The dialectics of spatial performances: The interplay of tensions in activity-based organizing

Abstract

Navigating organizational workspace is often plagued with tensions that emerge from the interplay of intended designs with organizational activities and lived experiences. These tensions are evident in research findings, such as inconsistencies in the ways that employees react to new workplace designs. They call on scholars to rethink organizational space, not as a concrete, static, or ready-made ‘thing’, but as a set of ongoing performances that enact particular practices, clashes among opposites, and organizational tensions. Based on research in a Nordic company, this study reveals how tensions and responses to them in an activity-based office generate creative alternatives that enhance participation and navigate passages between order and disorder. Contrary to the presumption that tensions need to be resolved, this study suggests that embracing them through managing the fluidity and flux of space gives rise to adaptability. Thus, in orchestrating workspace changes, it calls on organizational members to attend to mobility, constellations of objects and materiality, and temporal boundaries in navigating space rather than focusing on fixtures and designs.