ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that human-focused workplace design and management has a fundamental and profound influence on the strategies realised by organisations. However, to understand this relationship, the workplace community will need to draw on the theories and methods used by Strategy-as-Practice scholars. Strategy-as-Practice is a distinctive approach to studying organisation strategy that focuses on micro-level social practices. Strategies realised by organisations in practice are not always the result of formal strategic planning processes. Indeed, research has shown that in times of great uncertainty, new strategic directions emerge from within the organisation as the result of everyday actions and decisions. Actors across the organisation make decisions in order to cope with everyday problems, and these decisions accumulate into patterns of action that ultimately become recognised as strategic in nature. This process of everyday coping is a fundamentally social process influenced by the nature of social interaction within the organisation. As a result, the characteristics of an organisation’s strategy is influenced by the organisation’s profile of social interaction; who interacts with whom, how often and for how long. Workplaces tend to encourage certain types of interaction and constrain others, so it follows that the profile of an organisation’s social interaction is influenced by the design of the workplace. This means that workplace designers are consequential contributors to the strategies realised by organisations in practice. Strategy-as-Practice researchers have developed methods that help understand the strategic consequences of everyday actions and interactions. Integrating these with the methods used by workplace scholars for understanding the impact of spatial design on social interaction has the potential to place human-focused workplace design onto the strategy making agendas of senior executives.
