Dear Colleagues,

If you are studying organizations and management by considering space, place or social geography, this is a gentle reminder. We hope you will consider submitting your work for consideration at CMS 2017 (July 3-5). Please find the call below and do not hesitate to contact us!

Céline Donis, Véronique Perret & Laurent Taskin

-----------------------------------------------------

Sub-theme 26 

Space, Place, and Scale: 
Critical Reflections on the New Spatial Turn in Organization Studies 
  
 
Many established disciplines such as human and economic geography, urban sociology, or architecture recognize that space and place exert a considerable influence on people’s lives, social relations, and identities. Indeed, intuitively this influence of spatial configuration on identities and representations must seem obvious. Despite this long-standing recognition in many other disciplines, we note that organization studies has only recently begun to make the “spatial turn” (Lauriol , Perret and Tannery, 2008). We are beginning to consider how space—and its related features of place, mobility, territory, distance—structure, compel, and empower social relationships through subjective, inter-subjective, and political dimensions. Moreover, far from being neutral, space is produced and processed by human and social experience. In a contemporary era of spatial research (e.g., Soja, 1989; Lussault, 2007), it seems particularly important to understand this multi-dimensionality of space to better capture and understand the complexity of the processes at work in organization studies. Here we can look to recent developments outside our own discipline—especially developments in critical social theory and human geography—which provide pointers to a promising direction of renewed critical analysis. This move will assist the broader organization studies community by enriching our analysis of many of the processes and objects that we commonly study.
Among the more obvious themes that are amenable to such a spatially-oriented critical investigation, are familiar macro processes like globalization, individualization, or digitalization. Here we can augment traditional research on these topics by understanding them through their status as epiphenomena of the re-scaling of the spatial and temporal borders of the fundamental norms of labour, organization, and management. At a micro-level, the intersubjective relations of organizational life are also re-scaled, such as when we are expected to work in geographically dispersed teams. And, of course, such coarse scales as the macro and micro themselves begin to look increasingly arbitrary analytical conceits scales as organizational members come to terms with the interaction of myriad intervening scales associated with developments like hot-desking, open offices, co-working spaces, home-based teleworking, etc.

In this stream we seek contributions that go beyond the mainstream organizational literature dealing with space as something to be conquered or overcome in the pursuit of effective change, global reach, performance management, governance, etc. We will also seek contributions that go beyond showing the more obvious negative effects of the spatial reorganization of work such as absenteeism, resistance, reduced well-being, disengagement, etc. We thus seek contributions that extend the growing body of critical research that examines the spatial reorganization of work—for example, how it contributes to things such as loss of meaning, work degradation, a shifting of disciplinary effects, or a reduction in autonomy (see: Carter et al, 2011; Leclercq - Vandelannoitte, Isaac and Kalika, 2014; Taskin and Raone, 2014)—by taking the new spatial turn.

Thus we invite a reconsideration of how recent organizational and economic transformations involve and affect the territories and social spaces through  ideational and material relationships (see: Veschambre, 2006; Ripoll and Veschambre, 2006; Hérin, 2013; Di Meo and Buléon, 2005). Here human geography and social theory provide helpful grids, concepts, and tools. If some called for such multidisciplinary approach (Ripoll, 2006; Warf and Arias, 2009), few management scholars engaged in this avenue. In the field of strategic management, the collective work edited by Clegg and Kornberger (2006) showed the interest of such dialogue for organizational analysis. In the field of critical management studies, the spatial scale and spatial concepts are central to the analysis of power relations and conflicts in work practices developed by Herod et al. (2007) and Donis (2015). They also serve to understand the dynamics of organizational transformation in logical research by Spicer (2006). The social construction of spatial boundary of an organization can also be designed as a crop management tool and employee control (Fleming and Spicer, 2004; Sewell and Taskin, 2015). Ropo et al. (2013) also analyze the performative role of space in building leadership. In this research tradition, the work of geographers such as Henri Lefebvre and, more recently, Claude Raffestin has been mobilized to rethink some central issues of management. This is, for example, the case of Dale (2005) who proposes a socio-physical analysis of the transformations of organizational control modes, or Fahy et al. (2013) who mobilize the temporal dimension of space.  

In summary, this stream seeks contributions that further the spatial turn in organization studies through an engagement, inter alia, with the following questions:
o   How does the consideration of spatial dimensions contribute to understand differently the way one experience organizational and managerial practices and realities? 
o   How does the consideration of spatial dimensions contribute to better understand the power-resistance relationships, i.e contribute to the study of control and emancipation mechanisms in management studies. 
o   Specifically, how does space (territory, place, distantiation, etc.) help re-considering concrete work, labour, expertise, in the study of management, i.e. help to develop the study of the materiality of management, as well as management effects on bodies?
o   Specifically, how do spatial dimensions, a.o. in the study of new ways of working, help understanding identities at work?  

Deadlines

Proposals/abstracts of 500 words are due for January, 31st, 2017. Decision for acceptance to the stream should be communicated by the conveners to the authors latest by 15th February 2017. Please send the proposals to the three conveners.


Conveners
Dr. Céline Donis, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Prof. Dr. Véronique Perret, Université Paris-Dauphine, France
Prof. Dr. Laurent Taskin, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium


References
Carter, B. ; Danford, A. ; Howcroft, D. ; Richardson, H. ; Smith, A. & Taylor, P. (2011), ‘All They Lack is a Chain’: Lean and the New Performance Management in the British Civil Service, New Technology, Work and Employment, 26, 2, 83-97.
Clegg, S. & Kornberger, M. (Eds) (2006), Space, Organizations and Management Theory, Advances in Organization Studies, vol. 17, CBS Press.
Dale, K. (2005), Building a Social Materiality: Spatial and Embodied Politics in Organizational Control, Organization, 12, 5, 649-678.
Donis, C. (2015), De l’intérêt d’une lecture territoriale pour appréhender les dynamiques de transformation des espaces de travail : Une perspective critique et politique en management, Thèse de doctorat, Université catholique de Louvain.
Fahy, K. ; Easterby-Smith, M. & Lervik, J. (2013), The power of spatial and temporal orderings in organizational learning, Management Learning, OnlineFirst, 21 Feb.
Fleming, P. & Spicer, A. (2004), ‘You Can Checkout Anytime, but You Can Never Leave’: Spatial Boundaries in a High Commitment Organization, Human Relations, 54, 1, 75-94.
Halford, S. (2005), Hybrid workspace: Re-spatialisations of work, management and organization, New Technology, Work and Employment, 20, 1, 19-33.
Hérin, R. (2013), Chemin faisant, Parcours en géographie sociale, Caen, Presses universitaires de Caen, 369 p.
Herod, A. ; Rainnie, A. & McGrath-Champ, S. (2007), Working space: why incorporating the geographical is central to theorizing work and employment practices, Work, Employment & Society, 21, 2, 247-264.
Kalika, M. & Isaac H. (2008), Management & TIC, le e-management devient management, in Dauphine Recherches en Management, Colasse, B. et Pezet, A. (Dir), l'Etat des entreprises 2009, La Découverte col. Repères, 87-96.
Lauriol, J. ; Perret, V. & Tannery, F. (2008), Stratégies, espaces et territoires. Une introduction sous un prisme géographique, Revue Française de Gestion, 34, n°184, 91-103
Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, A., Isaac, H., Kalika, M. (2014), Mobile information systems and organisational control: beyond the panopticon metaphor ?, European Journal of Information Systems, advance online publication 20 May.
Lefebvre, H. (1974), La production de l’espace, Economica. Traduit en anglais (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell.
Lussault, M. (2007), L’homme spatial : la construction sociale de l’espace humain, Paris: Le Seuil.
Ripoll, F. & Veschambre, V. (2006), L’appropriation de l’espace : une problématique centrale pour la géographie sociale in Séchet, R. et Veschambre, V. (Dir.), Penser et faire la géographie sociale – Contributions à une épistémologie de la géographie sociale, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 295-304.
Ripoll, F (2006), La géographie comme science sociale, la démarche « critique » et l’épistémologie. Réflexions à partir d’une thèse sur les mouvements sociaux, EEGS L’espace social : méthodes et outils, objets et éthique(s), Rennes, 8 pages 
Ropo, A. ; Sauer, E. et Salovaara, P. (2013), Embodiment of leadership through material place, Leadership, 9, 3, 378-395.
Sewell, G. & Taskin, L. (2015) Out of sight, out of mind in a new world of work? Autonomy, control and spatiotemporal scaling in telework, Organizations Studies, 36 (11), 1507-1529.
Soja, E. (1989), Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory, London: Verso.
Spicer, A. (2006), Beyond the Convergence–Divergence Debate : The Role of Spatial Scales in Transforming Organizational Logic, Organization Studies, 27, 10, 1467-1483.
Taskin, L. & Raone, J. (2014), Flexibilité et disciplinarisation : repenser le contrôle en situation de distanciation, Economies et Sociétés, Série « Etudes critiques en management », KC, 3, 1, 35-69.
Veschambre, V. (2006), Penser l’espace comme dimension de la société – Pour une géographie sociale de plain-pied avec les sciences sociales, in Séchet, R. et Veschambre, V. (Dir.) Penser et faire la géographie sociale – Contributions à une épistémologie de la géographie sociale, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 211-227.
Warf, B. & Arias, S. (Eds) (2009), The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary perspectives, Routledge Studies in Human Geography.