Pictures and rugs, cartoons and mugs: Using artefacts to create stable individual spaces in changing organizational times
Jan Betts, Leeds Metropolitan University
This paper uses photographs, interviews and repertory grids to examine how individuals at work use artefacts in their external work spaces to create psychological spaces which are portable across place and time.
In the places where we work, one way in which we manage our own comfort, identity and sense of belonging is through our construction, both physical and psychological, of the space around us. Organisations will restructure and move employees from room to room, and from small offices to open spaces, in a search for efficiency and order. Within these often unpredictable and unopposable spatial changes, how do employees retain any sense of individual ownership of a space where they feel ‘at home’, with some sense of continuing identity? This paper examines the role of artefacts as part of that construction of place, space and identity at work. It deals with cognitive and affective spaces rather than regulatory spaces. (Clegg and Kornberger 2006). Rather than examining the shared meanings of public artefacts, such as logos, which might create a corporate continuity (Rafaeli and Pratt 2006), it focuses on objects which have salience through their private meanings. These insentient, stabilizing objects may be part of a formal working life, or may be cartoons, pictures, old and battered things, or beautiful things. These objects, the paper suggests, create affective spaces which are connected to earlier and possible future lives, to current lives and to lives which have current meaning outside the immediate workplace.
Researching affective spaces creates a challenge for the researcher, which is discussed in the paper. In this study, the data, rather than being ethnographic, draw on material generated when respondents in a range of workplaces were asked to use a digital camera to ‘photograph those objects in your immediate working space (usually an office) which mean something to you’. Participants were subsequently asked to reflect on why they had chosen these objects. As a further analysis, they were then asked to use the images in a repertory grid exercise (Kelly 1955) which drew out, in more specific detail, the nature of the values, categories and connections generated b the objects. A brief contrast with relating to public spaces in the organization was explored with each participant.
Initial analysis, using Vilnai-Yavetz and Rafaeli’s (2006) primary categories of instrumentality, symbolism and aesthetics, suggests that meaningful objects for individuals often have little to do with the main job, and function in complex ways to support individual identity, resistance and practice at work. Some key concepts which emerge are related to control, to a sense of long term personal history and future, and to preservation of ideals about the self in the face of organizational pressure. The creation of an affective space within the organization, however minimal, works both to suborn and support changing organizational futures.
References
Clegg, S. and Kornberger M. (Eds) Space, Organization and Management theory Advances in Organisation Studies series, Copenhagan, Liber and Copenhagan Business School
Kelly, G. (1955) Principles of personal construct psychology New York Norton
Rafaeli,A. and Pratt, M. (2006) Artefacts and Organizations: Beyond mere symbolism Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah New Jersey
Vilnai-Ravetz, I. and Rafaeli, A. (2206) Managing artefacts to avoid artefact myopia in Rafaeli, A and Pratt M(2006) Artefacts and Organizations: Beyond mere symbolism Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah New Jersey