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Human Relations
DOI: 10.1177/0018726704042715
Volume 57(1): 75–94
Copyright © 2004
The Tavistock Institute ®
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com

‘You can checkout anytime, but you can

never leave’: Spatial boundaries in a high
commitment organization
Peter Fleming and André Spicer

A B S T R AC T This article suggests that the concept of organizational boundaries

evokes a spatial metaphor. While the scant literature exploring the
social geography of organizational life has pointed to the power-
laden nature of spatiality, it does so only within the workplace. Our
article maintains that the very boundary separating the inside from
the outside of organizations is an equally important instrument for
controlling labour. In light of the permutations that this boundary is
currently undergoing, a field study is presented identifying aspects of
a culture management programme aimed at significantly reorganiz-
ing the meaning of the inside/outside spatial divide among call-centre
employees. This entailed a two-way process in which typically
‘private’ spatial practices are drawn into the site of production and
organizational norms are encouraged outside work. The implications
that these techniques have for employee autonomy are raised as
important concerns.

KEYWORDS boundaries
control
culture management
physical

environment
space

It is now almost commonplace to proclaim the porosity of various bound-

aries that have traditionally separated the workplace from more ‘private’
domains of life. Although the notion of the ‘boundaryless’ organization
probably exaggerates the extent of this blurring of the inside/outside
75
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76 Human Relations 57(1)

division, transformations in the character of the work/non-work boundary

are nevertheless a fascinating feature of contemporary organizations. This
article demonstrates how the term ‘boundary’ inter alia suggests a geograph-
ical metaphor, signifying a line drawn in space. Permutations currently
redefining the inside and outside spheres of work therefore have a funda-
mental geographical aspect, a point that has curiously been missed in some
investigations of organizational boundaries (Perlow, 1998). Scholarship that
has explicitly considered spatiality in work organizations has focused on its
relationship with power and domination, aiming to ascertain the often
unobtrusive connections between political processes and the physical
environment. Mauro Guillén (1998), for example, argued that the work of
modernist architects like Le Cobusier and Mies van de Rohe represented a
wilful attempt to build spaces of work (and leisure) that materialized the
power dynamics of scientific management. Inspired by Taylorism, modern-
ist architects rendered workspace rational, instrumental and, above all,
controllable (also see Sewell & Wilkinson, 1992; Sundstrom, 1986). The
strong association between managerial control and workspace has been
further developed by Baldry (1999) who argues, ‘the working environment,
as socially-constructed space, must be reintegrated into analysis as part of
both the objective conditions of the labour process and the subjective
mechanisms of control and subordination’ (p. 536). Baldry is careful to
point out how these spatial elements are intentionally manipulated by
management in sometimes unobtrusive ways (also see Henley, 1977; Palm,
1977; Perin, 1991).
One limitation of this research, however, is that it focuses on the
relationships between spatiality and power only as they unfold within
organizations. Indeed, the boundary that separates what happens inside and
outside the workplace is simply taken for granted by Baldry, Guillén and
others (e.g. Gagliardi, 1990; Strati, 1999; Yanow, 1998). It is what happens
inside the firm that is of primary interest. With this limitation in mind, our
objective in this article is to demonstrate how a significant expression of
power in contemporary workplaces is not only the control of space inside
the organization, but also the very boundary delineating the inside from the
outside. Rather than observing how power relations influence an isolated and
enclosed space, it is suggested that an analysis of how the boundary between
work and non-work is governed by powerful groups may offer a more
complex understanding of control in contemporary organizations. Drawing
on a field study of a culture management programme in a call-centre, we
identify how management attempted to erode and reconstitute the spatial
division between work and non-work that was arguably indicative of indus-
trialism. In this case, culture management involves activities that challenge
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 77

the meaning of work both inside and outside the firm so that employees no
longer create a clear physical distance between employment, on the one hand,
and home life, family or leisure, on the other hand. This undoubtedly
occurred under industrial conditions as well (e.g. the Protestant work ethic,
paternalism, religious indoctrination, Ford’s Sociology Department), but just
as culture management is different to, say, 19th-century moral regulation,
certain differences in emphasis can also be discerned in boundary manage-
ment, as we shall see in the field study.
In terms of the culture management literature, studies have demon-
strated how organizations use normative controls to encroach upon the
private lives of employees (Barker, 1993; Kunda, 1992; Scase & Goffee,
1989). But the specific spatial and social geographic dynamics of this process
has received little attention. As we point out later, boundaries are usually
framed in terms of time or identity rather than in any physical sense. The
field study therefore synthesizes considerations of space, boundaries and
culture management by revealing an interesting two-way cultural process
whereby spatial practices once considered the domain of organizational life
are transferred into the homes of employees, and so-called private activities
are conversely carried back into the organization. It is hoped that this synthe-
sis will contribute to the limited literature on the social geography of work
by broadening our understandings of how organizational boundaries (both
physical and symbolic) and cultural controls operate as material political
mechanism in contemporary workplaces generally, and call-centres more
specifically.

Boundaries at work

Boundaries that constitute and regulate the inside and outside domains of
organizations appear to be an enduring feature of modern employment
relations and a key characteristic that distinguishes them from pre-industrial
modes of production. Such boundaries have obviously been conceived in
various ways including time management, worker identities and gender roles.
This section concentrates largely on the spatial nature of the demarcation
between work and non-work, a boundary that is also plural and differenti-
ated. We outline the character of industrial boundaries and the post-indus-
trial transformations that are currently unsettling them, focusing in particular
on the deployment and maintenance of culture management programmes. We
do not, however, want to overdraw the industrialism/post-industrialism
distinction, or make the mistake of construing each ‘epoch’ as a homogenous
and undifferentiated whole (cf. Hirschhorn & Gilmore, 1992). We merely
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78 Human Relations 57(1)

sketch certain trends that, although not entirely unproblematic, are generally
accepted as useful categories for making sense of the complex vicissitudes of
western economic history (on this point see Harvey, 1989).

Industrial boundaries
The shift from feudalism to capitalism in Europe during the 18th and 19th
centuries witnessed a major reorganization of both the physical and concep-
tual spatiality of working life (Braudel, 1961, 1982). Under feudalism,
peasants and artisans were usually located in close proximity to home, family
and leisure (Pollard, 1965). With the emergence of capitalism and factory
production, however, the spatial characteristics of the ‘putting-out’ system,
in particular, were unsuitable due to the lack of worker discipline and control
(E.P. Thompson, 1967). As Marx’s study of the ‘dark satanic mills’ in Capital
(1867/1976) graphically demonstrated, the physical concentration of wage
labourers under a single roof was driven by the capitalist need to discipline
and monitor the execution of work (also see Smith, 1777/1974).
This spatial reorganization primarily involved the constitution of a
boundary that, although by no means impermeable or impervious, formed a
line of division between the organization and the outside world. This
boundary was first and foremost physical, as commentators of the industrial
revolution and modernism have closely documented (e.g. Foucault, 1977).
Factories were fenced off like prisons and the urbanization of the industrial
proletariat created a new geography of work that was markedly different
from previous systems. But this division also involved important temporal
and subjective elements. As time became the source of wealth under the aegis
of capitalist production the working day was dichotomized between
company time and private time (Clegg & Dunkerly, 1980). Depending on
whether one was at home or at work, quite different selves were exhibited
(Scott & Storper, 1986). For example, just as Weber (1922/1978) highlighted
the normative separation of the office-bearer and their office in a bureau-
cratic context, so Beynon (1980) recounts the Ford Philosophy in the factory
context: ‘When we are at work, we ought to be at work. When we are at
play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two. When the
work is done, then the play can come, but not before’ (Beynon, 1980: 40,
quoted in Collinson, 2002: 276).
Although the division between work and non-work life was certainly not
watertight, with the work ethic (E.P. Thompson, 1968) and industrial paternal-
ism (Bendix, 1956), for example, playing a major role outside the factory gates.
However, industrial spatial division did represent a significant shift from
feudalist economic arrangements. The development of the work–non-work
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 79

boundary was not purely accidental but a reflection of the power relations that
attempted to render labour more amenable to the production process. Accord-
ing to Castells (1977), the working-class areas of the industrial city are ‘centres
of habituation’, places where labour resides, is replenished and easily moni-
tored. Reproducing the labour power of a society is thus contained in a demar-
cated area that is controllable (penetrated by police surveillance) and removed
from the spaces of governing elites. Moreover, the constitution of workers as
‘free sellers’ of labour power meant that organizational responsibilities to the
workforce ended when they left the company gates. During periods of extreme
unemployment or industrial unrest these gates are not only used to keep
workers inside the factory but also outside. Similarly, other research has high-
lighted the instrumental importance of the inside/outside boundary for firms
wishing to externalize the costs of production to individual workers, the state
or the family (Harvey, 1973; Waring, 1989).

Post-industrial boundaries and culture management

Although many characteristics of industrialism are still prevalent today it is
now commonly accepted that an array of shifts in economic, cultural and
social geography are taking place in western societies generally and the work-
place specifically (Castells, 1996; Clegg, 1990; Harvey, 1989). What some
have termed post-modern or post-industrial developments in economic and
organizational spatiality have made social institutions more fluid and fissi-
parous over time and space, reshaping people’s experiences of their physical
environments in fundamental ways (Jameson, 1991; Soja, 1989, 1996;
Thrift, 1996). These macro trends have also had significant ramifications for
the spatial organization of companies and their workforces as various indus-
tries develop employment practices that are deemed more ‘flexible’,
‘empowering’ and ‘adaptable’. The popularity of outwork and homework
(Brocklehurst, 2001; Felstead, 1996), so-called hot-desking (Duffy, 1997;
Laing, 1997) or the deskless office (Apgar, 1998; Van Meel, 2000), for
example, has seen the development of a porosity that has blurred a number
of the typical differentiations between work and non-work spaces.
The stream of research that we want to develop here has focused on the
way in which some human resource management strategies have attempted
symbolically to challenge and reconfigure industrial boundaries in order to
gain a more committed and dedicated workforce. The widespread use of
culture management practices in particular has been shown to encroach insid-
iously into the hitherto untapped areas of workers’ private lives. Barker
(1993), Casey (1995, 1996) and Kunda (1992), for example, emphasize the
increased demands that so-called high-commitment organizations and
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80 Human Relations 57(1)

managed cultures place on the psychic energies of employees, compromising

their personal lives and the ways they enact work and non-work roles (also
see Scase & Goffee, 1989). The effect this has is perhaps no more evident than
in a story relayed by the original gurus of culture management in which the
geographical dimension of cultural controls are implicitly illustrated: ‘a
Honda worker, on his way home each evening straightens up windshield
blades on all the Hondas he passes. He just can’t stand to see a flaw on a
Honda!’ (Peters & Waterman, 1982: 37).
Gideon Kunda’s study of a high-tech corporation in the US revealed
that the expectation for long working hours was built into the organization
culture and was very difficult to resist once it had been internalized. The
organization he called ‘Tech’ attempted to appropriate as much time as
possible from organizational members and this could only be done if workers
come actively to desire it themselves. The ‘Tech culture’ was designed to
constitute this desire through various mechanisms of role embracement so
that workers would think of themselves as ‘Tech employees’ all the time. As
a result of this management approach many employees found their family
and home lives suffered because they gave more and more of themselves to
the firm and experienced burnout, role contradiction and other kinds of
pathologies (alcoholism, heart attacks, divorce, etc.). Indeed, even though
workers endeavoured to maintain some kind of spatial distance, many found
that ‘work and nonwork aspects of social ties are experienced as hard to
separate, requiring constant definition and redefinition and are never fully
resolved’ (Kunda, 1992: 169).
Catherine Casey recorded similar findings in her study of an electron-
ics manufacturer that had built a high commitment culture. Working very
long hours was considered an axiomatic cultural norm at ‘Hephaetus’ and
employees therefore felt obligated to sacrifice their personal lives. As one
employee Casey interviewed made clear: ‘I try not to but sometimes I come
in on Sunday mornings . . . I also do a lot of work at home after the kids go
to bed’ (Casey, 1995: 127). Casey’s study concludes that it is not only the
personal time of employees that is appropriated by the company, but also
their identities, a process she ominously labels the corporate colonization of
self. When this occurs workers become ‘company people’ even at home and
cannot think about anything other than their job and the well-beginning of
the firm. Many of these employees were classified by Casey as neurotic and
obsessive/compulsives because they have allowed the company to erode the
identity boundaries that once separated them from the organization and
subsequently burnout as psychic anxiety and contradiction become too
intense (also see Barker, 1993; Willmott, 1993).
Although this research does illustrate how so-called post-industrial
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 81

management techniques have attempted to challenge the boundaries that

typically demarcated work and non-work activities, they have largely
conceptualized them in terms of time and identity. Given that they are
predominantly dealing with experiences of immaterial normative controls
operating within the firm this emphasis is perhaps unsurprising. More
research is required to understand how culture management disrupts and
challenges not only time and identity boundaries, but also the spatial dimen-
sions of what is considered work and non-work places. This dimension of
spatially is obviously intimated in the literature but not explicitly explored.
In what follows we discuss the changing nature of the inside/outside spatial
boundary in relation to our own field research of a call-centre firm and
investigate the very ‘material’ nature of boundary manipulation in the
company’s culture management programme.

Field study

Iocus Customer Service (a pseudonym) is a large American-owned call-centre

based in Australia that deals with communications functions outsourced by
banks, airlines, insurance firms, telephone companies and the like. Our
research interest was centred on the intensive culture management
programme at Iocus, which has been a dominant feature of the company
since its inception in 1992. Over an 8-month period interviews were
conducted with management and employees involved in various team- and
culture-building exercises. The initial aim of the research was to discern how
management manipulated the culture and its reception among employees.
During the research period data were collected through interviews with
management and employees involved in various team and culture building
exercises. A random sample of 3 human resource managers and 30 employ-
ees was selected and interviewed at various intervals over the 8 months. This
part of the research project involved 45 interviews. The sample consisted of
18 females and 15 males. The average age of the telephone agents inter-
viewed was 23. Interviews were also conducted with telephone agents to
gauge their feelings and reactions to the culture management programme.
What makes this research project relevant to an analysis of organizational
boundaries is the interview process involved data collection outside the firm,
yielding data that would not have been as evident had the interviews been
conducted only on-site. Fifteen interviews were conducted in informal
settings such as cafes, bars and the home. The research focused on a cohort
of three workers who were living together and four focus group sessions (two
and a half hours in length) were conducted in their home. Transcripts were
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82 Human Relations 57(1)

manually coded and analysed along a variety of criteria that aimed to discern
dominant or significant themes in relation to the culture.
The culture management process at Iocus focused on the nature of call-
centre work and is primarily directed at telephone agents. All agents are
employed on a casual basis, with around 70 percent working at least 35 hours
a week dealing with both inbound and outbound calls. It is openly accepted
by management that call-centre work is very mundane and monotonous. The
culture is pitched not necessarily to hide this fact but to help employees better
cope with and negotiate this kind of work. Kimberly, a team development
manager explains, ‘work in a call-centre can be extremely mundane and
monotonous, so we have to make it a rewarding experience in order to be
successful’. A wide range of techniques are employed including bright colour
schemes, team-building exercises, informal dress code, special away days
involving a theatre production and party, theme days where employees must
come dressed in a costume or their pyjamas, vision statements and so on.
Perhaps the most ubiquitous feature of the culture is the slogan, ‘Remember
the 3 Fs: Focus, Fun, Fulfilment.’ This phrase attempts to encourage Iocus
employees to perceive call-centre work as exciting, exhilarating and exuber-
ant. When an employee embodies the three Fs and is seen to be part of the
team they are said to have the ‘right attitude’ (also see Callaghan &
Thompson, 2002). This seems to consist of a set of display performances of
self that communicate a positive personality, a childish playfulness, a bubbly
frame of mind and an extroverted and careless disposition. This kind of
personality is deemed to be of utmost importance at Iocus because competi-
tiveness is said largely to depend upon the ability of workers to deliver quality
customer service. Other studies of the call-centre industry have also demon-
strated the use of similar techniques (e.g. Derry & Kinnie, 2002; Hutchinson
et al., 2000), but the spatiality of these controls remains largely under-
theorized and unexamined. As we shall demonstrate, management want to
colonize not only the minds of employees, but also the spaces they dwell in.

Boundary control at Iocus

Culture management at Iocus endeavours to manipulate and blur the
traditional boundaries that have typically divided work life and private life
as a method of extending organizational control. Team development
managers feel that it is no longer sufficient to restrict culture management to
only the workplace but increase its span in a number of interesting ways.
Some of these techniques have also been documented in other studies (e.g.
Barker, 1999; Kunda, 1992). For example, team meetings are often held
outside work in a downtown cafe or nearby park and may take place after
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 83

or before work, depending on the project. And, similar to the organizations

investigated by Casey, Kunda and Barker, the culture instigates everyday
norms and expectations regarding the time and effort one must devote to the
company, often involving unwanted overtime or weekend work.
Other cultural techniques used at Iocus attempted to disrupt and
reorganize the traditional inside/outside boundary through a two-way
process, whereby activities that should have typically taken place outside
work were encouraged inside the organization (e.g. wearing pyjamas, alcohol
consumption), and activities seen to be appropriate inside the organization
were encouraged to take place at home or in other private spaces (memo-
rizing the company slogan, etc.). This dynamic of the cultural system
represented not only a symbolic challenge to the traditional demarcating
boundary, but also had material implications in which the social geography
of work and non-work were reconfigured in order to further the reach of the
culture’s influence. Let’s look at each part of this process.

From outside to inside

A significant aspect of the Iocus culture initiative involved encouraging

employees to evoke traditionally non-work feelings and identities within the
sphere of production. It was openly acknowledged that call-centre work can
be stressful, boring and monotonous but management argued that employ-
ees did not have to perceive it in this way. As Rachel, a telephone agent, told
us: ‘you have to be able to see the lighter side of things. You have to be able
to look at your work and turn it around in a positive way’. Thus, training
workshops and everyday cultural messages constantly stress that all of those
experiences employees wait until after work to have such as fun, partying,
joy, fulfilment, exhilaration, friendship and even sexuality are appropriate to
evoke in the workspace. Many of these evocations are uncontroversial and
have been noted in other studies of culture management. For example, the
bright office colour scheme and ‘party atmosphere’ was celebrated at Iocus
because it attempts to break down the sterile nature of call-centre employ-
ment. Similarly, workers are encouraged to bring homemade cakes and
dishes into work and share with other employees. This cultural protocol is
part of the personalization of space that Iocus hopes will make employees
feel more ‘at home’ when working. Telephone agents will bring to work
personal belongings to decorate their team’s work cubicle. Also observed
were surfboards, photos of loved ones, sporting trophies and other non-work
items displayed in prominent places.
Team-building exercises also attempt to break down the barriers that
typically separate work and private spaces. For example, employees may be
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84 Human Relations 57(1)

asked to bring to the next training workshop a personal item that best
represents and sums up their personalities. This may include anything from
a teddy bear to a golf club. Or trainees may be asked to think of as many
‘square shapes’ they saw while travelling to work in the morning, demon-
strating that working as a group can produce many more instances than an
individual could evoke on their own. In the training workshops the virtues
of ‘being oneself’ and the importance of cultivating an ‘Iocus attitude’ even
outside work are discussed as individual employees engage in a self-assess-
ment process in order to ascertain what type of person they are and how
their unique personality contributes to the Iocus Way. For example, one
question is ‘what are you passionate about?’, the answer invariably pointing
to some extra-employment activity. Utilizing the private lives of workers is
thus a crucial training strategy that aims to have them invest more of them-
selves in their work and evoke spatial norms commonly reserved for outside
of work activities (e.g. reflecting on personal passions and existential
purpose).
The home lives of workers are also of interest to the company when
monitoring and assessing work performance. Teams aim to replicate a clan-
like situation in which team leaders assume the role of confidant and coun-
sellor rather than that of supervisor. In this capacity, leaders listen to the
confessions of workers regarding personal problems at home, give them
sound advice and ‘work it through with them.’ At Iocus, the ritual of con-
fession is activated when a team leader or member notices someone acting
abnormally. This is what Sarah, a team leader, said about this part of her
role in relation to punctuality:

We have a situation here where an agent can feel comfortable enough

to say the reason why they’ve been coming late is because they have a
serious problem at home. I will first recognize a difference in their
attitude. It will begin to wane and I will say, ‘what’s happened? Is it
the job or something at home? What can I do to help you with that?’

In this way, the company explicitly links home issues to the productive
demands of the company. The workplace has often been a space where employ-
ees can escape the traumas of home life. At Iocus, in contrast, the boundaries
are rendered permeable in order to influence more facets of the person and
thus hopefully engender a more productive employee. Interestingly, this ritual
of confession and counselling distinguishes Iocus culture management from
studies discussed earlier, especially Kunda’s (1992) Engineering culture. Kunda
argued that because the Tech culture tended to create disturbing external
pathologies and traumas among workers (alcoholism, burnout, divorce, heart
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 85

attacks, etc.) the company was decidedly wary about employees referring to
personal problems at work.
The organization tries to reproduce private spatial practices in a
number of more controversial ways, which have received less attention in the
literature. For example, team-building exercises involving heavy drinking, as
well as the consumption of alcohol during the last two hours of work on
Friday afternoons, were encouraged by management. The expression of sexu-
ality and ‘flirting’ are openly encouraged at Iocus. The work environment is
considered by a number of employees to be a fruitful place to proposition
someone for a romantic ‘date’. The informal dress code suggests that employ-
ees are free to ‘be themselves’ at work rather than suppress feelings and idio-
syncrasies, potentially making work more exciting and fulfilling. A number
of the employees interviewed had brightly dyed hair, facial piercing and
sported designer clothes in a manner that apparently celebrated the ‘whole
individual’. For sure, the cultural norm of wearing designer jeans and
footwear suggests that private consumption rituals are an important cultural
signifier at Iocus. Displaying one’s dedication to the ‘culture of cool’ thus
depended on one’s ability to span the boundary between private patterns of
consumption and working life.

From inside to outside

Perhaps the most startling finding from our research of Iocus culture was the
attempt to transfer workplace activities into the home and the private sphere.
Thus employees were encouraged not only to evoke non-work rituals inside
the organization, but also to reproduce work-related motifs outside the firm.
Sometimes this was very explicit. For example, in relation to the evocation
of sexuality discussed earlier, the pub that employees are encouraged to
frequent (especially on Friday nights) is deemed to be part of the workplace
insofar as sexual harassment regulations are concerned. Moreover, interviews
with employees in their homes revealed the extensive reach of the culture as
it was expected to be positively endorsed and talked about both inside and
outside the workplace. For example, workers were often asked to attend the
away day on a Sunday, which was commonly assumed to be a work-free
period. Failing to attend this activity was a sign that they are not fully
committed to the firm and lacked the required ‘attitude’. One employee
relayed a story about a fellow worker:

A woman in my team was told that she had to go to the away day but
she said she had family commitments, ‘I’m a mother.’ But she was told,
‘no, we are all going. You should go.’ She said, ‘No I can’t.’ And again
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86 Human Relations 57(1)

she was told, ‘It’s expected that you go or you must pay the $65 fee
for the end of year party’.

Another interesting example of company cultural practices manifesting in

‘private space’ was discovered when interviewing a group of three Iocus
workers who were living together in the same house. On one occasion, the
group was being interviewed and Michael brought home a handbook that
included the question, ‘What are the 3 Fs?’ and three blank spaces to be filled
in with a pen by the reader. These cultural artefacts were specifically designed
to be taken home with employees so that they continue to be processed once
the more overt institutional pressures of the organization were not present.
If the internalization of the cultural values and norms constitutes a type of
‘identity work’ (Ezzamel et al., 2001) on the behalf of employees, then the
various devices that they take home are designed to encourage employees to
continue their work outside the workplace (so they do not ‘lose the habit’)
and fashion an identity and lifestyle that is conducive to the Iocus Way (also
see Sturdy & Fleming, 2003). In labour process theory terms, there is a
concerted attempt to render labour power determinate as labour, however
momentarily, outside the traditional geographical boundaries of the work-
place.
While being interviewed at home in the evening, Jonathan, an Iocus
employee, was telephoned on two separate occasions by his superior regard-
ing some aspect of his work. His job included various information tech-
nology elements and he was thus consulted about certain events while he was
at home. These conversations were not simply technical, but also involved
an important cultural dimension. He would still have to present the correct
attitude to his boss over the phone, conveying his commitment and dedi-
cation to the project in question. Key signifiers were observed being articu-
lated such as ‘fun’ and ‘commitment’ in Jonathan’s discourse that suggested
he was conducting identity work even in his living room. Indeed, it was
surprising how much time (and space) informants used discussing the Iocus
culture at home, and in cafes and bars. Even when unprompted by the
researcher, it was obvious that Iocus house members had the company in
their thoughts a good deal after they had officially left the workplace.
Although the discourse that was recorded in spaces outside work was not
always positive it nevertheless occupied a central space in the social geogra-
phy of employees and the understandings they had of themselves as employ-
ees in the company.
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 87

The spatiality of cultural controls

Some critical accounts of culture engineering have emphasized how mana-

gerial technologies can shift the boundaries between work and non-work
time (Kunda, 1992; Perlow, 1998) and work and non-work identities
(Barker, 1993; Casey, 1995). Our study has emphasized how these shifts may
also occur in the boundaries inscribed in space. It should be noted that this
spatial boundary is not singular, but plural. Along with typical manifes-
tations of spatial blurring such as the office colour scheme, personalization
of cubicles and cafe meetings, there were more novel extensions of work-
space outwards into the private sphere. The training tasks conducted exclus-
ively at home by workers, the intensive counselling, ‘partying’ and
sexualization of work relations were particularly salient. Spaces previously
allotted to leisure and private life are colonized by the cultural logic of Iocus
in a dynamic manner. It is what we have termed a two-way process that
perhaps distinguishes this kind of spatial blurring from industrial examples
like paternalism (past and present) and the work ethic. Not only are osten-
sible non-workspaces inscribed with the logic of production, but places of
non-work are simultaneously imitated within the firm as well. This finding
is especially significant for the literature exploring workers’ engagements
with call-centre employment. Iocus employees did not necessarily escape
workplace controls ‘at the end of the shift’, as Bain and Taylor (2000: 14)
argue in relation to their call-centre study, but found themselves still
embroiled in the managerial discourse outside the workplace. Indeed, much
of the critical call-centre research appears to concern itself only with controls
at work. This may merely reflect methodological protocols (gathering data
on-site or about what happens on-site) as much as conceptual assumptions.
By paying attention to how corporate culture reshaped spatial bound-
aries at Iocus we realized that it has an important material dimension that
has often been missed in other research on culture management generally.
Culture management endeavours to change not only how we abstractly
perceive the world and our selves, but also our lived experiences of space.
As Henri Lefebvre has argued, for any set of power relations to become actu-
alized they must produce an appropriate space:

any ‘social existence’ aspiring or claiming to be ‘real’, but failing to

produce its own space would be a strange entity indeed, a very peculiar
kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the
‘cultural’ realm.
(1991: 53)
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88 Human Relations 57(1)

Current managerial technologies such as team-working, hot-desking and

outsourcing have produced their own spaces by manipulating the built
environment of the organization and beyond (Duffy, 1997). The resultant
‘new office’ folds transit spaces, leisure spaces and workspaces onto one
another to create buildings where the division between the inside and the
outside of work and organization are unclear. We have seen some of these
changes in the built environment at Iocus with the evocation of spatial norms
particularly associated with leisure and consumption in the workplace.
In emphasizing the materiality of culture we must simultaneously high-
light the cultural nature of space. At Iocus many of the spatial changes were
largely ‘cosmetic’ to the extent that the physical environment continued to
be reminiscent of Taylorist offices and factories. As other studies of call-
centres have similarly revealed (Frenkel et al., 1999; Knights & McCabe,
2001; P. Thompson & Callaghan, 2001; Wray-Bliss, 2001), the seating at
Iocus was rationally grided in an open plan space that facilitated the surveil-
lance of workers. Although there was little difference between the built
environment at Iocus and what we would typically find in ‘industrial’ fac-
tories and office spaces, we observed a palpable difference in how workers
experienced these spatial boundaries. By holding meetings in locations that
are usually associated with leisure activities like parks, the boundaries
between work and non-work were blurred with little change to the built
environment. This meant the spatial boundaries between the inside and
outside of organizations was not just constituted by blunt physical barriers
such as factory gates or the ubiquitous revolving door of a modern city office
building. The boundaries at Iocus were as much encoded in the everyday
practices of talking, dressing and assembling objects in the workplace as they
were by physical walls of the workplace. When employees participate in exer-
cises like bringing an object of private obsession into the workplace they
conjure up places of leisure, private relations and consumption. Research
discussing cultural and other controls in a call-centre context can be devel-
oped with this extended understanding of spatiality.
The explicit spatial practices noted above were also accompanied by
shifts in how workers imagined the boundaries between inside and outside
the organization. The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (1958) argued that
our sense of a space is as much a product of how we socially imagine it as
it is of the physical dimensions of the built environment. In this sense, lived
space represents a paradoxically concrete abstraction:

The objective space of a house – its corners, corridors, cellars, rooms

– is far less important than what it is poetically endowed with, which
is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 89

and feel: thus a house may be haunted or homelike, or prison-like or

magical.
(Bachelard, 1958: 56)

The forthright attempt to manipulate how workers imagine their space at

Iocus can be seen in management’s acknowledgement that although the
reality of working within a call-centre is repetitive and boring, employees
should be encouraged to consider work as a place where they can have fun,
experience personal fulfilment and express their creativity. This re-imagining
of work as a space of ‘fun, focus, and fulfilment’ blurs the imagined bound-
aries between spaces of consumption, personal and family life, and the work-
place. The significance of the experienced and imagined dimensions of space
at Iocus tells us that spatial boundaries as they are constituted by culture
management initiatives are simultaneously material and abstract. Instead of
approaching space as just the built environment (Baldry, 1999; Guillén,
1998) it appears that the way employees imagine and live their spaces is just
as important in constituting organizational boundaries.
The blurring of spatial boundaries also seems to be linked with changes
in relations of control between organizations. Power relations at Iocus are
not ordered around the organization as a single institution with strict
boarders that designate where the jurisdiction of the management preroga-
tive begins and ends. Even when they are beyond the physical walls of the
organization, employees are encouraged to practise the Iocus self. This
represents a diffusion of power relations found at the site of production like
a call-centre into other aspects of people’s lives. Indeed, Hardt and Negri
capture this dynamic succinctly:

labouring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the
entire society. In other words, the apparent decline of the factory as
site of production does not mean a decline of the regime and discipline
of factory production, but means that it is no longer limited to a
particular site in society. It has insinuated itself throughout all social
forms of production, spreading like a virus.
(1994: 9–10)

Similarly, power relations associated with consumption and leisure such as

the ‘cult of cool’ have extended into the realm of production. This means
that Iocus employees are simultaneously subjected to the command to be a
productive worker as well as the requirement to be a fashionable, youthful
and fun character who would not look out of place in a Levi’s advertisement.
This leads us to speculate that managerial power at Iocus should not
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90 Human Relations 57(1)

only be interpreted as a panopticon where workers are concentrated, ration-

ally ordered and surveyed within an isolated environment (cf. Bain & Taylor,
2000; Fernie & Metcalf, 1998). With the blurring of organizational bound-
aries we see evidence of what Gilles Deleuze (1992; see also Munro, 2000)
has famously termed ‘societies of control’ in which a number of relations of
power simultaneously work in different sectors of social life. The conse-
quence is that ‘one is never finished with anything – the corporation, the
educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in
one and the same modularity, like a universal system of deformation’
(Deleuze, 1992: 5). The case of Iocus demonstrates that rather than being
the sole reserve of high-paid managers, even post-industrial wage labourers
are subjected to sophisticated strategies that manipulate organizational
boundaries outwards, making workspaces ever present in their lives. This
controlled overlapping (or perhaps ‘stacking’) means that one is simul-
taneously always a producer, always a family member and always a
consumer.

Concluding remarks

This article has identified how the manipulation of spatial boundaries was a
significant aspect of the culture management programme in the organization
we investigated. Spatiality is, therefore, controlled not only within the
organization, but also via the ‘blurring’ of the boundary that has usually sepa-
rated it from outside domains. However, we conclude as we began, with a
qualifying note. We do not want to overstate our case by proposing that the
‘blurring’ we observed is a radical break with the past. Practices of consump-
tion, for example, have always been important in building workplace cultures.
Bourdieu’s (1984) seminal study of class, for instance, identifies how practices
of consumption such as the food one serves, how it is served, and how it is
eaten are central in reproducing various occupations and class ideologies.
Similarly, aspects of workplace culture like the work ethic, industrial efficiency
and paternalism subtly pervade other aspects of society including places of
leisure, the domicile and even intimate relations (Horkheimer & Adorno,
1972). What appears to differ in an organization like Iocus is the distinct two-
way dynamic. There is a purposeful attempt to manipulate and control the
boundaries between the inside and outside spaces of employment in a way
which brings the outside space of consumption, leisure and spiritual develop-
ment onto the site of production, and pushes the inside sphere of corporate
culture out into other aspects of employees’ lives. It is the instrumental nature
of Iocus’ boundary control that makes this case particularly interesting.
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Fleming & Spicer Spatial boundaries in a high commitment organization 91

A final qualification we want to make concerns the suggestion that

engineered corporate culture programmes may not always be accepted or
internalized by workers (see Fortado, 2001). Recent studies have argued
that workers often resist and contest the boundaries between work and
non-work identities through dis-identification (Fleming & Sewell, 2002;
Fleming & Spicer, 2003). Similarly, others have examined how workers re-
appropriate company time through ‘goldbricking’ and other strategies
(Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999; Burawoy, 1979; Roy, 1959). Although not
a primary concern in this article, an analysis of how workers may contest
the manipulation of spatial boundaries may be a fruitful topic of investi-
gation in future research. For sure, perhaps attending to the spatial expres-
sions of resistance will allow us to hear how the politics of work may
resonate in ‘pedestrian speech acts’ and the ‘chorus of idle foot-steps’ (de
Certeau, 1984).

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Peter Fleming is a Research Fellow in the Department of Management

at Melbourne University, Australia. He is currently studying the trans-
formation of employment practices and post-industrial labour politics in
western economies. His other research interests include workplace
democracy, patterns of conflict and industrial semiotics.
[E-mail: p.fleming1@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au]

André Spicer is a Lecturer in Organization Studies at the Warwick

Business School. His interests focus on developing a geo-politics of
organization. He is currently involved in projects investigating theories of
politics in organization, spatial conceptions of organization, the role of
discourse in industrial relations disputes, globalization in public broad-
casting, and rethinking the entrepreneur.
[E-mail: andre.spicer@wbs.ac.uk]