Unmaking the place: The non-place as a practice of organizational resistance

Abstract

This article describes how employees resisted a collective space imposed by the management of an international banking group. By depriving this space of their regular presence, they prevented it from emerging as a place in its own right, thus transforming it into a non-place. Thanks to an original methodology combining research in the organization’s archives and documentary study, interviews, and non-participant field observations, the authors were able to better understand the mechanisms of spatial resistance at work, and propose in this article the analysis of an organizational failure in the creation of a new workplace. The case studied shows different practices of resistance to an imposed space which was supposed to become a place of major importance. From this observation, the authors support the idea that Marc Augé’s concept of non-place (1992) should be more often mobilized in management science because it offers a particularly relevant interpretative lens at a time when organizations are multiplying collective spaces supposed to federate employees and optimize their skills.