Space and doing spatial research in organization, management and entrepreneurship studies

Professor Robin Holt (MPP), Copenhagen Business School
Timon Beyes (MPP), Copenhagen Business School

The aim of the course is to equip doctoral students with an interdisciplinary understanding of spatial thought and current strands and methods of spatial theorizing, and of how organization needs to take place in order to happen. It also provides an invitation for the participants to relate key concepts and insights to their own conceptual and empirical work, and to experiment with the applicability of contemporary spatial theorizing.

Interviewed by geographers in 1976, Michel Foucault expressed his irritation at the neglect of spatial thinking. How could space, he asked, be treated as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile”, while time would be seen as “richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Foucault, 1980/1976, p. 70)? Since then, things have changed. The question of space – space as ‘alive’, as fecund, multiple, contested, ever in movement – has become a primary matter of concern in social and cultural thought, especially with regard to how social space is produced and experienced, how it is dominated, contested and appropriated.

The study of organization, management and entrepreneurship has itself been swept along by, and indeed contributed to, this ‘spatial turn’. Loosely connected to adjacent movements of thought – organization understood affectively, (neo-)materially, media-technologically, aesthetically – there now is a robust body of research inquiring into the sites of organization, their spatial power relations, the organizational multiplicity and performativity of space, and organization’s spatial poetics. Addressing these concerns entails reconsidering the methods of organizational inquiry, from mappings to atmospheric walks, from topological analysis to spatial poetics.  

This course invites PhD students working with, or interested in, the spatiality of organized life. Having taken stock of the state of thinking and researching spatially (in the study of organization, management and entrepreneurship), participants are asked to engage with current strands of spatial theorizing, to discuss spatial organization at work in different social spheres, and to reflect on how these ‘spatial attunements’ affect our understanding of organization, management and entrepreneurship – not least as concerns the participants’ own dissertation projects and empirical materials.

As this is an advanced course, the level of engagement with the texts and the ideas expressed in them is expected to be intensive. Participants in the course are asked to prepare a 3-5 page paper engaging with the course materials as a means of exploring potential connections between spatial theorizing and their own research projects. Deadline for submission of the paper is January 17th , 2022.

During the course, each participant is expected to make a short presentation of his/her project and how it relates to the course literature.

Participants (and, indeed, faculty) are encouraged to ‘performatively reflect’ on the spatiality of research production by choosing other formats for sharing their thoughts – whilst we ask for a 3-5 page paper (mediated by the standardizing technologies of admission and assessment, along with those  typically associated with theorizing, as we are), we encourage participants to supplement the paper based framing in their presentations during the course. Text can be used, but supplemented with imagery such as diagrams, symbols, pictures, films. Or the privilege typically accorded to the eye as the dominant sensory organ can be challenged, for example by using sound. The presentations are 10 mins., no more, given we expect lively exchanges and will ask participants to comment on their colleagues’ texts and presentations. Please expect to be asked to leave the classroom so as to more forcefully let ‘space’ into the atmosphere of the course.

Faculty will scatter the presentations throughout the course schedule, with a mind for how they may resonate with the focus of each session, but without thereby confining them to being simply an illustration of such.  This will require faculty to place student work into themes to promote active (ie experience based) discussion taken along distinct lines.  

Both Prof Beyes and Prof Holt will be present for all sessions.

Day 1

10.00-10.30 Welcome and Introduction

10.30-12.00 Session 1: Why space? Opening up space in a ‘research walk’. Studying through rather than in space.

13.00-14.30 Session 2: The ‘spatial turn’ and the study of organization. The slightly presumptive attempt at an overview of spatial research in organization studies. Lecture.

15.00-16.30 Session 3: Space, power, politics & self-management: Lefebvre’s legacy & Massey’s provocation. The intimacy between space, politics and the political.

17.00-18.00 Student work and discussion

18.00-18.30 What have we learned today? 

Day 2

09.00-10.30 Session 4: Networked spaces and new topologies of organization. A foray into the dominating organizational space of networks (Tiziana Terranova), the tactical options of politics, and Marilyn Strathern’s work on cutting the network

11.00-12.30 Student work and discussion

13.30-15.00 Session 5: Spatial affects and atmospherics. Examining the sensory nature of space, especially the organization of human sensory experience through mediating technology (e.g. Walter Benjamin on ‘sich einfühlen’, or ‘feeling with’ or ‘learning to feel with’ the camera)

15.30-16.30 Student work and discussion

16.30-17.00 What have we learned today?

18.30 Onwards - Dinner

Day 3 (concentrating on methods and weaving these into student inquiry)

09.00-10.30 Session 6: Spatial poetics and the arts of spatial inquiry.

Methods for:

• Site writing
• Ethnography
• Sound
• Artistic intervention

11.00-12.30 Student work and discussion, developing spatial research projects

13.30-15.00 Student work and discussion, developing spatial research projects

15.30-16.30 Student work and discussion, developing spatial research projects

16.30-17.00 What have we learned today? / Feedback and conclusions

Readings (indicative)

(Those listed in bold are more open in their reach, and hence might be regarded as texts that help set the scene and direction for the course)

Session 2

Kitchin, Rob (2009). ‘Space II’, in Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 268-275.

Beyes, Timon and Holt, Robin (2020). ‘The topographical imagination: Space and organization theory’, Organization Theory 1(2).

Ross, Karen (2008/1988) The emergence of social space. Rimbaud and the Paris commune. London: Verso.

Krauss, Rosalind (1979). Grids. October

Session 3

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). ‘Plan of the present work’ [excerpts from sections I, VI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVII], in: The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.

Massey, Doreen (2005). For Space. London: Sage

Beyes, Timon (2017). ‘Politics, embodiment, everyday life: Lefebvre and spatial organization’, in Varda Wasserman, Karen Dale and Sytze F. Kingma (eds.), Organisational Space and Beyond. London: Routledge, pp. 27-45.

Strathern, Marylin (2020) Relations. Durham: Duke University Press.

Terranova, Tiziana (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age London: Pluto Press.

Session 4

Anderson, Benedict (2009). 'Affective atmospheres', Emotion, Space and Society 2(2): 77-81.

Stweart, Kathleen (2011) Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.29: 445-453

Beyes, Timon and Chris Steyaert (2012). Spacing organization: Non-representational theorizing and the spatial turn in organizational research. Organization, 19(1): 45-61.

Session 5

Böhme, Gernot. (2014). Encountering Atmosphere: A Reflection on the Concept of Atmosphere in the Work of Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter Zumthor. OASE 91 Building Atmosphere: 93–10.

Benjamin, Walter (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J A Underwood. London: Penguin.

Jørgensen, Lydia and Robin Holt (2019). Organization, atmosphere, and digital technologies: Designing sensory order. Organization, 26(5): 673–695.

Ratner, Helene (2020). Topologies of Organization: Space in Continuous Deformation. Organization Studies, 41(11): 1513-1530.

Sumartojo, Shanti, Sarah Pink, Deborah Lupton, and Christine LaBond. (2016). The Affective Intensities of Datafied Space. Emotion, Space and Society 21: 30–40.

Session 6

Beyes, Timon & Chris Steyaert (2013). Strangely familiar: The uncanny and unsiting organizational analysis. Organization Studies, 34, 1445–1465.

Skoglund Annika and Robin Holt (2020). ‘Spatially organizing future genders: An artistic intervention in the creation of a hir-toilet’. Human Relations, published online first: doi:10.1177/0018726719899728.

Westerkamp, Hildegard (2015) The Disruptive Nature of Listening

https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/writings/writingsby/?post_id=11&title=the-disruptive-nature-of-listening

Jane Rendell https://site-writing.co.uk

Perec, Georges (2008) Species of Space and Other Writings. London: Penguin

Copenhagen Business School
Porcelænshaven 18 B
Room PH18B 1.154
2000 Frederiksberg