Office Places, Work Spaces: An Ethnographic Engagement with the Spatial Dimensions of Work

Auteurs-es

  • Robert L. Ordelheide University of Cape Town

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.15273/jue.v7i1.8409

Résumé

Have you ever been curious to know more about how people engage with their place of work? This article explores the spaces and places of a scientist‘s academic office. It draws on four weeks of in-depth participant observation, interviews and visual analysis at the University of Cape Town to create an in-depth understanding on how the office, as a thing, shapes behaviour. Theoretically, this paper draws on phenomenological thought, Henri Lefebvre‘s (1991) theory on the social production of space, and Tim Ingold‘s (2000) ideas on the ‘taskscape‘ to analyse the spatial components of work within and beyond the academic office. It argues that the office is far more intricate than just the site of non-manual labour. Indeed, there appears to be a unique way in which the performance of one‘s academic discipline disciplines space.

Téléchargements

Numéro

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2017)

Rubrique

Articles

Licence

By sending potential submissions to the editors, you grant The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography a royalty-free, perpetual, license to: use, reproduce, store, adapt, translate, and publicly display such submissions for any purpose.  In addition to the grant of the above license, you hereby consent to your name appearing as the contributor of any submission where applicable, and to the disclosure and/or display of such information and any other information which appears in or is associated with a submission. Further, you acknowledge and agree that The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography is not responsible for any loss, damage, or corruption that may occur to your submissions, and acknowledge and agree that any submissions you provide for display on the website will be considered non-confidential. If your manuscript is rejected, the above license is revoked, and your submission (manuscript, name, and associated documentation) will be stored only in the correspondence records of The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. You may submit your manuscript to other publications, but must withdraw if selected for publication in The Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Your paper itself is published using a strict Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License that allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can‘t change them in any way or use them commercially. You retain the right to grant other permissions.