ABSTRACT
Lefebvre’s reflections on social space have profoundly changed the ways scholars think about the physical environment of organizations. As researchers start from their own perspectives to engage with Lefebvre’s thinking and develop research agendas for organizational space, new questions also arise that require closer scrutiny. One such question concerns the dynamics of social space. Earlier seminal works (Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008) recognize organizational space as social materiality; more recently, a body of literature points to the direction that organizational space may be seen as social processes. For instance, Beyes and Steyaert (2012) invite us to view organizational space as undergoing an ongoing process of making and remaking. A number of empirical works use Lefebvre’s triad of conceived, perceived and lived spaces to understand and trace changes in organizations’ spatial formations and their underlying power rationales (Beyes and Michel, 2011; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2011; Zhang and Spicer, 2014). So far, however, little is known about how the conceived, perceived and lived elements of Lefebvre’s triad inform, affect and perhaps transform one another during the ongoing processes of spatial production. I think that knowledge of this kind is important as it would allow us to further register organizational space as a social process, which is one of the central ideas laid out in The Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991). This chapter makes an effort in this direction.
