Abstract
Work is escaping the confines of the office through new forms of homeworking, teleworking and virtual working, while offices themselves are changing too, encouraging greater informality and openness. A recent article on a popular news site devoted itself to ‘weird workplaces’ (BBC, 2015), describing an urban-treehouse-office, a yacht-turned-office and an office constructed from a series of refurbished train carriages. Leadership in Spaces and Places sets out to explore leadership in the context of these changing environments.
Of course, work has always happened outside of the office, and not every aspect of the changing spaces of work and leadership is new. In the book’s introduction, the editors offer a brief history of the study of workplaces and the recent ‘spatial turn’ in management and organisation studies. The term space here (and in the majority of following chapters) is defined as the ‘physical or virtual environments people encounter in their work’ (p. 3). This is refined in terms of two perspectives to space, distinguishing between the objective physically observed space (architecture, interior design, project software, technology and other material aspects) and the subjectively perceived space, that is, how each person perceives the environment with their senses, emotions and cognition. (p.3)
The editors relate this conception of space to what they term the sociomaterial nature of leadership and to ‘spatial leadership’ (p. 12). In doing so, they seek to move our understanding of leadership beyond simply human–human interactions and to emphasise the relationship between people and places, with physical and symbolic elements of the environment. The book includes a collection of 12 chapters grouped into six parts, each of which seeks to develop this stance in different ways.
Part 1 focuses specifically on recent changes in working spaces. Chapter 1 by Salovaara presents empirical material from participant observations and interviews to explore co-working. Co-working refers to workspaces with shared facilities, usually flexible and open-plan, that individuals can make use of for short periods of time or on a long-term basis. Salovaara relates the co-working movement to forms of ‘plural leadership’ (p. 37), a distributed process among a collective rather than residing within an individual. He identifies emergent forms of informal leadership inspired by a particular set of decentralised, cooperative values associated with co-working spaces and derived from traditional artisan and artistic communities. As with each part of the book, this chapter is thematically paired with another chapter. This second chapter is by Blakstad who discusses a different, and more common, change in the increasing ability for many people to adopt some degree of teleworking. Blakstad reflects on her personal experiences with teleworking, placed in the context of a history of office working and drawing out some of the challenges of leading remotely.
The focus on the changing nature of working space is developed in Part 2 which explores open-plan offices, first in Chapter 3 by Vaagaasar in relation to project-based work and then in Chapter 4 by Uolamo and Ropo to employee wellbeing. This latter chapter questions positivist accounts of workspaces, especially in relation to the built environment. The authors highlight a need to engage deeply with employees’ subjective experience of organisational spaces. In response to the needs of participants to express themselves more fully, Uolamo and Ropo describe encouraging them to take photographs of their workspace and using this as a starting point in narrative interviews. As seen in other recent research (e.g. Zhang and Spicer, 2014), photographs provide a valuable means for research participants to relate their experiences, providing the opportunity to gain new insights into organisational spaces. Not only here but in several of the chapters, effective use is made of the presentation of visual reference material. For Uolamo and Ropo, photography’s main value is to aid their interviews, identifying interesting themes such as the need for privacy, forms of work intensification and a lost sense of community.
Part 3 tackles a different area in exploring virtual workspaces. Chapter 5 by De Paoli argues that the leadership literature has yet to fully engage with or account for increasingly prevalent forms of virtual work. In particular, De Paoli argues that the full implications of technological changes reach beyond conceptualisations of ‘e-leadership’, which tend to approach the topic through discussion of how it differs from traditional forms of leadership rather than by considering it in its own right. She argues for the relevance of more relational, less leader-centric approaches to leadership in virtual working. Chapter 6 by Vartiainen provides an interesting counterpoint by looking not at the impact of virtual working in physical workspaces but at leadership within virtual worlds themselves where ‘we are labourers of a global company digitized as avatars’ (p. 130). Here, leadership is observed to draw upon alternative forms of social collaboration and interaction, again suggesting the relevance of relational approaches to leadership.
The next two parts, Parts 4 and 5, include a selection of chapters which take up several different perspectives. Chapter 7 by Greenlees describes the study of a book store and focuses on the importance of artefacts within a space. Chapter 8 by Höykinpuro pushes this further through a focus on the ‘face-to-space service encounter’ (p. 164) in self-service hotels. She analyses the stories of five customers, drawing out not only the visual elements common to several of the chapters but also the importance of sounds and smells to the experience of a space. Höykinpuro highlights the customers’ feelings of discomfort from the lack of human interaction but also the need for people to learn how to interact with such spaces. Chapter 9 by Sauer moves the scale of this discussion by demonstrating the ways in which cities lead, and how they affect people, for example, through climate, traffic or urban planning. However, in exploring the contrasting cities of New York and Jakarta, Sauer also acknowledges the unplanned ways in which cities develop, that ‘People develop their cities, sometimes individually without participation of the authorities, sometimes under their control and guidance’ (p. 183). Chapter 10 by Grenness then returns us to open-plan offices, this time examining the example of a Norwegian multinational to provide a cross-cultural perspective. He highlights the relevance of cultural differences such as power-distance to office design, arguing that space is a question in need of greater attention by multinationals. In these four chapters, a sense of the power and resistance embedded in social spaces, the tensions between conceived spaces of architects, designers and urban planners and the lived spaces of individual users begin to emerge. These tensions are explored more explicitly in the final two chapters of the book.
The final section, Part 6, focuses on institutional spaces. Chapter 11 by Dale and Burrell provides a fascinating case study of a new academic building, developing Grenness’ insights into the imposition of architectural design without consideration of users and how they may wish to inhabit a workspace. The authors demonstrate the value of understanding the lived experiences of workspaces and their account provides insights into power and space, relating interesting examples of what Lefebvre (1991) discussed as the domination and appropriation of space (see, for example, Wapshott and Mallett, 2012). Dale and Burrell’s case study frames leadership in terms of the distance, dissent and disembodiment of university academics. Their engagement with power is followed in the final chapter, by Sauer, with a Foucauldian exploration of space through an ethnography of a Finnish hospital. This chapter also draws upon Dale and Burrell’s (2008) earlier work, exploring the control of both space and time. Sauer argues for the ways in which buildings are not only symbols of power but help to produce the social order, that they represent a form of leadership ‘where the people are controlled by the building’ (p. 261).
While Sauer’s is an interesting argument with which to conclude the book, it is somewhat surprising that the editors did not provide a concluding chapter. Many of the chapters are authored or co-authored by one of the editors or their colleagues, giving a sense of unity to the book and a consistency in the approach to both space and leadership. This could have been utilised to develop a broader set of conclusions and contributions from across the different chapters. This would have been particularly valuable in drawing out the theme of involving space in the human-to-human interactions of leadership, broadening its conceptualisation and perhaps providing new understanding. However, while there are valuable insights in a number of chapters, there is no attempt to synthesise or debate these insights, and they are left as potential openings rather than a significant contribution. Perhaps the sense of unity, despite a laudable multidisciplinary approach, may also have limited difference and debate. Partly as a result, none of the chapters explicitly challenge or critically engage with the assumptions set out in the introduction, and overall, the book struggles to move significantly beyond this starting point, despite the inclusion of several fascinating chapters.
Leadership in Spaces and Places does suggest several potential directions for spatial perspectives on leadership, for example, in terms of the forms of leadership enacted by spaces themselves which gradually emerges as an intriguing theme in the second half of the book or in highlighting the relevance and importance of relational approaches to leadership. However, overall, there is little direct engagement with the leadership literature and little clear contribution to it. Similarly, there is little that is new in the conceptualisation of organisational space. In both areas, the book does an effective job of highlighting the potential relevance of existing areas of literature to the changing nature of working spaces, and as this review has sought to illustrate, the book is best on illustrating these new spaces. None of the chapters engage with the spaces of ‘traditional’ working environments, although clearly many of the questions around space and leadership are equally applicable here. Instead, the book is predominantly concerned with open-office spaces but also with co-working, with virtual spaces and with the face-to-space service encounter. In drawing attention to these different spaces, it provides an excellent resource.