Seeking Organizational Geographies: A multidimensional spatial analysis of everyday organizing

Abstract

In the context of debates about organizational space, this paper undertakes a multidimensional spatial analysis of everyday organizing. Drawing on an extensive ethnographic study of a housing estate, we use the territory, place, scale, network framework to reveal processes of everyday spatial production that occur through territorial, place-based, scalar and networked organizing. Foregrounding the interplay of these dimensions, we identify four resulting tensions at work in everyday organizing: conflict and resistance, boundaries and (un)boundedness, stasis and movement and alterity and diversity. We propose that centring attention on these dynamics manifest what might be termed ‘organizational geographies’. Thus, we contribute an empirical demonstration of the ways in which organizing as a sociospatial process occurs during everyday life in a more ‘informal’ site, thereby extending the contextual repertoire of organization studies. We also contribute a methodological approach for organization scholars to analyse everyday spatial production as a multidimensional process, pointing to the potential for greater cross-disciplinary fertilization with human geography in future organization research.