Seeking Organizational Geographies: A multidimensional spatial analysis of everyday organizing

Vandeventer, James Scott ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9712-1479, Lloveras, Javier and Warnaby, Gary ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6696-6671 (2024) Seeking Organizational Geographies: A multidimensional spatial analysis of everyday organizing. Organization Studies. ISSN 0170-8406

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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 Jessop, Brenner, and Jones’ (2008) 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 centering 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 analyze everyday spatial production as a multidimensional process, pointing to the potential for greater cross-disciplinary fertilization with human geography in future organization research.