Building People: Identities and Spaces
Building People: Identities and Spaces
Introduction: The Relationship Between Organisational Spaces and Identity
The task of the architect is not merely to build houses, but to create "new people" who suit the intended architectures (Welsch 1997).
Frank Lloyd Wright (1999) stated, "The architect is a molder of men, whether or not he consciously assumes the responsibility."
Aldous Huxley (1994) envisioned future "Manhattan Projects" as government inquiries into "the problem of happiness," essentially, "making people love their servitude."
This chapter examines the relationship between organisational spaces and the social production of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (a person's self-concept and relations with others).
It develops the interconnections between space and power, specifically focusing on enchantment, emplacement, and enactment, through the lens of self-organisation.
Organizations are increasingly physically reshaping workplaces to achieve institutional objectives, particularly to 'capture hearts and minds' by encouraging individuals to identify with the organization.
Design consultancies, such as DEGW, are central to these initiatives, producing "conceived" or "representations of space" as per Lefebvre's (1991: 39) terms.
Modern Workspaces and the Blurring of Boundaries
The principles and models for spatial arrangements developed by design consultancies are applied across various settings, including workplaces, arts complexes, housing estates, government buildings, heritage sites, and retail outlets.
The central argument is that "places are always already hybrid" (Massey 1995a: 183).
Modern conceived workspaces engage with constantly shifting identities shaped by dynamic social and cultural relations across space, as well as "imaginary" spaces.
Traditionally, workplaces are treated as distinct from other spaces like home or leisure.
Modern life, however, increasingly blurs these boundaries, evident in "mixed use" spaces (e.g., the Mailbox in Birmingham, London's Docklands).
Examples on a smaller scale include BBC Media Village and St Lukes Advertising Agency (table football, pool), British Airways HQ ('street' with shops), and EnergyCo (gym, wetlands).
Caution is necessary to avoid deterministic views of organized space; designers' intentions do not directly determine identity or social relations.
Nevertheless, the emergence of mixed or hybrid spaces signifies a changing dynamic in the relationship between self and workplace.
The Disappearing Workplace: Physical and Psychic Dimensions
A recurring theme in redesigned organisational spaces is the "disappearing workplace," which refers to changing physical characteristics where work is less bounded by a specific place and time.
The concept of "separate spheres" has always been somewhat illusory, but recent trends accelerate the dispersal of paid work (Felstead et al. 2005).
This dispersal involves:
Technological facilitation of mobile work, creating an "electronic envelope" for employees.
Increased importance of real estate and facilities management to optimize occupancy levels and time-space usage.
Spaces in a growing service economy are simultaneously work, consumption, retail, leisure, and education spaces, blurring traditional roles.
The "backstage" (Goffman 1969) employment relationship, where organisational rules mediate customer service, makes hybrid spaces challenging.
Paradoxically, as work becomes less physically bounded, the spaces of organisation are increasingly drawn into a conscious and explicit "battle for hearts and minds."
Thrift (1996) argues that increased speed and electronic transactions do not diminish the need for face-to-face relations but rather enhance the establishment of embodied networks and physical meetings.
Organizations seek greater employee commitment, involvement, and identification with company goals and culture.
This powerful identification, ideally carried by employees "outside" the physical boundaries of the company and formal work time, is partly intensified by the very openness and extension of work.
Organizational spatial practices aim for identity-identification links to be internalized.
The workplace is also "disappearing psychically" as organizations appeal to employees' identities and desires as consumers, citizens, or aesthetes, rather than solely as 'employees'.
The Historical Development of Organisational Spaces and Employee Identities
The relationship between identity, work, and space is complex and dynamic.
Early Industrialisation (UK): Work relations were often indirect, mediated by traditional social forms like gang work, the 'butty' system, master craftsmen, familial systems, and skill hierarchies (Littler 1982: 64–72).
Late 19th Century (USA): The very category of "the employee" emerged, creating a new, continuous relationship between individual and organisation (Jacques 1996: 48). Previously, being a 'hireling' often denoted a low social status, while the American ideal emphasized self-sufficiency.
This nascent employment relationship was spatially concretized by figures like Albert Kahn and Henry Ford (Chapter 2), leading to the mass class of employees and direct individual-organization control.
However, early capitalists (e.g., Henry Ford) actively worked to prevent worker collective identification, promoting consumer identity through propaganda (Moving Forward, 1931; Today and Tomorrow, 1926) and monitoring private lives via a 'sociological department' (Beynon 1973; Corbett 1994).
Fordism and scientific management minimized worker subjectivity and knowledge, leading to the "unemployed self" (Gouldner 1969), where employees' creative consciousness was left to its own devices due to routine work (Sillitoe 1960).
Workers expressed oppositional identities through practices like "goldbricking" (Roy 1952), "soldiering" (Taylor 1911), and appropriating space for leisure (e.g., Longbridge car factory nightlife).
Hawthorne Studies and Human Relations School: These studies uncovered the social and psychological identity of the worker; however, their dissemination by Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) and Mayo (1949) largely disregarded spatial and material aspects.
Despite this oversight, the workplace historically shaped employee self-construction, as shown by Hofbauer's (2000) study of burolandschaft (office designs).
Open-plan offices: designed for supervisory transparency.
Single-cell offices: for individual enclosures.
Office landscape: emphasizing "co-operative effort" and "communications" rather than work flow (Duffy 1992: 82).
Contemporary Management: Recognizes the importance of "management of meaning" (Gowler and Legge 1983) and "management of identity" (Collinson 1992; Watson 1994), often referred to as the "battle for hearts and minds."
Ethnographic studies reveal the interaction of individual identity construction with organisational practices, such as managers shaping their own and subordinates' identities (Watson 1994) or trainee accountants undertaking a "project of self" (Grey 1994).
While the physical environment is often seen as a mere "empty container" (Lefebvre 1991: 15), spatial and material dimensions are crucial:
Shop-floor workers use spaces like washrooms for oppositional identity (Collinson 1992).
Accountants extend their "work identity" into non-organisational spaces and times (e.g., golf, pubs) (Grey 1994).
The Spatial Performance of Identity
Shifting Theories of Identity: Identity is now viewed as an ongoing, ambiguous, fragmentary, discontinuous, multiple, non-rational, and contradictory negotiation rather than a fixed, pre-given personality (Collinson 1992: 28).
Workplace as a Site of Identity Construction: This shift is due to:
The significant amount of working time in adult life.
The necessity of selling one's labour power in capitalist economies for economic survival and social status, leading to a deep connection between individual identity and employment (e.g., "What do you do?" as a common introductory question).
Consumption as an Identity Site: Consumption is also a key site for social identity construction, sometimes rivaling production (Bauman 1998: 1).
Life-projects are increasingly built around consumer choice, and the acquisition/display of goods shapes self-presentation (Gabriel and Lang 1995: 81–99).
However, production and consumption are interconnected, as earning power underpins consumption.
Self-Reflexivity and the "Project of Self": A crucial aspect of modern identity is self-reflexivity, where individuals are encouraged to actively "run a project of themselves" across all life domains (Rose 1996: 157).
This implies autonomy and choice, with social judgment cast upon those who "make nothing of themselves." This ethos of unfettered choice aligns with advanced capitalism and the "American Dream."
Thrift (2005: 1) highlights capitalism's "crazy vitality" and appeal to "gut feelings," connecting pleasure and desire with identity projects.
Campbell (1987) argues that psycho-cultural forces driving pleasure-oriented consumption also influence work attitudes (Gabriel and Lang 1995: 103), demonstrating the intertwining of self-fulfilment and capitalist social/material relations.
"Engineers of the Human Soul": Rose (1996: 157) identifies a rise of "new spiritual directors" who implant "identity projects." Designers and architects of organisational spaces can be included in this category.
Discourse and Narrative: Identity construction is strongly influenced by "discourse" (Casey 1995; Collinson 1992; Henriques et al. 1984; Hollway 1991; Shotter and Gergen 1989), where individuals create consistent self-narratives based on socially legitimated discourses (e.g., professional ethos, 'good' mother).
Spatial and Embodied Actor: Moving beyond purely discursive views, identity also requires recognition of the social actor as a spatial and embodied actor. The Cartesian influence often overlooks this.
The enactment of organisational space is a key mode of power production/reproduction and central to identity negotiation. The concept of "enactment" here refers to the spatial and embodied "living through" of social relations, spaces, and identity, distinct from theatrical performance.
Butler's Performativity: Identity is understood through Judith Butler's concept of "performativity" (1993: 95), which is "neither free play nor theatrical self presentation" but rather "the forced reiteration of norms" (1993: 94) and "regulatory fictions" (1993: 95).
De Certeau's "Walking Rhetorics" (1984: 100–3): This concept links pedestrian activity in the city to creating narratives through choosing and improvising routes, which organizes possibilities. This resonates with design consultancies, although critical reservations exist regarding de Certeau's assumption of the autonomous self.
Ricoeur's Narrative Theory (1988): While focusing on time, Ricoeur connects narrative to lived experience, historical action, and imagination, linking it to Lefebvre's (1991) lived and imaginary spaces in identity development (Ezzy 1998).
Self-narratives configure, but are not determined by, lived experience; they are formed by a complex interaction of events, imagination, others, routines, and habits. Identity is a series of practices lived through, not just discourses.
The perspective developed recognizes how "performativity" and "walking rhetorics" contribute to the "enactment" of spatial power and politics, where subject identity is a negotiation of "spaces of representation" (conceived/organised spaces) with "representational spaces" (lived spaces) (Lefebvre).
DEGW, as "engineers of the human soul," facilitates this process by producing organised spaces as potential embodied narratives or "walking rhetorics."
The Redesign of Workspaces: The Example of DEGW
Space design is a significant industry, with consultancies offering extensive spatial solutions for redesigning workplaces.
Influential design consultancies, such as Foster and Partners, claim to integrate key organisational decisions and strategies into spatial, architectural, and material forms.
DEGW (Duffy, Eley, Giffone, Worthington) is a leading, influential design consultancy, established in , specializing predominantly in workplaces (Myerson 1998).
It is a multi-professional group (ergonomics, psychology, planning, architecture) with over staff in the UK and approximately worldwide across offices.
DEGW offers tailored services, including in-company research, spatial strategy development, and design.
They utilize copyrighted "Time Utilisation Surveys" and conduct "post-occupancy" studies to measure spatial efficiency and goal achievement.
Founders like Frank Duffy (past RIBA president) actively contribute to knowledge production (Duffy 1992, 1997; Worthington 1997) and governmental projects (e.g., UK's Commission on Architecture and the Built Environment, 2004).
Duffy highlights a "silo mentality" among managers who discuss IT and organisational issues but neglect buildings. He sees buildings as "agents of change" that can "express new ideas and push possibilities forward" (13 November 1996).
Spatial reordering is integrated with employee self-perception and role, linking to the management of meaning and identity.
DEGW's website asserts that "Space is beginning to be perceived as a tool and as an enabler for increased productivity through collaboration, strengthened cultural values and knowledge sharing," aiming to "deliver measurable business benefits."
Andrew Harrison's Four Elements of Value Maximized by Buildings:
. Image value: The semiotics and aesthetic cachet of the structure.
. Exchange value: The resale price, influenced by factors like a "signature architect."
. User value: Flexibility for the owner and the building's capacity to adapt to changing internal activities over time.
. Business value: The predominant view, aiming to incorporate and capitalize on all other forms of value.
The phrase "Less space, better used" (GlaxoSmithKline's global 'Space Program') epitomizes DEGW's synthesis of economics and human relations management.
Trends in Workplace Redesign by DEGW
Openness and Transparency:
British Treasury: A high-profile project involving cultural engineering. Demolition of miles of corridors, creation of atriums, open-plan offices, a -foot-high reception area, and glass lifts aimed to increase transparency and collaboration, even making the Permanent Secretary visible to staff.
JWT (J Walter Thompson): Design focused on fostering "a more open culture" and "transparency" to enhance knowledge sharing and internal communication (www.degw.com).
Google Headquarters, California: Utilizes a "neighbourhoods" and "street" plan to facilitate the "circulation" of individuals, workgroups, air, and light.
Urban Design Metaphors:
These designs frequently draw on ideas from urban planning (village, town, city, street, campus).
Insurance Company Call Centre: Used a "townscape design" with novelty interiors and "sanctuaries" to address staff retention among young employees.
Boots the Chemist HQ (Nottingham): Employed "neighbourhoods and home-bases" for communication and flexibility.
Other examples include MLC Sydney ('vertical village'), Apicorp Saudi Arabia ('office-village'), and Capital One European Headquarters ('townscape').
Campus Design: Popularized by DEGW for clients like Philips (Bangalore) and Microsoft (Hyderabad), often mimicking academic institutions.
Peter Andrew (DEGW Asia-Pacific, 2005) identified types of campus designs (e.g., street campus, vertical campus), all aiming for "ad hoc and serendipitous" interaction.
Aesthetic Pleasure:
Workplaces are designed to be bright, colorful, and attractive, merging work, leisure, and domestic needs (e.g., nurseries, gyms).
JWT: Featured "inspiration" zones, and staff successfully advocated for an S-shaped bar over a gym for satisfaction.
BBC Media Village: Teams received budgets for artwork.
Egg Headquarters: Lighting and dynamic background projections manipulated to influence staff mood.
These initiatives underline the need for further research into the "rhetorics and realities" (Legge 1995) of spatial reorganizing processes.
The link between spatial reordering and employees' identity enrollment is explored through liquidity, aestheticisation, identification with "community," and "the consuming self."
Deep Dive: The Disappearing Workplace
Overall Trend: The concept of a bounded, specified "place" of work is eroding due to globalization, technology, economic shifts, and organizational dispersal.
Traditional "placings" (functional, sectional, hierarchical markers) and permanent workstations are being replaced with expectations of employee mobility across multiple physical (train, plane, café) and virtual environments.
Paradox of Extension: While physically disappearing, the workplace paradoxically extends its times and spaces into more aspects of everyday life, often obscuring this "colonisation" (Massey 1995b).
Psychic Disappearance: The traditional connotations of 'work' are disassembled and replaced with symbols from other social arenas: community (villages, neighbourhoods), domesticity (family), leisure (fun, art, gyms), and consumption (streets, employee shareholding).
This creates an individual of "free-play of the mobile identity," shifting management's focus from "hands" to "hearts and minds."
The physical and psychic disappearance merge, allowing employees to carry their work identity through various spaces in their lives, blurring work-life boundaries.
Tom Peters' (early 1990s) call to harness employees' "outside" work identity for business returns exemplifies this drive to manage pleasure (Burrell 1992a), extending capitalist interests into employees' lives .
. Liquidity and Movement:
Modern workplaces valorize "liquidity" and de-sedentarization, creating "smooth, frictionless spaces" (Buchanan 2005: 19) "geared to keep you mobile."
Design literature emphasizes movement, flow, serendipitous interaction, and communication, contrasting with the rigidity of old bureaucracies (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building desks with hinged chairs, Duffy 1980: 268).
Work practices are now expected to be flexible, unbound from a specific desk, clock, or country. The notion that "all that is solid melts into air" (Harvey 1989) reflects the overcoming of physical constraints.
This fluidity in spaces corresponds with the dismantling of separations between public and private selves in creating organisational identities.
Organizational transparency and openness aim to obscure power relations by fostering movement and interaction, enabling employees to "freely" enact organisational relations of power and identity.
This resembles neo-baroque spatial control, where power sources are hidden beneath apparent choice (Chapter 2).
Tensions: A contradiction exists between maintaining employee mobility and fostering community commitment.
Warren (2002) observed micro-scooters meant for speed being used for games and then confiscated, highlighting the conflict between efficiency and informal activities.
Dovey (1999: 24) cautions against equating open physical space with liberty, noting that an "open syntax can operate as a powerful signifier of solidarity and democracy in the absence of the practice."
. Community as a Spatial Rhetoric:
Workplace design frequently uses community imagery (village, town, city) to emphasize social bonds over the cash nexus of employment.
Open designs are associated with "greater teamworking, interpersonal familiarity and spontaneous interaction" (Steele in Hatch 1990: 131; Hofbauer 2000: 174).
The goal is to make the organisation feel like a "second home" by evoking "emotional memories" (Stanilavsky in Berg & Kreiner 1990: 47) of positive community and domestic bliss, blurring office-home boundaries.
This spatial rhetoric focuses on rebuilding a romanticized notion of community into the organization, sometimes occluding the organization itself as the unit of analysis (Hofbauer 2000: 183).
Historical Parallel (Larkin Building, 1905): Communal values were inscribed on walls (e.g., "Co-operation, Economy, Industry"), and Frank Lloyd Wright called it a "family home." However, the building's materiality enforced a Taylorized, "routinised and factory-like" labor process with tight spatial control and "single-cell offices" (Duffy 1980: 265, 268).
Modern Approach: Unlike the Larkin Building's discursive exhortations, modern workplaces aim for the enactment of communal relations, where employees physically "live through" this communal identity daily.
The "street" metaphor is frequently used to suggest movement, neighbourliness, spontaneous interaction, and consumption opportunities, contrasting with anonymous, routinized workplaces.
This modern "community" is often based on the individualized, yet collective, "community" of consumption rather than traditional residential street-based ties.
. The Consuming Self:
Since the 1920s, consumption has become an end in itself, synonymous with "living life to the full" (Gabriel and Lang 1995: 7).
Choice as Freedom: Choice is valorized as a fundamental aspect of freedom, driving economic efficiency and growth.
However, exercising consumer choice often entails significant "work" (Bourdieu 1984), demanding knowledge and effort for "intelligent consumption."
Various images portray the consumer positively (chooser, communicator, explorer, hedonist, etc.), emphasizing an active, social agent (Gabriel and Lang 1995).
Organizations tap into this positive image of the consuming self (choice, agency, pleasure) within their spaces.
Origins: This modern ideal of the autonomous subject, free from authoritative tradition, harks back to figures like Luther and Freud (Brueggemann 1999: 22).
Contradiction: In capitalist society, the need to sell labour power compromises individual freedom. Consumption serves to mitigate this contradiction, aligning individual self-fulfilment with capitalist demands.
Brueggemann (1999) notes a shift from "neighbourliness" to the "mall" in the "therapeutic culture," where self-fascination dominates.
Bringing the shopping mall into organisational space evokes positive associations but also reveals the paradox of the autonomous self within capitalism.
Ambiguous Spaces: Consumption spaces (like malls) hover between workplace/home, work/leisure, privacy/sociability, rationality/impulse. They are "public-private liminal spaces" (Zukin 1988: 431).
Canary Wharf Example: Corporate employees descend into a controlled shopping mall, where apparent freedom is disrupted by high security regulating sitting and eating, demonstrating the clash between imaginary freedom and lived experience.
Giddens (1990: 140–1) notes that malls offer ontological security through familiarity, yet contain chain stores reflecting distant events and a superficial "street sociability."
Self-Reflection in the Workplace: Falk and Campbell (1997) argue that identity construction occurs during the shopping process through self-reflection ("Am I like that?," "Could I be like that?"). A similar process occurs in designed workplaces, where engagement with the company's material trappings mirrors the "project of self" through consumption.
This ideology of the consuming self spatialized in the workplace obscures the underlying need to sell labour and the extraction of surplus value.
. Aestheticisation:
Explicitly aestheticised spaces contribute to obscuring power relations, creating a "spectacle" that distracts from underlying controls (Featherstone 1991).
Aesthetics are presented as a neutral managerial tool to sell the organisation and its products and to manipulate employees, aiming for extreme employee enthusiasm (Dickinson and Svenson 2000: 41).
This taps into "pleasure" as an unexploited resource, transferring organisational goals and identity to employees through values of creativity and pleasurable (demanding) activity.
Corporate aesthetics encompass visual elements (packaging, logos, buildings) and engage the entire sensorium (Corbett 2003, 2006), such as bird song in LSE BOX or white noise in EnergyCo, to control sensual experience.
"Anaestheticisation": This managerial encouragement of a certain perception brings an accompanying "anaestheticisation" (Dale and Burrell 2003; Welsch 1997), where continuous excitement leads to indifference, and stimulating one sense anaesthetizes others.
Customer aesthetic experience often comes at the cost of employee anaestheticisation (Hochschild 1983).
This highlights a tension between "conceived aesthetics" (managed space) and "lived aesthetics" (phenomenological experience).
Camouflage: The "dazzle patterns" at the BBC Media Village entrance, originally used on WWI ships for camouflage, symbolically raise the question: "what is being camouflaged?" (Dale and Burrell 2003).
Control via Aesthetics: Cartoons in a Melbourne bank, for instance, used a playful aesthetic to enforce spatial rules, condescendingly depicting employees as children.
Co-option of Play: While play has been advocated as a radical, transformative approach (Burrell 1984; Kane 2004), it has been co-opted into workplace redesign with specific organisational goals (e.g., table tennis, pool tables).
John Holm (DEGW, 2006) describes this as moving "from dark satanic mills to holidaying at work." The aim is to harness employees' spontaneous creativity.
Lefebvre (1991: 383–4) critiques this, stating leisure is an "illusion" of freedom, as alienated as labor, co-opted and assimilated into the capitalist "system."
Alferoff and Knights (2003) found in call centers that "play" activities (decorations, games) were seen by employees as illegitimate and contradictory to management's control and profit objectives. The "conceived aesthetics" and "lived aesthetics" were not aligned.
Manipulative Dimension: Employees often perceive the manipulative aspects of aestheticisation. Coal miners in responded to cosmetic changes at pitheads with "Same bloody gaffers," detecting underlying exploitative continuity.
The "projector behind the phantasmagoria" is eventually revealed.
Conclusion: Contradictions and Dynamics of Spatial Identity
The chapter explored spatial devices used to integrate employee identities with organisational goals, but noted contradictions and paradoxes.
Spatial practices are a constant negotiation between conceived (planned) and lived experiences.
Revisiting De Certeau and Butler: While de Certeau's "walking rhetorics" romanticize the pedestrian as a free, choice-making agent constructing identity narratives, a critical view reveals limited choices due to real-world constraints (no-go areas, fear, class, gender, race exclusions - Sibley 1995).
The idealized "flâneur" (Featherstone 1991: 75) ignores the embodied individual, especially women (Wolff 1985; Featherstone 1991: 75–6), whose movements are socially read and constrained.
Thus, "walking rhetorics" are more akin to Butler's "forced reiterations" of norms than free will.
The ideology of autonomy, pleasure, and self-fulfilment in identity construction often conceals pre-designed, repetitious "routes," meaning individuals are "incorporated" even in their perceived choices.
Dynamic Negotiation: However, the negotiation of identity through spatial practices is dynamic and not entirely determined.
"The Thick of It" (BBC4, 2005): This political comedy illustrates employees' oppositional relationships with a new open-plan government building (filmed at BBC Media Village), mimicking the renovated Treasury.
Characters express discomfort, with the open plan ironically aiding the bully Malcolm Tucker. The atrium becomes a stage for "organisational suicide" discussions and public humiliation ("bollock vision").
This highlights the manipulations in corporate building designs and shows how organisational identity can lead to oppositional identity.
Even carefully conceived spaces contain their own contradictions.
This first part of the book focused on "the spaces of organisation" (social production of space within organisations). The next part will consider "the organisation of space" (how social space is intimately linked with organising processes beyond specific organisational boundaries), leading to Lefebvre's (1991) "political economy of space."
Notes from the Text
The text humorously points out the male desire to reshape people to fit buildings, comparing it to the impulse to usurp reproduction (Easlea 1983) and referencing Lloyd Wright's perceived "war against the housewife" (discussed in Chapter 5).
Spatial power relations are doubly obscured: first, by their taken-for-granted nature by those living through them; second, by the failure of linguistically-focused analysis to perceive them.