Space in organisation and management. Interdisciplinary perspective in modelling towards new managerial roles

Abstract

The concept of space is a category that has been present in science since antiquity. Experiencing “spatiality” of the world was one of key experiences of human being throughout the development of Civilisation. Space was of primary concern to physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of nature. Socio-economic sciences treated the issue of space primarily in terms of distance, possibly as a configuration of material objects. To a great extent, modernist interpretations of organisation and management processes have been limited to the relationship between “an organisation and its environment”. The concept of space is trapped in metaphor. It was assumed that if organisation by definition may be described without references to space, however the way organisation is functioning has always a reference to space. Simultaneously, organisations are increasingly struggling with different spaces, especially in the face of the “localness-globalness” dichotomy, or virtual and network spaces. This paper attempts to achieve an interdisciplinary conceptualisation of space issues in the context of organisation and management sciences. A conceptual innovative model of space dimensions for organizations was developed, identifying: (1) Organisational space; (2) Glocal space (between locality and globality); (3) Topical (contextual) space and (4) Cyberspace, so-called “Space Organisation Model” (SOM). In the latter part of the paper, a theoretical experiment based on deductive substantiation is presented which focuses on the meso-level, with a view to proposing new “spatial” managerial roles in organisations. The research logic presented in this paper, leading from wide interdisciplinary studies through construction of a conceptual model as the meta-level (SOM), to theoretical experiments at the micro-level (New Managerial Roles).