ways that challenge the service provider’s original goals and expectations. Furthermore, this study identifies the factors that shape which modes of customization are possible and how they are enacted. Specifically, the discussion examines how experiential complexity, governability, the compatibility of consumer and organizational practices, and the collective mobilization of resources may determine the scope and form of customization.

South Asian communities have lived in Scotland since the late nineteenth century, experiencing a substantial growth in the post-war period. This paper contributes a new understanding of the spatial practices of South Asian communities in the city of Glasgow based on statistics and surveys. The authors aim to address the gap in literature by analysing patterns of location and trends across the city region over the census period of 2011. The study furthermore integrates a walking tour assessment generated by checklists and a recording scheme. The attributes of cultural identity, economic diversity and socio-spatial practice of six urban spaces within three selected neighbourhoods are examined. Two urban spaces were chosen from each neighbourhood to interpret the diversity of land uses along each case study and the social interaction as well as economic activities of South Asian residents. This suggests that the idea of a coherent 'Asian community' obscures differences and generates assumptions regarding residential behaviour and 'in-group' identities. The research, therefore, provides an enhanced understanding of how these distinctive communities interact with a built environment, which has not been designed to cater certain spatial practices.

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.

This chapter looks at male-on-male sexual activity in the subaltern world of male sexual spaces. It examines the importance of such spaces regarding etiquette, negotiation, opportunities, safety, safer sex practices, status, and navigation of sexual expression including experimentation, exploration, and risk-taking through sexual activity. It also explores how these time-limited communal engagements for sexual pleasure and affirmation contrast normative societal expectations. Through hard-copy and online content analysis as well as ethnographic immersion and observations in the subaltern world of gay male sexual spaces such as bathhouses, circuit clubs, dark rooms, fetish balls, porn theaters, sex clubs, and sex shops, a self-monitored subculture that creates its own tribal rituals at various odds with both mainstream societal and LGBTQ movement norms is examined. By deviating from and resisting such norms, this tribe demonstrates how it maintains a core drive of liberated sexuality outside of mainstreamed sexual governance. Premised on spatial theory, in which space, place, and spatial practices are deconstructed with regard to the creation and preservation of male-on-male fetish activities, a link is made to queer liberation theory that supports self-defined sexual expression, including that of kink.