Does a Spatial Perspective Offer New Insights into Inclusive Organizing?

Inclusion has long been associated with concerns of tearing down the ranked and filed “gendered and racialized” hierarchical spaces of traditional organizations, most infamously imbued in Taylorism and Scientific management with its Panopticon apparatus designed to sustain and stabilize the power-scape (Taylor & Spicer 2007, Clegg & Kornberger 2006, Foucault 1984, Soja 1996, Lefebvre 1991, Butler 1990, Acker 2006, 2009, 1990, Ashcraft 2013, 2001). Counter intuitively my research shows how the allegedly borderless, flat, free seating open office space does not a priory convey membership inclusion: In fact it can be enacted as an obstacle to inclusion, in that it induces an opaque power structure difficult to navigate for non-traditional members. My research demonstrates how analyzing the organizational space an external ‘effect’, as embodiment and as the product of membership actions, can render tangible the more subtle relations of power. These are power relation enacted in the zoning of the workspace, in patterns of distribution of privilege, and in members’ spatial tactics of maneuvering of excluding practices. Hence my research demonstrates how space matters when organizing diversity and that space can be utilized as a lever when working to change the organization in favor of a more inclusive climate.