“That was easier when we were sitting together”: Managerial work as ordering with place

Abstract

This article explores how the changes brought about by flexible offices affect managerial work, focusing on middle managers. Our study of three organizations that have adopted flexible offices reveals that middle managers face increased responsibilities and additional activities after such adoption, highlighting an intensification of their work. Combining the practice perspective with the theoretical lens of place and its concepts of trajectory and throwntogetherness, we put forward a definition of managerial work as situated ordering that is an ongoing sociomaterial accomplishment. We identify four new managerial practices required in flexible offices to achieve situated ordering, namely materializing new homes, sustaining closeness, reproducing alignment and keeping performance under control. Taken together, these practices reveal how managerial work changes when its place is altered, elucidating why such alterations create more work for managers. In doing so, our study addresses why and how place matters for managerial work.

Introduction

In recent years, the widespread adoption of flexible offices has fundamentally altered the dynamics of work by dislocating it from traditional “fixed” offices (cf. Halford, 2005). Employees in flexible settings no longer have assigned desks as they choose among various workstations, inside and outside the office, to fit their activities and needs. While this transformation promises improved efficiency and performance through individual flexibility and enhanced digital support, empirical evidence reveals that middle managers in flexible offices often face extended working hours, increased responsibilities and additional tasks (Hassard and Morris, 2022; Ipsen et al., 2022; Manca, 2022). These additional efforts are partly attributed to the greater use of digital technologies, prompting managers to extend their work beyond traditional office premises and schedules (Butts et al., 2015; Johns and Gratton, 2013). In addition, the reduced physical colocation in flexible offices demands that managers invest time to mitigate the relational and coordination challenges inherent in distributed collaboration (Bosch-Sijtsema et al., 2010; Kossek et al., 2015).

When studying these effects, workplace researchers have mostly focused on how changes in the spatial and material conditions of work brought about by flexible offices deterministically affect managers’ activities and relations. By doing so, they have analytically and theoretically separated the social and material aspects of work (Van Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010), overlooking the “inherent movement of space” (Stephenson et al., 2020: 798) that is continuously extended, altered and reorganized by the emerging configurations of people, objects and organizational practices. This oversight may lead us to attribute increased managerial efforts to a “mere” misalignment between new designs and current work practices, obscuring a more nuanced understanding of what middle managers need to learn to handle once their workplace has changed, and what requires their time and energy.

To better understand managers’ experiences of having to work differently in the transformed workplace, we draw on a practice perspective and, following Korica et al. (2017), we conceptualize managerial work as situated ordering. Understanding the situatedness of practice implies examining the construction of situations in their relationships with the physical environment and the objects in it (Gherardi, 2021). A practice perspective encourages us to consider how all the elements of managerial practice hold together in a socially and materially sustained way, emerging as “the appropriate ‘way of doing things together’” (Gherardi, 2021: 11). Viewing managerial work as situated ordering also suggests that activities like “bringing together” and “arranging” are needed to generate order, encompassing social, spatial and material elements. Our article aims to study how changes brought about by flexible offices affect middle managers’ practices by focusing on their work as situated ordering. To do this, we mobilize the theoretical lens of place (Massey, 1994, 2005) that allows us to see ordering as a sociomaterial accomplishment, involving elements beyond managers and their social relations, such as objects, technologies and bodies. This lens underscores that ordering is not solely a product of human action but an ongoing sociomaterial accomplishment that can be analyzed through Massey’s (2005) concept of trajectory, defined as an emerging “story-so-far.” This concept directs our attention to how humans (with their bodies), technologies and objects—all conceptualized as evolving trajectories rather than static entities—are brought together and ordered in relation to each other into a coherent and meaningful whole to perform work as a collective. A place lens allows us to scrutinize ordering as a sociomaterial achievement in which the terms for keeping together a multiplicity of trajectories are continuously negotiated and enacted, highlighting the interplay between social and material factors in shaping managerial practices and outcomes. Drawing on this lens, we can address the following research questions: how are trajectories brought together and ordered in flexible offices, and what does this imply for how managerial work is understood and practiced?

We apply a place lens to analyze managerial work in three organizations that have recently transitioned to flexible offices, based on activity-based designs (Appel-Meulenbroek et al., 2011). This lens enhances our understanding of the ordering enacted by managers in the transformed workplace, encompassing what such ordering achieves and why it is needed.

A place lens to study managerial work as situated ordering

The idea that managerial work involves ordering is foundational in management thinking. Early portrayals of managerial work (e.g. Fayol, [1949] 1916; Kotter, 1982; Parker Follett, 1942; Taylor, 1911) predominantly emphasized ordering as the regulation of activities and interactions to rationalize processes and ensure efficiency. Over time, scholars have started viewing ordering as the discursive production of order to attain stability by reinforcing organizational identities and alignment. This is especially visible in studies exploring managers’ sensemaking and sensegiving practices during periods of change (cf. Rouleau, 2005; Rouleau and Balogun, 2011), which exposed the relational and contextual nature of managerial work and how its ordering efforts encompass various elements, including meanings and discourses.

Recently, the mundane work of managers has been articulated in terms of situated ordering, focusing on the order-producing activities that are situated in a sociomaterial context that affects—but is also reproduced in—these activities. This understanding aligns with a practice perspective (cf. Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Nicolini, 2012) that brings scholars closer to the everyday realities of managers, disclosing the connections between their work and its material and relational hinterland (Korica et al., 2017). Yet, empirical inquiries adopting a practice perspective on managerial work remain scarce (for an exception, see Bouty and Drucker-Godard, 2019). Scholars have largely disregarded how the interplay between managerial work and its spatial and material setting is manifested through practice and what this might imply (Bouty and Drucker-Godard, 2019; Korica et al., 2017). Consequently, the situatedness of managerial work still revolves around managers and their social context, downplaying the role of the immediate material surroundings where work is performed. This poses challenges when these surroundings undergo radical changes, leading to consequences for managers that may remain unacknowledged or only partially understood.

To analyze how physical objects and locations play out in managerial work, we adopt a place lens grounded in its processual and performative understanding developed in human geography. While the spatial turn in management studies has already introduced scholars to both the concepts of space and place, which are related phenomena (Berti et al., 2018; Massey, 2005), space has attracted far more attention (Wright et al., 2022). Place tends to still be understood as the physical and tangible location in which work happens; a container for work practices and managerial work (cf. Tengblad, 2012), which is often taken for granted, black-boxed and treated as a background to social action—and, sometimes, even as a synonym for space. However, the concept of place is important for understanding managerial work, as it brings attention to an important aspect that a focus on space overlooks: meaningfulness. Gieryn (2000) has argued that place is characterized by three elements: location, material form and meaningfulness, claiming that “space is what place becomes when the unique gathering of things, meanings and values are sucked out” (p. 465). Although arguing against a sharp distinction between space and place, Massey (2005) also emphasized the meaningfulness of the latter, conceptualizing place as an ongoing achievement rather than a static entity. She offered the concept of throwntogetherness as a means for understanding how the meaningfulness of a place is not essentially connected to a certain location but is the result of negotiations regarding the terms of relating and coexisting there. Central to understanding throwntogetherness is the concept of trajectory, which helps conceptualize the ongoing movement and accumulated history of what we usually treat as entities, including people, objects, norms, discourses and physical environments (Massey, 2005). Trajectories are emergent—not deterministic—developments that contain and materialize in the present the past interactions, movements and doings. In Massey’s words,

By “trajectory” and “story” I mean simply to emphasise the process of change in a phenomenon. The terms are thus temporal in their stress, though, I would argue, their necessary spatiality (the positioning in relation to other trajectories or stories, for instance) is inseparable from and intrinsic to their character. The phenomenon in question may be a living thing, a scientific attitude, a collectivity, a social convention, a geological formation. [. . .] what I intend is simply the history, change, movement, of things themselves. (Massey, 2005: 12)

Applying a place lens allows us to reconceptualize seemingly fixed objects, like standing desks and hanging lamps, as trajectories with their own histories, gathering in office locations alongside employees using them, also seen as trajectories. There are always plenty of trajectories “thrown” in a location and, when they gather recursively, in a similar way over time, a form of temporary stabilization is produced. This stabilization leads us to take the resulting place for granted, enabling it to affect identities, actions and practices, making its contingency disappear (Massey, 1994, 2005). Hence, while always provisional, the throwntogetherness of trajectories can be temporarily stabilized, producing a sense of attachment and uniqueness of a location that supports meaningful action (Massey, 2005; see also Crevani, 2019). However, place is never fully stable and may be disrupted or disassembled at any moment, calling for new efforts to recreate stability (Gieryn, 2000). Thus, the concepts of throwntogetherness and trajectories enable us to consider the materiality, meaningfulness and stabilizing character of place (cf. Berti et al., 2018; Gieryn, 2000; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024; Tuan, 1977) as relational and processual rather than as essential “fixed” qualities. A place lens illuminates the ordering efforts that connect, fix and stabilize trajectories in meaningful bundles. It allows us to unpack the ongoing stabilization and negotiation of the terms for the coexisting and coevolving of the trajectories that are “thrown together” in a certain location. Rather than treating the workplace as an inert container for managerial work, embracing Massey’s (2005) concept of place leads us to recognize that workplace transformations can alter the bundles of trajectories that previously converged in various office locations, impacting their stabilization. We suggest that middle managers may be particularly affected by this alteration of the bundles of trajectories, and studying these effects may inform us on the nature of recent workplace transformations and that of managerial work.

Research design

Our inquiry rests on a qualitative investigation of how managerial work has changed in three organizations that recently transitioned to flexible, activity-based office designs (cf. Figure 1). Table 1 describes the three companies.

Figure 1.

Graphical representation of the trajectories converging into the flexible, activity-based office (illustration by Stina Rudebjer, based on our field notes).

Table 1.

Descriptions of the studied organizations.

Study organization	Description
Company A	Company A is a Swedish real estate company headquartered in Stockholm. Three years before the study, the company moved its headquarters into a fully flexible activity-based office of 2500 m2, designed to stimulate collaboration, impromptu encounters and creative problem-solving among its 220 employees. Two years later, Company A implemented the same model and designs in its smaller 1000 m2 office in Uppsala.
Company B	Company B is a small, privately owned accounting company in Stockholm, with 35 employees occupying a single-floor flexible activity-based office of approximately 500 m2. The company embraced this model 2 years before the study, to improve collaboration between professional groups, including accountants and developers.
Company C	Company C is a nationally owned firm in the aviation industry that, one year before the study, moved 530 employees into new 6991 m2 activity-based headquarters in Stockholm. The head office was designed to foster collaboration and networking opportunities among employees from operations that used to be dislocated across different locations.

These organizations were chosen as they all changed from traditional “fixed” offices, where employees had assigned desks grouped by department, to flexible offices, allowing for a clear contrast. Also, at the time of the study, the three organizations had only recently made this transition, making the changes to managerial work more salient.

Data collection

Place revolves around how various trajectories come to be in relation to each other and hold together (Massey, 2005). Embracing a place lens—distinct from a spatial approach—forefronts meanings and offers the conceptual tools to reveal the challenges of perceiving throwntogetherness in flexible offices. To capture the patterns of activities that stabilized into practices and the embodied experiences of change, we conducted interviews, which have been recognized as a relevant method for exploring and theorizing sociomateriality (see Berti et al., 2018; Crevani, 2019; Orlikowski and Scott, 2014). We drew on 29 in-depth interviews conducted with first- and second-line managers, along with 8 additional interviews with employees to confirm activities and interactions. Semi-structured interviews lasted on average 46 minutes each. Except for two conducted via video conference, they were held face-to-face in the companies’ offices. In this way, we could conduct direct observations in the new office before and after the interviews, placing the practices in their material context. To produce accurate accounts of managerial work in place, we began interviews by asking managers to describe a typical workday, taking us into their daily lives and actions. We asked them to explain the reasons behind their daily doings and interactions, and how these had changed due to the flexible office. We also invited comparisons between past and present activities and experiences, asking how the new office altered what managers did and achieved in terms of communication, performance and control. We inquired about the challenges both managers and employees encountered, and the actions taken to respond. To get closer to the actual respondents’ experiences, we also collected critical incidents (Bott and Tourish, 2016; Chell, 1998) in the form of lived situations affecting managers in the flexible office. Because these critical incidents revolved around situations that felt important or significant to them and focused on what was being done in terms of managerial work, they allowed us to combine subjective interpretations with empirical accounts of actual office events, offering rich and detailed descriptions that captured both social and material aspects (Bott and Tourish, 2016). By drawing on this empirical material (cf. Table 2), we could contrast the work of managers before and after the change, highlighting their purposeful efforts to reestablish a meaningful throwntogetherness in their new workplaces.

Table 2.

List of empirical material.

Study organization	Empirical material
Company A	• Exploratory interview with two project leaders in Stockholm and Uppsala. • In-depth interviews with 3 second-line managers, 13 first-line managers and 5 employees from Stockholm and Uppsala offices. • On-site observations of activities and interactions at the Stockholm and Uppsala offices. Two authors conducted observations equivalent to approximately three working days in Stockholm and one working day in Uppsala, using their drop-in stations in various office areas while collecting field notes on how different trajectories materialize within the flexible office.
Company B	• In-depth interviews with three employees, one second-line manager, and three first-line managers. • On-site observations were conducted by two authors immediately before and after the interviews at the new office, and during a tour of the flexible office provided by one respondent.
Company C	• Exploratory interview with two project leaders. • In-depth interviews with two second-line managers and seven first-line managers. • On-site observations of activities and interactions at the flexible office. One of the authors spent the equivalent of two working days at Company C’s premises, using the drop-in stations at various office locations while collecting field notes.

Data analysis

Data analysis involved a three-phase iterative approach. Although described sequentially below, in practice, we moved back and forth between these different phases. This analytical sequencing allowed us to develop connections between categories and understand how managers tackled the various effects of workplace transformation through new practices. Table 3 presents these three phases and the main results of our analysis.

Table 3.

Analysis phases and results.

Phase	Phase 1: Describing the alterations to the place of work	Phase 2: Identifying the effects of these alterations	Phase 3: Identifying new managerial practices
Main results	The nature of the alteration of the place of work	The absence of a meaningful throwntogetherness: a lack of significance, coherence, and stability of the new place of work	New practices developed to deal with the alterations generated by the workplace transformation, all helping managers to negotiate a temporary throwntogetherness
Details	Three distinct forms of alterations: • Inclusion of new trajectories • Exclusion of old trajectories • Changes in the relative positioning	Two categories of effects: • Instrumental effects • Affective effects	Four practices: • Materializing new temporary homes • Sustaining closeness and relationships • Reproducing alignment • Keeping performance under control

Phase 1

In this phase, we focused on the alterations of the place of work triggered by the flexible office. To do this, we first engaged in a descriptive level of coding by labeling the evidence of workplace changes. In the second, conceptual level of coding, we brought in Massey’s (2005) idea of trajectory to connect these changes to the alterations of the bundle of trajectories forming the previous place of work. We highlighted those trajectories that were relevant to managerial work according to what emerged from the interviews—for instance, discourses like “paperless orientation,” objects such as “assigned desks,” practices such as “closed-door conversations” and people like “customers.” While the studied places were made up of more trajectories than the ones we describe, our analyses focused on those that were critical for understanding the throwntogetherness that was consequential for managerial work. Building on our theoretical lens, we conceptualized these alterations in terms of “introduction of new trajectories” coming from different places (e.g. ideas of creativity and fun, materialized through cozy café-like artifacts), “exclusion of the old trajectories” (e.g. removal of private offices and assigned group areas) and “change in the relative positioning of the previously stabilized trajectories” (e.g. reshuffling of group members) (cf. Appendix 1).

Phase 2

In the second phase, we identified evidence of the effects of the workplace transformations as perceived by the respondents. We began by inductively developing first-order codes from the data, which we then grouped into second-order categories outlining various effects underscoring a lack of stability that impedes work. At an aggregate level, drawing on our place vocabulary, these effects revealed the absence of a meaningful throwntogetherness of the different trajectories gathering in the new offices (cf. Appendix 2).

Phase 3

In the third phase, we focused on the constitution of managerial work. Inspired by Gioia’s template (Gioia et al., 2013), we started by coding inductively the activities managers described for handling the conditions imposed by the flexible office (e.g. walking around, arranging more meetings, interacting in group chats). Similar activities were clustered into second-order categories. Through constant comparison between theory and data, we distilled four aggregate dimensions corresponding to four practices enacted by managers in the new office (cf. Glaser and Strauss, 1967). Practices were abductively derived to reflect customary managerial work as we understood it and they included materializing new homes for groups, sustaining closeness, reproducing alignment and keeping performance under control (cf. Appendix 3). While iteratively developing concepts and connections, we observed that the effects identified in phase 2 led to the dissolution of the previously established throwntogetherness, while the identified practices aligned with the provisional ordering of the trajectories that converged into new locations.

The next section presents our findings, beginning with the nature of the alterations brought by the workplace transformation and their effects. We then introduce the four uncovered managerial practices, showing how managers enacted these to renegotiate the throwntogetherness of the trajectories disassembled by the new office design. Our results are accompanied by five vignettes that represent situations encountered by respondents. Vignettes provide empirical details in a narrative and evocative form, illustrating a study’s key themes vividly (Jarzabkowski et al., 2014; Reay et al., 2019). Each vignette assembles experiences from various respondents, forming fictionalized syntheses of actual experiences that condense each of the study’s theme into a narrative. They focus on the commonalities between respondents and give a heightened sense of what they experienced, reproducing affect and offering glimpses of sociomaterial accomplishments. Such fictionalization presents complex data in a cohesive and relatable narrative and is “a way to engage in imagination that enriches inquiry spaces and research understandings” (Caine et al., 2017: 215). Our work crystallizes in Figure 2, which outlines the analytical narrative derived from our data.

Figure 2.

Analytical visualization of the findings.

Findings

It is 8:00 a.m., and John has just arrived at the office. Another intense meeting day is about to start but, before, coffee is a must. John goes to the café on the ground floor. He orders his cappuccino and sits at one of the large wooden tables amid the open landscape where managers and employees from different departments blend into a hectic crowd. He often sits there in-between meetings. Other managers find all that movement and chatting around disturbing; but John loves that place mostly because his employees know exactly where to find him when he sits there. No need for additional messages or SMS. If he needs to do some concentration work before going back home, he can always stay a little bit longer in the evening, when the office is emptier and quieter. John loves the modern setup of the new activity-based office and the opportunity to meet new people every day. But he also had to set up a new routine for himself to feel less lost in the new office and encouraged everyone to do the same. So, he starts every day by checking his email and logging into Outlook, looking through his employees’ locations. This morning Laura is logged in, but she won’t be at the office since she is visiting customers. Andreas and Robert are sitting in the area nearby the group cabinets, as usual. And there is Lena, who has not logged in yet. She hasn’t been logged in for days, and she is not nearby. Or maybe she is at the office, but no one knows precisely where. John considers calling her later to check if everything is ok; he also wants to remind her that working “activity-based” does not mean anarchy. She must log into Outlook; that’s the norm in the group! Maybe he should send a formal notice to HR. But before doing this, he would like to have an informal talk with someone from that department to understand how to tackle the situation. Yet, John realizes that he has no idea where HR people sit as there is no HR office anymore. “An email would work”, he concludes. Meantime, his mobile beeps; Laura is asking about after-work plans on the group chat on WhatsApp. John knows that Laura misses her colleagues; when they were still occupying the old office, if not around visiting customers, Laura was always sitting at her desk, next to them. Now, most of the times, she cannot even find a spot in colleagues’ vicinity, and she told John that she feels really frustrated about it. For this reason, each Friday, John organizes an after-work beer with the whole group. Today won’t be an exception. John is on the verge of replying to the group chat when a young man comes up close to him. “I beg your pardon,” John raises his eyes; in front of him stands a young man who looks stranded. “Do you know where I can print a document?”. The guy is clearly new to the company; while waiting for John’s answer, he is holding his breath, worried he might have asked something trivial to a top manager. John displays one of his best smiles to put the young colleague at ease, showing him printing machines in a corner. The guy thanks him shyly and slides away. John brings his eyes again to his mobile and suddenly realizes that time has flown because it is almost 9 a.m. and the meeting is about to start. He collects his stuff quickly and runs to his first meeting of the day.

The analytical narrative, illustrated in Figure 2, begins with the traditional office serving as a place where trajectories gather recursively and are stably positioned in relation to each other. With the introduction of the flexible designs, we observe a destabilization of the bundles of trajectories gathering in the new office that we interpret as a lack of meaningful throwntogetherness. This instability catalyzes affective and instrumental effects that hinder managers’ ability to “hold together the collective.” In response, the managers enacted four practices to offer some stability in the terms for gathering and connecting trajectories, creating and recreating a common ground for performing collective work. We theorize that these practices served to temporarily stabilize the throwntogetherness of the trajectories converging in the flexible office. To elaborate our findings, we examined the dynamics behind the rise and development of each practice, discussing how they emerged as a consequence of the experienced lack of throwntogetherness, interacted with one another and provided some stability to the bundle of trajectories that, differently from before, remained provisional.

Materializing new homes for groups

As he has done since the move to the activity-based office, Andreas is sitting next to Robert near the group lockers. John told them that’s their reference area: a safe base to return to whenever they don’t have to wander around meetings. Yet, a few days before, a new hire from the IT department dared to sit there. But someone might have told him that was not meant to be his place because that small infringement has not happened again. Andreas looks around, hoping to spot John, but he’s not there. Nor is any senior in his group, and Andreas desperately needs advice before submitting a proposal to a customer. So, he logs into Yammer, enters the group room, and just drops the question there. Shortly after, Laura and John both intervene with precious inputs. John is always highly responsive on the group chat because he knows how important it is. The new office, at first, was disorienting for many. But now, with this combination of group tools, zones and routines, Andreas feels he still belongs somewhere, even if everyone in his team is sitting at a different place, even without a group home.

The absence of concrete group “homes” in the new office profoundly influenced participants’ daily experiences. In traditional corporate offices, assigned desks, departmental meeting rooms, shared corridors and communal facilities, such as printers and coffee machines, partly controlled the interplay of trajectories that developed at specific locations. They determined who became a natural presence there and who did not, favoring the recursive gathering of specific human and nonhuman trajectories, including group members, routines, fixed desks, meeting rooms and other shared facilities and landmarks. Over time, these recursive gatherings produced the stabilization of meanings of homeyness and collective ownership tied to the locations in which they converged. One manager explained,

In traditional offices, you meet up with your department at the same place and you have your lockers at the same place together, and you start the day in the same way. (. . .) Sometimes people need to have a special place that is theirs. (M5, A)

This fragment highlights the emotional, identity-related bonds participants formed within these familiar, shared group places. By offering stability in activities and relationships through the seamless convergence of trajectories, the more traditional office provided employees with a cognitive map to navigate this familiar and safe place.

With the new design, participants experienced both instrumental and affective drawbacks, reflecting significant changes in how trajectories converged and were stabilized into new office locations. Assigned workstations, name plates, departmental document archives and non-portable computers were replaced by hot desks, wheeled cabinets and laptops, creating a boundaryless environment that eroded the feelings of stability and familiarity experienced in the old office. One respondent put it starkly: “[in the new office, you should] let go your desk and all the security around existing as a person” (M5, A). Another manager noted that the real challenge in the new office is “to have to be in a new environment every day” (M18, B). Employees, now restlessly moving through the office with laptops and switching workstations, struggled to regain the stability that once made the office feel like home. These struggles were reflected in the frequent use of place-laden language to express a perceived loss of coherence, stability and taken-for-grantedness, as in the quote below:

I am still waiting for the feeling of being completely at home. Because you are always moving around. And somehow my instincts are used to come to the same place, setting up in the same way when I am at work. (. . .) And I’m starting to think that, maybe, I would never get that feeling of starting and ending the day in the same way, that you have more when you have your desk and the same environment and the same people around you all the time. (M26, C)

Some even commented they felt more vulnerable in an office that lends itself to different people and uses. In the new office, “you have people around you at all times and you really don’t know if it’s your colleagues or your guests or your competitors” (M1, A). With new trajectories—partners, customers, competitors, open landscapes and glass partitions—entering the office, managers and employees have lost their private, safe places and must now constantly control themselves and their reactions to a greater extent. They have become nomads, moving from one location to another without a safe place they could call their own. The challenge appeared particularly acute for professional groups whose work was routine-driven and stationary. One manager remarked, “We do very different types of work. For some of the people who work in our office, there is no reason for them to move at all. (. . .) and this just brings an extra level of stress to them” (M18, B). This issue extends beyond practical concerns; the flexible office seemed designed for mobile workers and creatives, further alienating those whose roles do not fit this image.

To restore meanings of homeyness and collective ownership in the new office, managers worked to create new, temporary homes for their groups. This often involved combining people, new routines, digital technologies and other material artifacts to initiate and support the development of new group places. One manager, for instance, told us: “I sit where [there] is a desk where several people can sit beside each other, where we have our lockers. I usually sit there every day, for a while” (M25, C). Another commented: “I like routines, as I said. And then you have your locker with your computer . . . (. . .) You find those spots that work the best way, I think. Or with your friends and so on” (M17, B). These accounts reveal managers-initiated efforts to rematerialize “homes” by role modeling behaviors for employees, such as regularly sitting near team members and close to group landmarks like lockers. One respondent candidly admitted,

We [my employees and I] just started seeing if we could create a zone where we could recreate our home. So, we started up at that corner. (. . .) to tell you the truth, we tried to block seats for colleagues to start with (. . .). We were bad boys. But we are a very strong team! So, we really want to sit together. (M24, C)

By combining employees, personal items, spatial routines, group desks and landmarks, managers rematerialized some sort of stable homes for their groups amid the flexible office. Their efforts restored meanings of homeyness and collective ownership, making employees converge into predictable and recognizable locations that served as temporary shelters for displaced workers. Even meetings organized by managers occasionally took on new meanings, transforming into temporary places where group members could gather and work side-by-side, regardless of the collaborative nature of their activities. One manager, for example, shared she booked regular group meetings in which “Sometimes, we just sit together and work” (M1, B). Trajectories converged for the duration of the meeting, creating a transient place for the group that dispersed again once the meeting concluded. Temporary homes also emerged in virtual realms, as managers actively role-modeled placemaking in digital contexts to reconnect dispersed individuals and reestablish a sense of belonging to a place—and with it, to a group. One employee noted,

We worked with Yammer. [. . .] Everyday, [. . .] the department shares a lot of inspiration, information and experiences besides these meetings they also have. I think that’s a really good combination. Because even if you sit at different places or [you] are at different places, you still belong somewhere, and you also meet. (E2, A)

Taken together, these managerial efforts aimed to materialize new homes for groups. These new group homes offer some stability, helping to mitigate the instrumental and affective challenges brought about by the new designs. Yet, due to their transient nature, these homes resemble more temporary shelters than the stable group homes employees once knew. The key difference lies in their stability, which is no longer provided by the office itself. The constant change in social and material conditions demands continuous adaptation. As one manager reflected,

[In the new office,] I need to constantly plan what we do and when we do things; it should also be planned in what type of room we should be, and what type of behavior I should set to get all these things to come together. (M18, B)

Without managers’ continued efforts to gather and order trajectories, these homes risk vanishing. While these transient places produced some stability and feelings of familiarity and attachment, the recursive gathering of trajectories is no longer effortless, as managers must engage in continuous daily efforts to materialize and rematerialized them. Thus, the stability managers achieve is only provisional and must be actively produced and reproduced through ongoing efforts.

Sustaining closeness

Laura saw the notification on Yammer and immediately replied to Andreas’ query. Being responsive online, for her, is a way to feel part of the group, even if she barely sees her colleagues since they have moved into the new, flexible office. Laura has kids and drops them at school before getting to work. Usually, by the time she arrives, all the seats next to her group mates have already been occupied by other people. Even today, Laura sits in the middle of an open space, alone amid a crowd. But she feels happy because she will have an after-work beer with her colleagues. Since they have moved into the new office, John arranges these hangouts each week, along with regular coffee dates and group lunches. On these occasions, Laura can still talk with her colleagues about those private things they used to naturally exchange before, such as opinions on tv shows and updates on kids. Things you do not discuss with strangers. John also pays regular visits to her whenever he has some time in-between meetings, to check if everything is okay and if she needs support. At first, Laura perceived such a frequent follow-up as an intrusion; with time, she realized how important these chats are to feel that she’s not forgotten, as her manager still cares about her and her job.

In addition to weakening employees’ connections with their previous, physical office “homes,” the new office introduced new relational challenges. In the traditional office, both human and nonhuman trajectories regularly converged in stable, predictable locations. This stability in how trajectories materialized group places afforded relational stability, helping employees form strong bonds and lasting friendships with colleagues. The office actively supported these ties, as people consistently gathered in the same locations, at specific times, with familiar faces, contributing to the stabilization of the bundle. One respondent nostalgically recalled,

At the old office, you had your mates around you that you met every morning, and. . . in this office, you just sit somewhere. (. . .) The challenge is that everybody needs to be seen, (. . .) being part of a community and . . . you are used to that, and you always go out for lunch with the people sitting around you and suddenly it’s different people and you don’t do as you’ve always done. (M5, A)

With the move to the flexible office, managers and employees began sharing locations with colleagues from other departments with whom they lacked close professional or personal ties. The constant change in how individual trajectories converged in different locations reduced the informal exchanges that had previously fostered closeness with managers and colleagues. As one employee observed, “Before, you had your department. You were sitting here, and everyone knew each other and you could also talk about “this weekend I did this.” (. . .) And now people don’t know, because you don’t talk, you’re not sharing these kinds of things” (E1, A). As a result, people got detached not only from the physical workspace but also from the colleagues who once nurtured their sense of belonging to the organization and their groups. From an instrumental perspective, employees often sat far from those who could support their work and struggled to locate them. One manager laughed, saying,

I don’t have a clue about what the people next to me do (. . .) The funny thing is that [when you need to collaborate with someone] you have to email first, to find out where they are sitting today. (. . .) And the house [i.e., the flexible office] is supposed to encourage meetings with people! (M24, C)

Similarly, another manager remarked that in the new office, “when you need to talk to someone, you don’t know where they are,” so you often need “to call someone first and say “where are you? Are you in the office?” and take the conversation on the phone” (M16, B). Managers thus reflected on the contradiction of an office designed to encourage interactions that yet hinders spontaneous, face-to-face encounters. At the same time, new trajectories—such as hot desks, collaborative areas and drop-in stations—emphasized ephemeral connections. In the flexible office, people often “get frustrated because someone is talking to them all the time . . . and when things like this happen, people start to sit at home more and more often,” (M16, B) further weakening close connections at work. Another manager reflected that while he knows more people thanks to the new office, “I guess I know a little bit less about everyone” (M1, A). These accounts reveal a shift in the meanings of the office, which is no longer seen as a place for meaningful connections. While trajectories enabling collective work—like technologies, individuals from various groups and diverse physical locations—still converged in the flexible office, the terms for negotiating their throwntogetherness remained unsettled. Consequently, employees experienced reduced closeness, likening the new office to a “cocktail party” with “no friends, just a lot of nice people” (M9, A). Employees also attributed the reduced closeness to managers, sometimes perceived as less visible and involved in employees’ work. A manager confirmed: “I can feel a little bit of frustration when people say: ‘Oh, we haven’t seen you in many weeks!’ (. . .) And that was easier when we were sitting together” (M20, C).

To foster relational stability and closeness, many managers initiated new—or more frequent—shared experiences at the office. These included Friday breakfasts, coffee breaks and team lunches to nurture social connections among employees (e.g. M1, A; M18, B; M20, C) and “bring the team even closer” (M21, C). These occasions involved a combination of informal gatherings, cozy features and coffee or drinks, introducing in the office some trajectories that once belonged to different places, like cafes. By combining these trajectories, managers negotiated new meanings for the office that became a place for sociality. In addition, closeness to employees was supported by ordering new trajectories to emphasize managers’ accessibility. When not in meetings, most managers chose visible, accessible workstations, evoking temporary places apt for a coffee break or a casual stop, typically featuring standing desks placed in the reception area, in the company café, or in other “crossroads” in-between meeting rooms (cf. Figure 1, left side). These spots conveyed openness to interruptions, signaling that managers were available for informal chats. One manager shared: “I like to be in the middle of the office. (. . .) Choosing that place is kind of signalling that it’s fine to interrupt me” (M6, A). Another one said that, in-between meetings, he usually sits “somewhere in the middle. Because then I want to get hold of people between meetings and stuff. Then I’ll choose the mid-area like the one by the coffee machine” (M7, A). Drawing on trajectories, we can say that managers ordered new routines, norms, office facilities, visible spots, informal chats and work information to sustain a sense of accessibility to their employees, who knew where to find them and when it was appropriate to interrupt them. Ordering attempts also developed through new efforts to plan and organize more frequent one-to-one interactions with employees, intentionally designed to exchange personal and private information, fostering personal connections. Talking of her one-to-ones, one manager said: “Before I was talking more about projects and tasks; now I’m also talking a lot about how people have been working, more private things, and make sure that everything is ok and so on” (M20, C). Others revealed they often “walk around,” to have frequent casual interactions with employees, “making sure that they know where to find me, (. . .) letting them know that I’m interested in what they are doing” (M27, C). Managers also brought digital tools and applications into the bundle of trajectories. Some required employees to log their locations in shared calendars on Outlook and Lync to enhance findability (e.g. M2, A; M3, A; M27, C), shifting the meanings of these technologies. Outlook was no longer a tool for booking rooms, but “to make sure that we can actually see each other at that time” (M1, A). Similarly, smartphones were now not “for talking anymore. Just texting” (M1, A). Texts and instant messages became key for replicating the spontaneity of past casual office encounters. In trajectory terms, managers changed the relative positioning of employees, physical locations and technologies, ordering them together in novel ways that provided new meanings to the bundle. Yet, these trajectories did not naturally hold together by design; they relied on additional, deliberate managers’ efforts to stabilize closeness. This marks a significant difference from before. One manager noted:

“[Now] you can have standing meetings, coffee dates and lunches for teams and departments. In our old office, we didn’t have to have specific times to do this. But in this environment, you have to!” (M15, A).

Supporting closeness in the new office required managers to regularly plan social events and daily interactions, find new ways to signal availability for interaction, and continuously use technologies to favor spontaneous interactions. Before, the office itself supported these accomplishments to a greater extent, keeping people, exchanges, walking routes and ideas of accessibility together in a more meaningful and enduring way.

Reproducing alignment

Robert raises his head from his laptop and calls for Andreas’ attention: “It’s time to go!”. Together, they head to the cozy coffee area on the same floor. It’s 2:30 pm, most people in the group have just got back from lunch, and they now sit in a coffee meeting. That’s what they call it: coffee meeting. Since they have moved into the new office, each afternoon, the group drinks coffee together to receive quick updates from John and tell their colleagues what they are working on and what is on the top of their agendas. Robert does not miss any of these coffee meetings, because he wants to get all the latest updates and be aware of what the others are doing. Before, it was easier to grasp important updates and what everyone was working on just by overhearing conversations taking place in the office. After important meetings with senior managers, John was just standing in the middle of the departmental office and updating everyone at once. Now, sharing information in the group requires John to set up specific times and routines to make sure everyone in the group gets the same information and is on the same page, regardless of where they sit.

Among the trajectories that changed their relative positioning in the new office were those essential for maintaining informational alignment within groups. As group homes disassembled and once-close trajectories dispersed, even alignment was at stake, as participants highlighted. In the previous office, managers, employees, departmental facilities, routines and information consistently converged in predictable locations, producing and reproducing alignment. One manager recalled how effortless it was to update his team: after important management meetings, he would go to the department, stand amid the team’s desks and update everyone at once on relevant matters. Employees were familiar with this routine and recognized a clear pattern in how they received and retrieved information, alleviating fears of missing out on critical updates. Even if someone was absent, being in the group home in the following days allowed them to catch up through spontaneous, informal chats. As one respondent put it: “I could stand up in the office and ask a question, and I always had a colleague who could help me. And I can’t do that here, because they are not around me” (M24, C). Also, the stabilized convergence of employees with their bodies, departmental facilities and informal chats made it easier for managers to identify underlying resistances, conflicts, or misunderstandings that lurked beneath the surface of office life.

With the transition to the flexible office, these trajectories have dispersed, making it more difficult to understand how people and information were organized across times and locations. This also had instrumental effects for employees, who felt increasingly uncertain about having all the necessary information. One manager commented,

Some [employees] think it was better before, because they were sitting close to their team members, and they don’t do that now. So, they think it’s harder to get the information, and they think it’s more important to get the information from the team than to get it from other people. (M2, A)

In the flexible office, individual trajectories frequently shifted their relative positioning, often intersecting with new information, people and open environments. This left employees more vulnerable and exposed to unwanted stimuli, making it difficult for them to identify what mattered. Some even advocated for the responsible use of an office that provided constant “access to people, all the time” (M18, B). The trajectories that once made the place of work intelligible, such as departmental areas, regular seats and nameplates, had gone, leaving individuals without cues for navigating the ever-changing landscape, hindering effective information retrieval. One manager, for example, shared the struggles of a newcomer who “needs to talk to me all the time, and ask for everything (. . .) from work things to practical information” (M20, C) since she is not consistently sitting with the rest of the group. From an affective standpoint, the changes in the bundle of trajectories have implications for employees who fear they could miss important information, leading to increased anxiety and uncertainty. As one manager said, “[In the old office] it was easier for everyone; you would learn stuff much faster sitting and listening and having discussions with your colleagues” (M16, B). In the flexible office, the stability of the trajectories was gone, making knowledge sharing harder.

In response, managers in our study developed new efforts to combine information and employees with new routines, norms and technologies that ordered information across various digital locations. Some leveraged HipChat, WhatsApp and SharePoint to establish group chats as routine tools for quick informational exchanges (e.g. M17, B; M22, C). These tools got embedded in the fabric of daily team operations, shaping new patterns of information and knowledge sharing. One manager explained,

If you come in as a new developer now, (. . .) there are instructions in place [on group chats on SharePoint] which help you to ask questions. (. . .) We didn’t have those types of things a year ago, but we have them now. (M16, B)

Some managers also introduced shared calendars and regular electronic notes into the bundle to keep employees informed about meetings and decisions, thereby enhancing alignment and transparency. One manager, for instance, said that

For meetings, we take meeting notes on OneNote and save them. So, we can see them on Calendars. (. . .) But I think you need to add this kind of solution when you are moving into a different house [i.e., into the flexible office]. (M21, C)

Another manager revealed that, just the day before, he had opened his Outlook calendar to everyone “and so are the personal notes I have there” (M3, A). Shared calendars conflated with team sites, new group routines and norms to enhance findability and alignment, smoothing coordination. One manager commented: “Now I feel it is becoming more and more important that we have the team site with the calendar, just to see where everybody is, and that everybody can fill in when they are working at a distance” (M20, C). Managers thus orchestrated the convergence of employees, digital tools, platforms, group norms and informational exchanges to produce and reproduce alignment. These ordering efforts changed not only the meanings of technologies but also informal office gatherings, which became the places where managers, information and employees converged recursively, producing stability, as illustrated in the quote below:

We have our daily routine which is 8.30-fika, 2.30-fika [i.e., coffee break in Swedish]. And it’s a rule. You’re not excused. You need to be there, more or less. And it’s the perfect time to see each other. (. . .) I would say that 90 % of what we talk about is business, cases, challenges and related to our ongoing meetings or. . . of course, we talk about football as well. (M1, A)

However, the transient nature of such gatherings and information sharing routines intersecting with new digital tools demanded ongoing efforts from managers to sustain alignment throughout daily activities. “I think that when we sat in the same room, it was very easy to share information,” admitted one manager; “But, also, that’s kind of a lazy approach for managers, I think. Because maybe you just take for granted that they [i.e. the employees] know, because you sit with them and always discuss things” (M21, C). While the previous office naturally supported alignment, affording managers to be “lazy” in how they shared information, the new office demanded actively creating conditions to ensure that alignment is consistently maintained. Managers accomplished this by gathering and arranging several trajectories to reproduce informational alignment—efforts that were not needed in the “fixed” office.

Keeping performances under control

Lena is at home. She often feels drained by the hectic environment of the new office. For this reason, whenever they don’t have in-presence meetings, she avoids the office crowd and stays at home. She knows this is not aiding her performance; Lena would need help from John and her colleagues, who are more experienced, but she is not sitting next to them, so she concluded that being at the office will not make any difference. The phone rings: it’s John. “Lena, is everything Ok? Your project leader and I haven’t seen you in a while, and we are pretty worried. Are you at the office?”. Lena blushed. She knows she hasn’t even logged in to the system, as John asked everyone on the team to do. “Sorry, John, I am not feeling well, and I prefer working from home today.” Silence on the other side. “No worries, just come in tomorrow, ok? I will be here for a few days, so we sit together, and I can help you with your project”. Lena agrees, says bye, and closes the call. She realizes her serene days away from the crowd are over, at least for a while.

Finally, the lack of a meaningful throwntogetherness of the trajectories converging in the flexible office led to greater difficulties in trusting employees and monitoring their performances. This revealed another meaning managers assigned to traditional offices, that of control. The old office controlled how trajectories were ordered across different times and locations, making it easier for managers to identify and determine where and when they converged. This allowed closer follow-up on employees and the assessment of whether they had the conditions to perform effectively, including instructions, knowledge and peer support. Talking of performance management, one manager observed: “It’s easier if you are sitting in a normal office where you have your co-workers around you, [since] you can hear them all the time and what they are doing . . .” (M2, A). The traditional office was thus portrayed as a place that produced and reproduced not only homes for groups, alignment and closeness, but also control. It did that by ordering individuals, tasks, visible performances and work information across specific and predictable times and locations that designated occasions for following up.

Differently, interviewees suggested that the new design and the newly imported ideals of flexibility and freedom may have compromised the office’s ability to achieve such control. In the flexible office, employees with their tasks and interactions moved around in unpredictable ways, making it more difficult to track behaviors and outcomes. The instability of this bundle created new opportunities for employees to evade managerial oversight, leading to perceptions of reduced control and growing difficulties in building trust. As one manager noted, “In the traditional way [i.e. office], you see all your colleagues, at all times, and [you know] when they are in the office. Now you don’t have a clue about where they are, and why they are not here” (M1, A). Another one sarcastically commented,

Maybe I have some people that . . . I shouldn’t say that they are at the office not working, doing other things, but maybe they don’t have control over their work. We know that it is a problem, but we want to be a company that is flexible and free, so . . . (M17, B)

As the office no longer supported performance control, managers made additional efforts to actively reestablish it. After the workplace transformation, many have started investing previously unrequired efforts to combine supplementary meetings, walking routines and informal interactions to recreate the conditions for keeping employees’ performances under control. For instance, some described frequently roaming the office to spark casual conversations with employees, which subtly served as less intrusive yet intensified ways to follow up on their progress toward final deliverables. One manager shared: “I tend to . . . every day, walk around the office. And if I see people working for me in my department, I always go to them and say, ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ (. . .) So, I can also gain information in that way that could be useful to me.” (M27, C). Another manager told us:

If I have half an hour . . . maybe I just take a walk around and see if I can find my employees. And then just have a chat with them and talk. Kind of the old school management by walking around. (. . .) Because if I go there and I meet with Jonas and I ask him “how are you?,” in a split second you can see if he’s in a good mode, or bad mode, and I can just check on what he has been doing and what I can do to support him. (M19, C)

This combination of walking routines and informal interactions allowed managers to check whether employees had correctly understood their tasks, were managing workloads effectively and were adequately supported. Yet, managers admitted that the same combination also enabled them to follow up on individuals and performances in a closer, although less intrusive manner. One manager admitted: “When we were sitting [in the old office], I couldn’t get information on a daily basis in that way. (. . .) So it’s a very proactive way of gathering information” (M27, C). Some managers also brought new rules and expectations on employees’ behaviors into the bundle of trajectories, combining these with information technologies, enabling closer monitoring of employees’ activities. For instance, one manager told us: “As long as they are delivering the things they are supposed to deliver, this is the way it is,” and people can freely work from different locations; yet, when at home, “I also ask everybody to report it to Previa [i.e. a HR system used at Company C]. (. . .) I mean, you need to be clearer about the rules” (M21, C). Another manager shared the fact that his employees are all required to add their working locations on Skype, so that “I have the people in my team grouped, and I can see who is logged on, who is working from home, who is working here or . . . if anyone is in a meeting or so” (M19, C). The same manager also stressed he did not implement strict rules on when to work from other locations than the main office, but also added: “I expect them [i.e. the group members] to be here most of the time” (M19, C). Taken together, these managerial actions guided employees’ behaviors in the group; they contributed to ordering trajectories including employees, visible behaviors, digital tools and group rules in more predictable and stable manners, controlling when they diverged from the main office. In the experience of our participants, this prevented some individuals from exploiting the constant reshuffling of trajectories to disappear amid the chaos and disengage from groupwork. Some managers reasserted control by introducing more explicit and measurable objectives and following up through heightened one-to-one interactions—not only with individual employees, but also with coworkers, project leaders and customers. As one manager explained,

You need to measure output because you do lose everyday control of what your staff is doing. There is just no way he [my manager] could track me on a daily basis. He needs to focus on what the rest of the leadership team says about me, what I’ve done for them and then he asks around in the company. (M7, A)

Drawing from a place lens, these efforts reveal heightened managers’ efforts to keep performances under control by gathering and arranging employees, visible performances, customers, project leaders, technologies, measurable objectives and interactions. In doing so, managers recreated a ground to effectively monitor performances, even as trajectories dispersed within the flexible office—and outside of it. However, as the quote above suggests, managers have lost the everyday control they used to have effortlessly in the previous office. Consequently, they now engage in new activities to compensate for this reduced support, including regular attempts to assemble employees, measurable objectives, group rules on flexibility, technologies and interactions.

Discussion

This study explores managerial work as sociomaterial ordering, intrinsically tied to its material and spatial surroundings. By employing a place lens, we deepen our understanding of this ordering, highlighting the various elements contributing to it. This lens allows us to analytically treat individuals, objects and practices as coevolving trajectories rather than static entities (Massey, 2005). In doing so, we uncover how managerial work is performed socially, materially and spatially, involving the ordering of trajectories that include physical locations, technologies, norms, objects, bodies and affects. By applying a place lens to analyze experiences in flexible offices, we discerned a perceived loss of stability among managers and employees, understood as a lack of meaningful throwntogetherness of the trajectories that gather in the new setting. The stable throwntogetherness that characterized the traditional “fixed” office was disrupted, scattering trajectories that were previously ordered in specific ways. In response, managers developed new efforts to reorder trajectories in meaningful ways that materialized new homes for groups, sustained closeness, reproduced alignment and kept performance under control. These practices were either new (i.e. materializing new homes for groups) or expansion of existing ones, entailing additional managerial efforts in relation to people, technologies, objects and other trajectories. Together, they constitute additional work that managers must continuously perform to support their group’s work in transformed workplaces. These insights lead us to two the main contributions that we discuss below.

Throwntogetherness as a means for acknowledging the production of stability as central to managerial work

Our theoretical perspective introduces an important conceptual element for understanding and practicing managerial work: meaningful throwntogetherness. This concept draws attention to an often-overlooked part of managerial work, that is, holding the collective together in meaningful ways (cf. Bancou, 2024). This part is implicitly acknowledged in studies describing managerial work as fragmented, reactive and relational (e.g. Carlson, 1951; Mintzberg, 1990 [1975]; Stewart, 1967), which have emphasized how managers dynamically handle urgent matters and engage in additional communication work to enact organizational change and produce stability amid chaos (see also Tengblad, 2006). The concept of throwntogetherness offers an analytical tool for exploring this ongoing production of stability and meaningfulness. Stabilization is fundamental to organizations, whose raison d’être is to avoid renegotiating tasks, roles and processes daily when performing work collectively. While it is easy to grasp how organizations create stability by structuring contracts, tasks and relations, the role of the place of work in this stabilization process may have been overlooked. In the studied organizations, before their transformations, the place of work actively supported the accomplishments of the practices we identified, assisting managers. Yet, the flexible office destabilized what the place of work had previously stabilized and made meaningful: the throwntogetherness of the trajectories needed to perform work. As a result, managers had to invest increased and renewed efforts to renegotiate the throwntogetherness of the trajectories conflating into new office locations. This finding prompts us to question whether we have fully understood the consequences of partially removing the fixity of trajectories, as flexible designs imply. We suggest this oversight stems from the human-centric approach prevalent in management studies, which has led to underestimating the role of the office in establishing a meaningful ground for performing work. Our study shows that workplace transformations have rendered formerly effortless accomplishments effortful, no longer taken for granted, contributing to our understanding of the intensification of managerial work, particularly in flexible and hybrid contexts (cf. Hassard and Morris, 2022; Ipsen et al., 2022).

We also highlight that a key aspect of managerial work involves stabilizing and making meaningful a shared ground for performing work, achieved by ordering the trajectories that meet in designated workplaces. This aspect deserves more attention, especially with the rise of flexible and hybrid setups (Bancou, 2024), as the changes in managerial work we revealed are often overlooked in discussions on these workplace transformations. More generally, contemporary working life is marked by increasing precariousness and the destabilization of various aspects of work (Aroles et al., 2019), posing new challenges for managers and employees. While we focused on how office transformations have destabilized the meaningful throwntogetherness of trajectories, other scholars have examined other facets of this trend toward destabilization, such as mobile careers (Petriglieri et al., 2018) and independent workers (Petriglieri et al., 2019), with temporary or no organizational membership. Independent workers, in particular, often operate in non-traditional workplaces without the support of an organizational holding environment that aids sensemaking and reduces disturbing affects (Petriglieri et al., 2019). To deal with this, they create personal holding environments by cultivating connections to routines, places, people and purpose (Petriglieri et al., 2019). Similarly to our analysis, Petriglieri et al. (2019)’s study points to the necessity of a meaningful environment for sustainable work. Such an environment is not given but results from ongoing efforts enacted by either managers (in our study) or independent workers (in Petriglieri et al. (2019)’s study) to—drawing on our vocabulary—order trajectories. While Petriglieri et al. (2019) focused primarily on the social environment, they also noted the importance of connecting individuals to physical locations that “confine and evoke their working self” (p. 143). Our analysis echoes these insights by using a place lens to emphasize the material and spatial dimension of stabilizing the throwntogetherness of trajectories that enable work. The significance of the place of work lies in its capacity to create and sustain meaningfulness. However, the transformation has removed the inherent stability of the previous offices; as the throwntogetherness of the new place has yet to be negotiated and made meaningful, there is no consistent way for managers to order together with place. While researchers have extensively analyzed the effects of workplace transformations on employees and their relationships (e.g. Barth and Blazejewski, 2023; Bernstein and Turban, 2018; Cañibano, 2019), less attention has been paid to managers and the work they must perform. Our study introduces new insights into how these transformations impact managerial work and the nature of its intensification.

Understanding the intensification of managerial work in the flexible office as achieving provisional stability

By removing some forms of stabilization in interpersonal relations and work practices, the flexible office has also eliminated elements that previously supported key work activities like relating with people, making sense collectively, aligning tasks and coordinating. Indeed, engaging in these activities within the flexible office requires additional managerial efforts. Other than exposing these new ordering efforts, mobilizing a place lens reveals how the resulting stability is always provisional when the place of work is flexible. Without a “fixed” physical location where trajectories naturally converge, managers must continuously undertake ordering efforts. Differently, the previous office had been reproduced over time as a more stable place, as the throwntogetherness of the trajectories converging there was rather fixed, not requiring daily renegotiations. This contrast helps explain why managerial responsibilities often change following workplace transformations (e.g. Hassard and Morris, 2022). While these transformations promote flexibility and mobility, they also diminish the capacity of the place to hold the collective together. Since holding together is fundamental for the collective accomplishment of work, managers must actively perform those acts of gathering, arranging and keeping together that were previously accomplished by the office as a place.

While our study focused on planned changes, the recent pandemic introduced more dramatic, unplanned disruptions, resulting in ongoing negotiations concerning the “new normal,” often involving flexible and hybrid arrangements (Wheatley et al., 2024). This shift has sparked a growing body of research on productivity, well-being, innovation, community, trust and control in hybrid work (e.g. Bennett et al., 2021; Calhoun and McCarthy, 2022; Wheatley et al., 2024). A few years after the pandemic, it seems that the general discourse has already moved from perceiving work outside the office as more productive and sustainable to recognizing it as inherently problematic. We propose that using a place lens, with its concepts of trajectories and meaningful throwntogetherness, allows us to go beyond these deterministic views of hybrid work as necessarily leading to certain consequences, whether good or bad. Instead, it prompts us to focus on what kind of work is required to hold together the collective in a certain situated way of working, developing new managerial practices in relation to organizational goals and workers’ well-being.

The tendency to overlook the role that the traditional office once played in managerial work is both a theoretical and practical concern. Our study shows that the rapid adoption of flexible offices, now widespread as organizations consolidate hybrid work policies, has intensified managerial work, especially for middle managers who are responsible for coordinating individual employees and overseeing their tasks. While flexible, activity-based offices have faced prior criticisms (cf. Cañibano, 2019; Hirst, 2011; Taskin et al., 2019; Värlander, 2012), these have largely focused on employees’ interpretations and working conditions. Our study reveals that this workplace transformation has also shifted responsibilities for stabilizing relations and work practices from the office to managers, adding to their workload. What was once effortless has become effortful; the price of making work flexible in time and space is that managers must perform additional duties alongside their existing responsibilities. This extra work needs to be constantly reiterated as the office is no longer stable as it once was. Scholars have discussed changes in managerial work in an age of increased digitalization in terms of extensification (Hassard and Morris, 2022), implying enhanced flexibility and availability that alter the spatiotemporal boundaries of their work (see also Sewell and Taskin, 2015). These findings highlight how managerial work changes in place. Our study offers a complementary perspective on such intensification by describing the increased responsibilities for managers, whose work is performed with the office as a place. This adds a further contribution of our study that reveals why and how place matters for managerial work, even in flexible and hybrid settings.

Conclusion

In this article, we offer a nuanced understanding of the sociomaterial ordering that middle managers learn to practice in flexible offices, elucidating what this ordering aims to achieve. Using the theoretical lens of place and drawing on Massey’s (2005) work, we defined ordering as the gathering and relating of trajectories. Our analysis shows that traditional, “fixed” offices provided stability by holding together various trajectories, while flexible designs have shifted this responsibility onto managers. Rather than seeing this increased workload as a deterministic consequence of increased digitalization or reduced co-location, we emphasize the ongoing efforts to stabilize the throwntogetherness of trajectories as a central aspect of managerial work in the transformed workplace, contributing to its effects. In flexible offices, trajectories are still thrown together, but not in a meaningful way, forcing middle managers to produce and reproduce a meaningful throwntogetherness of trajectories in an office designed in a way that fails to support and, to some extent, undermines these efforts. Looking ahead, it remains uncertain whether the flexible office will eventually evolve into a new meaningful throwntogetherness or if managers will need to persist in their ordering efforts to establish provisional stability. Further studies will be essential once these novel office arrangements have been in use for an extended period, exploring how this added workload integrates into managers’ routines and how the identified practices evolve over time.