Spacing and Organizing: Process Approaches to the Study of Organizational Space

In the past several decades, the research on space in management studies has moved from being an implicit idea to becoming an important generative force in organizational theory. Through this turn, space no longer surfaces as a stable container in which organizing occurs, rather it is a process for enacting organizing. Even with the growth of studies on organizational space, only a modicum of work exists that aims to distill and theorize the notion of space as organizing. This paper sets forth a typology of process studies on organizational space linked to two dimensions and five approaches for conceiving of space as organizing. In offering this typology, it not only provides an overview of recent advances in management literature, but also links the research on organizational spacing to conceptions of order and disorder.