7 City Rhythms

Walking and Sensing Place Through Rhythmanalysis

Louise Nash

Introduction

This chapter considers the value to organizational scholars of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004), and, specifically, how it can be used as a methodological tool for empirical investigations into organizational life. I start by arguing that, whilst Lefebvre’s (1991) theories of space as socially produced have been applied to organizations and their spatial configurations (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2007; Ford and Harding, 2004; Taylor and Spicer, 2007; Wasserman and Frenkel, 2015), his later work on rhythms, originally published in France in 1992, later translated into English, has had less impact in this field (notable exceptions will be explored below).

The background to the research that is described here is concerned with organizational place and setting. I had a particular interest in studying how a setting dominated by one industry sector was experienced by those working within it. Whilst the spatial turn in organization studies has resulted in many rich explorations and analyses of organizational life over the last twenty years (Halford, 2004; Kornberger and Clegg, 2003, 2004, Tyler and Cohen, 2010), there has been less of a focus on work settings. What can a study of setting tell us about organizational life? Is it the scene of collective experiences and behaviours? As Tyler (2011: 5) describes:

The research was conducted in the City of London, also known by its metonym the Square Mile, the heart of the UK financial services industry. It is a city within a city, forming a geographical part of, but administered by a separate body to, greater London which encircles it, and is the site of Roman Londinium. The City is widely recognized as a distinct and bounded place. It is architecturally recognizable, due to its mix of soaring skyscrapers and British imperial–era architecture, medieval streets and Roman ruins, and maintains historical traditions which set it apart from many other work settings. It exists in the public imagination as a particular geographical location, with a distinctive materiality, a distinctive culture and where distinctive behaviours are manifested. Today, the City employs approximately 400,000 people and contributes £45 billion, or 3% of the UK’s entire economic output to the economy of the United Kingdom (Cityoflondon.go.uk, 2017).

Researching the City as an organizational setting allows an exploration of how meaning, materiality, sector and place come together, and what this means for the people who work there. My interest in the City was initially ignited by the years I spent working there, in a variety of different organizations and roles. I became interested in its history and the narratives of resilience and endurance which permeate much writing about the City, but also by its distinct geographical boundaries, its architecture and its sense of particular culture; you simply know when you are in the City, even if you do not consult a map or a guidebook. Some years later, and pursuing the idea of a research degree in Organization Studies, I vividly remembered my City days, and began to wonder why this sense of the City as such a particular locale endures, and what this might mean to people working there. I wished, in essence, to explore what Thrift (1996: 238) describes as its ‘distinctive patina’. The etymology of patina is from the Latin for a shallow dish, referring specifically to the green film formed on copper or bronze from exposure, and is often used to mean the surface appearance of something grown beautiful with age and use, or the appearance or aura of something derived from long association or habit. Thrift’s use of the concept is a reminder not only of the distinctiveness of the City, both materially and culturally, but of its age and history and long association with finance and trade. The City can be read as a palimpsest, with diverse layers and meanings apparent beneath the surface, all of which add to the rich patina of the City.

The chapter will explain the use of rhythmanalysis to uncover the patina of the City, describing why it was used, how it was developed, and what it can add to studies of organizational life. In addition, I will acknowledge its limitations as well as its potential. In the section below, I explore the City as a place of work, before moving onto Lefebvre’s engagement with the urban, and specifically with urban rhythms, before presenting more detail on the methods and a discussion of the findings.

Exploring the City

My leading questions are, then, that if setting and locale can shape the lived experience of work, how can they be empirically explored? And what can the rhythms of place tell us about how the place itself is perceived and experienced, and how they contribute to the patina of the City?

Building upon emerging insights, this chapter emphasizes that understanding the relationship between space, place and work is important because, as McDowell (1997: 5) has noted, in one of the few studies focusing exclusively on the City of London, more critical attention needs to be given specifically to ‘where things take place’. Through its focus on the City as a particular organizational sector and setting, the study set out to emphasize the symbolic and material significance of place to understanding organizational life.

Lefebvre, (1991), using the concept of space as socially produced, theorizes that space is fundamentally bound up with social reality and with our lived experience of the world; as Watkins (2005: 211) puts it, he moves space ‘from the realm of the mental to become the foundation of our engagement with the world’. Lefebvre claims that spatial practices can ‘only be evaluated empirically’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 38); thus it is only through an empirical analysis that the spatial practice of a society can be deciphered. Contextualizing his theories into a particular setting is not necessarily straightforward, particularly since he does not specifically relate his theories to organizational space, yet his work is highly applicable to discussions of urban spaces where day to day activities are carried out. An additional benefit of Lefebvre’s theorization of space in this regard is his insistence on the importance of representations of bodily, lived experiences of space. This emphasis on the body and its relationship to place will be central to the methodological approach of this study.

How to undertake the empirical study presented several challenges. Whilst the research setting, the City, is a relatively small space, with distinct and historic boundaries and borders, it was difficult to decide on the best mode of analysis for understanding how people treat, move within, and use the space. My own memories of working within the City, of the fast pace of life and demands of the place, were strong, and I was interested to see if it was possible to recreate the sense of urgency that was often felt in the City, whilst simultaneously being able to observe and analyse the street life and to see what findings might emerge in relation to how the City is experienced as a work place. Lefebvre’s work on rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004) became a methodological key which helped to unlock a very specific sense of place. In developing what he described as a nascent science, Lefebvre analyses time and its effect on places; more particularly, he focuses on the conjunction of time and space which, he argues, both results in and occurs through rhythm.

This space has its own history outside of the greater city of which it forms part, as well as its own cultural norms (McDowell, 1997; Thrift, 1996). These spaces have become partially detached from other cities in their nation states, and have become truly ‘global’ in that they are spatially dispersed yet globally integrated (King, 1990). London, along with Tokyo and New York, is pre-eminent among them, with elite workers typifying the individualist attitudes and lifestyles celebrated since the 1980s (Coakley, 1992; Corbridge, Thrift, and Martin, 1994; Zukin, 1991). Nonetheless, it can be argued that the City is still in many ways a territorially bounded culture with a local ‘flavour’ which makes it simultaneously both like and unlike other financial centres.

At the time of writing, the effects of the most recent financial crisis, which started in 2007, are still being felt by Western economies, which poses ongoing questions for the future of the Square Mile; are its skills and history, its networks of firms and the liquidity of its markets enough to keep it as the world’s pre-eminent international financial centre? This anxiety and loss of confidence, though less acute than at the time the crisis erupted, is still relevant to understanding the lived experience of those working in this place. Although there is a great deal of commentary and analyses both academically (French, Leyshon, and Thrift, 2009; Reinhart and Rogoff, 2008; Sikka, 2009) and within the media about the most recent financial crisis, and many written histories of the City (Porter, 1998; Roberts and Kynaston, 2002), which document the various failures and crises of its history, there is little that connects these with the lived experience of those working within the setting and subject to recurring cycles of disorder and chaos. Cycles of crisis have played their part in the ongoing history of the City, from the South Sea bubble crisis of 1720 to the more recent banking collapses in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. How the experience of such cycles is expressed rhythmically will be explored in the section of the findings discussing the City as a site of both order and disorder.

In addition to cycles of crisis, the increasing number of areas in the City which are owned by developers or corporations, but open to the public, mean that the line between public and private is being blurred. Walking in the space, therefore, can become a contested act where access can be denied, causing unexpected deviations.

The chapter, therefore, makes a methodological contribution to studies using Lefebvre’s theories to researching organization, by using rhythmanalysis to explore and analyse a shared communality of performance in a work setting. The research described here also makes an empirical contribution to the literature on organizational place and setting by applying an urban level of analysis to the City, developing an understanding of it as both global and local and shaped by both global and local rhythms. Below, I illustrate how Lefebvre’s theories pertain to the City of London.

Lefebvre, Space and the Urban

Lefebvre explains that just as everyday life has been colonized by capitalism, so too has its location; social space is produced and experienced through a conceptual triad of spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation, or, in other words as perceived, conceived and lived (Lefebvre, 1991). Lefebvre describes how particular space may be conceived, designed and produced in a particular way, but the meaning of the space, and the space itself, is adapted and transformed as it is perceived and lived by social actors and groups, for example a city park. In Lefebvre’s writing on the urban, he explains that the effects of industrialization on a capitalist society of production and property have produced their results: a programmed everyday life which is carried out in a predominately urban setting (Lefebvre, 1971 [1968]). Such a process has been enabled by the disintegration of the traditional town and the endless expansion of urbanism. Thus, the urban is accorded a central place in Lefebvre’s philosophy and politics; his understanding of urban space is infused with time and history.

Lefebvre’s engagement with the urban ranges from questions of planning and design, the importance of movement, mobility and rhythms, to the relationship of space and time, particularly with regard to the proliferation of capitalism, which is embedded and internalized in the urban. Lefebvre relates the dominance of the spatial directly to the reproduction of capitalism. In terms of financial centres, processes of capitalist enclosure lead to the intensification and extension of the urbanization process, directly connecting accumulations of finance capital with the rise of urban agglomeration (Lefebvre, 2003). He argues that a new understanding of the urban is required (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). As Prigge (2008) explains:

It is in urban studies and geography that the influence of Lefebvre has been most strongly developed, for example Brenner, (2000), Brenner and Elden (2009), Elden, (2004), McCann (1999), Merrifield (2006, 2011), and Soja (1998), inter alia. World city theorists suggest that the urban scale operates as a locally organized node within globally organized flows (Brenner, 2000). This has particular relevance for the City of London, which retains a very local character and socio-cultural traditions, but which is entangled not only with the greater city which surrounds it, but with other global cities and webs of global finance. Suggestions that the urban can no longer be understood as a bounded spatial unit, but instead saturates modern life, lead to questions about the implications for the City. On the one hand, the City maintains its ancient boundaries and is a geographic spatial unit. On the other hand, its temporal rhythms are dictated by global markets, and it can therefore be said to have a unique spatio-temporal character, or a ‘patina’ (Thrift, 1996: 238). It is this ‘patina’ which in this study will be explored in relation to its rhythms.

Previous studies of financial districts have examined the relationship between location and industry sector (Allen and Pryke, 1994; Amin and Cohendet, 2003; Beunza and Stark, 2003; Ho, 2009; Thrift, 1996). In these studies, financial centres are both constructed in and through global connectivity, but also through their particular geographical location.

Thrift (1996) explores how the City was historically reproduced by an interrelated web of time and space, for example, the various temporal routines associated with the management of money, such as the historic cheque clearing systems, along with rules on spatial regulation of the City; for example all Stock Exchange members had to maintain an office within 700 yards of the Exchange building. These traditions, rhythms and materiality all combine to form what he calls ‘a coherent City space … confirming the identity of place and person’ (Thrift: 241). The network of contacts, always so vital to professional life in the City, has been focused by the City’s small spatial extent, so ensuring that the City, was, in effect, kept in the City. Allen and Pryke (1994) use Lefebvre to help disentangle the social spaces which constitute the City. As they point out, the City is synonymous with finance, and anything not pertaining to this dominant sector is sidelined. They point to the production of a dominant coding in the City, and to the way in which it has been secured by the repression of differences, and point to its ‘cohesive clubbiness, its dress codes, its web of gentleman’s agreements’ (Allen and Pryke, 1994: 460) as evidence of its legacy of social practices which help cement tradition and which derive from its spatial history, with its roots in the small members-only coffee houses.

Extending this concept of a cultural legacy deriving from the spatial history of the place, McDowell’s (1997) ethnography of the City focuses particularly on the gendered practices within investment banks, and examining the multiple ways in which masculinities and femininities are constructed therein. Exploring the places and spaces within which City workers spend their time, McDowell argues that these affect as well as reflect acceptable ways of performing gender in a highly stylized way. For example, she identifies both the patriarchal, cerebral, almost disembodied masculinity of the ‘old’ City and its private, exclusive boardrooms and the noisy, sweaty, ‘carnivalesque’ masculinity of the trading floors. She emphasizes how the built environment of the City and its symbolic meanings are entwined with its social practices, leading to a tradition of inclusion and exclusion based primarily on gender.

The research undertaken here builds on the insights from these studies by exploring the ways in which what the City is and does is materialized in what and where it is; in other words, exploring the relationship between the lived experience of work and the setting within which it takes place. As I wished to understand how the City was both sensed and made sense of, I was looking for a method that would allow me to understand the ‘lived space’ of the City, and to sense it in the way that City workers sense it. What can an analysis of the spatial and temporal flows and shifts of the City tell us about the lived experience of working there? What can be added to our knowledge of how people experience their working lives in a setting that is historically, architecturally and culturally distinctive? These questions led me to an exploration of how the rhythm and movements of urban space might be researched.

Lefebvre and the Rhythms of Everyday Life

In Rhythmanalysis (2004), Lefebvre turns again to the everyday and urban life, but through the notion of rhythm in an attempt to analyse the coming together of space and time. Rhythmanalysis is the study of spatio-temporal rhythms and the dynamics that these rhythms create, at the bodily, urban, regional national and global scale.

In his essays on rhythm, Lefebvre pays particular attention to urban rhythms, in order to extend his understanding of how space is produced to how we are able to understand it; in other words, how by listening and analysing the rhythms of place, we can better understand their particular character and the effects they create. Rhythmanalysis is an attempt to use the body to understand the rhythms of space. The rhythmanalyst perceives the whole of the space, not just visually, but with all her senses, and by using her bodily responses in order to analyse them. Lefebvre uses the masculine form of the third-person pronoun when describing a rhythmanalyst. In order to provide balance, I have used ‘she’:

Lefebvre writes of time, space and an expenditure of energy colliding as rhythm in particular spaces, and of the importance of observing these rhythms in order to fully understand the place:

For Lefebvre, rhythms are never fixed and stable, but are by their nature fluid, susceptible to changes and based on difference—repetition in itself does not, cannot, produce a rhythm, but as soon as difference appears, a rhythm begins to form. So, in the quotation above, Lefebvre is explaining that rhythms belong to, and are shaped by, a particular place, but, at the same time, are always in a process of becoming, like a wave, because they are dependent on time.

His aim is to encourage the observer to listen to a space, to recognize that there is nothing inert in the world—only diverse and multiple rhythms which characterize a particular place or a particular time. To analyse rhythms successfully means becoming ‘more sensitive to times than to spaces, to moods than to images, to the atmosphere than to particular events’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 94). Lefebvre identifies both cyclical rhythms and linear rhythms. The former are rooted in nature and the physiological rhythms of the body, which, broadly, involve repetitive rhythms which take place after specific and naturally occurring intervals of time, for example the sun rising or the changing of the seasons. In contrast, linear rhythms, again broadly, are exterior and imposed by humans (although these two may coincide, for example news bulletins which occur at regularly punctuated intervals throughout the day).

Rhythms are fundamentally based upon repetition, yet repetition inevitably produces difference, in that it is only by the insertion of difference that a rhythm can be perceived. It is these differing rhythms which he asks us to observe and analyse. The only way we can do this is through bodily engagement, to use a multiplicity of the senses: ‘he thinks with his body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 94) Indeed, he posits that the only way to analyse rhythms is to use our own bodies and their rhythms as reference points.

What differentiates rhythmanalysis from more straightforward observations of urban rhythms is the stress on the body as the mode of analysis. For Lefebvre, the body proportions the rhythms we sense; therefore, it is critical that they are experienced with and through the body, and not only understood in the abstract, or through visual observation alone. Rhythmanalysis therefore becomes a multi-sensory, embodied and immersive method of researching organizational life. As Lefebvre explains, the rhythmanalyst ‘listens—and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 29). Lefebvre does highlight a methodological concern, however; ‘in order to analyse a rhythm, one must get outside it’ (ibid: 95). What Lefebvre is drawing attention to here is the difficulty of grasping the relationship between rhythms that constitute a whole, particularly within our own body. We do not, for example, pay attention to individual bodily rhythms except when one of them is in a state of pathology, i.e. when we are suffering. He relates this to the sensation of immersion in music and dance; we feel these sensations within our bodies, but in order to understand the experience we must also be able to detach ourselves from it and to observe the effects on others. What he is recommending is both observation and immersion, for we cannot experience rhythms unless it is through our body, and we cannot analyse our experience unless we observe; we need to be therefore both inside and outside, participant and observer.

Geographers have been interested in rhythms for some time (Edensor, 2010; Edensor and Holloway, 2008; Matos Wunderlich, 2008), particularly as a tool to reveal how they ‘shape human experience in timespace and pervade everyday life and place’ (Edensor, 2010). Delyser and Sui (2013: 293) point out that conceptually, rhythmanalysis ‘may enable a shift in geographic focus from one ocularcentric to one more auditory’, following Lefebvre’s observation that a rhythmanalyist is ‘capable of listening to a house, street, a town as one listens to a symphony, an opera’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 87). Rhythmanalysis has also been used for empirical explorations of, for example, festival spaces (Duffy, Waitt, Gorman- Murray and Gibson, 2011), and street performance (Simpson, 2008, 2012).

Lyon (2016), in one of the few studies which uses rhythmanalysis to explore organizational life, in this case Billingsgate Fish Market in London, notes that it is not just temporal patterns which structure a place, but also the activity and movement of people within it. For Lyon, drawing on Lefebvre, rhythm can be seen to operate at different scales and beats, creating a distinctive space-time. Lyon shows how rhythmanalysis can be an important and insightful tool to examine the interrelations between the body and urban organizational life, and can be situated within a methodology that explores work setting.

These studies of rhythms, both bodily and institutional and their relationship, demonstrate a method of analysis which explores the concrete lived experience of place. My particular interest was in how actors navigate the material setting in which they work and how their bodily rhythms are attuned to the space around them. The methodological imperative, therefore, of this study was to place the fieldwork directly in the streets of the research setting, to foreground the connection between bodies, space, materiality and culture and how rhythms can help us understand this. The next section will outline how I deployed rhythmanalysis in order to explore the City.

Walking as Rhythmanalysis

I will explain and evaluate the methodology in this section, and I will also further explore some of the methodological contributions and limitations in the conclusion to this chapter.

The fieldwork took place over a period of five months and represents ten full days of observations in the City. Most of the field days took place during the week, at different times of day. I used the ancient boundaries of the City to plot the walks (Figure 7.1).

Given the City’s relatively small spatial extent, and the fact that most City workers arrive via various transport termini and then walk through the space, both to and from their individual place of work and during the day (visiting cafes, parks, shops and travelling between office locations), walking the City was chosen as a method of rhythmanalysis. Walking both replicates the experience of most City workers, and enabled me to sense the rhythms of the streets and bring my sensory and embodied understanding into the research, in order to be able to fully analyse the rhythmic effect of place.

An embodied methodological approach such as walking within a given setting is not novel within sociological and organizational studies, although it is still relatively rare. Various forms and practices of walking have been used as methodologies by authors for understanding city life and modern urbanity (Edensor, 2010, 2012; Elkin, 2016). Most recent scholarly contributions have originated from the discipline of geography and are loosely bound by a shared understanding that seeks to uncover a nuanced and immersed sense of place (Edensor, 2010, 2012; Matos Wunderlich, 2008; Simpson, 2012, inter alia.) In addition, there are alternative ways of creatively representing the rhythms of place, for example ‘walking with video,’ i.e. filming and recording participants whilst walking alongside them (Pink, 2007), spatial shadowing, where the interviewer walks alongside the participant who is encouraged to describe what they perceive and experience throughout the walk (Raulet-Croset and Borzeix, 2014, Thibaud, 2013), and soundwalks, or recording the auditory experience of moving through a soundscape (Hall, Lashua, and Coffey, 2008; Paquette and McCartney, 2012).

The aim was to use my own body to immerse myself within the research setting, noticing the rhythms of my body and those of the wider setting, and observing and recording my sensory perceptions and emotional reactions as I moved through the space. This helped to make strange the familiar, and uncover what had previously been unnoticed by me (when I worked in the setting).

The subjective nature of this approach, however, does mean that the research lacked the perspectives of others. The study also involved research participants, in order to emphasize the depth of insight and understanding from those spending their working lives there. Interviews were carried out with eighteen City workers, recruited via a snowball sample, consisting of a roughly equal number of men and women, from a wide range of occupations, and representing a range of ages and time spent working in the City. Each interview lasted between one and a half to three hours. The aim of the interviews was to gain an understanding of how they sensed and experienced the rhythms of their wider workplace, and how they responded to them. During the interviews, my own status as interviewer was never fixed, but continually re-made through a process of negotiation; my personal history of having worked in the City for a period of time, and of familiarity with some of the financial services terminology, helped establish me as someone who was not there to be prurient or in some way critical about the post financial crisis City. A degree of anxiety was expressed by all participants with reference to how they might be viewed by the ‘outside’ world. At other times, however, my status as a university researcher who has not worked in the City for ten years made it easier to express a naivety and interest in their working lives, and helped them to see the need to offer fuller explanations or descriptions of their daily lives.

The first part of the fieldwork was carried out mainly over a period of five months and represents ten full days of observations in the City. Each of those ten walks was mapped onto a master map of the City (see Appendix A for an example). I walked armed with a notebook and pen for field notes and a phone for taking photos. I took regular coffee stops to be able to make notes whilst observations were still fresh in my mind. The walks lasted anywhere between three hours and six hours, and often included visits to museums and historic places of interest in the City, for example the Museum of London, which specializes in the history of London, the Guildhall, the ceremonial and administrative centre of the City of London Corporation, and the Tower of London.

The observational framework was structured around the external environment, noting both the physical characteristics of the setting and the human use of the space, as well as the time of day, the season, the weather and their relation to the setting. Particular attention was paid to the materiality: the architecture, and the placing of objects which impacted the flows and rhythms of the space and the behaviour of human actors. I also listened to background noise (often very intrusive), traffic noise, human speech and language, the tones of voices, as well as observing the physical characteristics of human actors—their gender, age, clothing and behaviour. I wished to observe and analyse the relationship between corporate space and public space on the City, particularly from a walker’s perspective. Paying attention to the rhythms of place also meant observing the order in which events unfolded, such as sequential patterns of behaviour. Following Lefebvre’s insights into the polyrhythmic body as the mode of analysis, internal responses were also noted, including sensory perceptions, for example temperature, bodily (dis)comfort, as well as feelings and emotions, reflections and interpretations.

I also collected data by means of photographs taken during the walks. The purpose was to help develop a richer understanding of the setting and to capture data that illustrate the environment in a way that written accounts cannot do in isolation. In line with the observational fieldwork, the aim was to capture the street life of the City, the way that people moved within the space, architectural points of interest, transport termini and the streets at different times of day.

Within the written accounts of my walks I referred to my own history as a worker in the City, particularly in relation to memories which were evoked as I walked. This is a space that I am very familiar with, yet engaging with it as a researcher was very different to engaging with it as someone who works there every day. For example, although in one sense I was immersed in the setting and therefore ‘within’, I was also free to ‘dip in and out’ as I wished, finding dates and times for research which accommodated my other responsibilities. I was not wearing business attire; this sometimes marked me out as an ‘outsider’, albeit one who is familiar with the geography of the place.

The Patina of the City

Themes emerged from the data collection, which can broadly be grouped into three main headings. Firstly, a sense of the City as a rarefied place shaped by performative rhythms was identified. Secondly, the corporate nature of the City is represented beyond the boundaries of individual organizations to encompass the space outside; the lived space of the City is often privatized with a sense of exclusion present when attempting to navigate the space. Thirdly, whilst the linear rhythms of the City are partly imposed by the temporal rhythms of global finance, they are also local, shaped by its particular history, and influenced by the recurring cycles of crisis. These themes will be discussed and analysed below.

The City as a Performative Workplace

The linear rhythms of the City are intense and purposeful. At Liverpool Street station, whilst dithering as to which direction I should head towards, I found myself walking against the flow and being almost knocked sideways by the crowd. My hesitancy was contrary to the purposive sense of early morning commuters all around me, as this quote from my field notes shows:

On another occasion I travelled in at the end of the working day, arriving just as the rush hour was starting, with workers heading home in the opposite direction to me:

All participants vividly described the rhythms of the City. Adjectives used included busy, stressful, and urgent, but by far the most common was purposeful. This sense of rhythms that are, ‘not sort of chaos busy, like the West End’ (the shopping and entertainment district of London)’, but ‘intense, fast and focused’ (Dave, a business development manager in his thirties with a very positive view of the City). Claire says, ‘you have no place here unless you are here to work, and to be seen to be working’. Claire is a woman in her forties, an ex-investment banker who left the City several years ago and found returning to it to carry out our interview to be a stressful experience, full of bodily discomfort; as soon as she started walking alongside me, she was reminded of the intense rhythms which to her were all about performing work. For her and the other participants, the rhythms of the City were not like any other place, because of their focused intensity of purpose, and because they were so acute at certain times of day, and so different when the City is at rest; there is no sense of twenty-four hour nightlife or weekend downtime here.

Many mentioned the stress of walking around such a dense and compact space; Ian, a financial consultant in his forties who enjoys the fast pace of the City, says, ‘You just need to know where to go. You need to be able to find your way around.’ This sense of navigational confidence was seen to be characteristic of what might be described as ‘eurythmia’, to use Lefebvre’s terminology; in other words, a sense that the rhythms are in harmony with the body. When a sense of ‘arrythmia’ (a sense of irregularity between the body and the rhythms) takes hold, it is because of a sense of not being able to keep up with the rhythms:

Rob’s feelings about the City are characterized by a sense of weariness. When I asked if his fatigue was caused by his current job or employer, he replied that, no, it was caused by ‘the whole place, the City itself’. The concepts of euryhmia and arrhythmia in relation to place will be further discussed in the conclusion to this chapter.

As explained above, the fundamental emphasis with rhythmanalysis is the foregrounding of the body as a means of experiencing rhythm. Whilst walking the City streets, I had to often stop and remind myself to consciously record how my body was feeling as I walked. Once I started to consciously think about and record my bodily responses, I started to notice rhythms everywhere; the way the traffic moved, the way that people moved in and out of buildings, the pace of walking on different streets. Lefebvre links rhythms to repetition (Lefebvre, 2004: 18) but makes the point that repetition in itself does not produce a rhythm—it is the insertion of difference which does that. So the noticeably fast rhythms of the morning and evening rush hours, and lunch times when the buildings disgorge hundreds of workers onto the streets at the same time, are created by also witnessing the slower rhythms of mid-afternoon, when only a few people rush up and down the streets, and the strangely tense and silent Sundays.

This sense of the City as dystopian ‘after hours,’ is attributed to the intense performativity that is expressed during the working week. For Claire, it is brutally exclusive: ‘It’s a place where you come if you’ve got a purpose and that’s for work—otherwise you don’t fit in, you shouldn’t be here.’

I was conscious of the way that I walked speedily in this space, my heart often beating fast, my head down. This is magnified at stations, particularly at Liverpool Street, which was my arrival and departure point. On weekdays, especially at rush hour but at other times as well, it is a sea of bodies moving towards the exits. There is little chatter or noise such as you might expect at an airport of other rail destination. The most audible sound is train announcements and the tapping of shoes on the concourse. On a Sunday, however, the scene is both visually and rhythmically transformed, as these photographs (figures 7.2 and 7.3) illustrate:

Outside on the streets on a Sunday, the rhythms continued to be different. Tourists stood waiting for buses to take them out of the City, as a contrast to weekday mornings when very few people are waiting for buses but some straight out of the rail terminus and walk to their City destination. People were waiting around, not rushing, heads down, as is the norm on weekdays (as seen in Figure 7.4):

With Lefebvre’s foregrounding of the body in mind, the body can be used not only as a metronome for sensing the rhythms of place, but metaphorically as well. The main thoroughfares of the City are like the main arteries of the body; you feel the blood flowing, sense the energy and the impatience, the activity. The quieter side roads are like the smaller veins, still carrying the blood, but quieter, calmer and emptier, with a slower rhythm. The linear rhythms of the City are temporal and attuned to commerce, and more specifically finance—the busy early mornings, the days punctuated by flows of people at lunchtime and in the early evening, the rest of the time more or less empty streets, with workers treating them like internal corridors. There is a sense that the dominant rhythms are creating a place where anything not connected to patterns of intensity and focus is only ‘on show’, not to be used; participants talked about the particular ‘atmosphere’ of the City, and connected it with an unusually focused intensity on performing work in a stylized and visible way.

The Corporate City—Both Inside and Outside

The rhythms are noticeably slower and less frantic in the enclosed spaces in which the City abounds—the pretty gardens, the squares, but all too often these places are locked and inaccessible. It is as if the City discourages attempts to slow down, and let your body rest, as I recorded in my field notes:

Wandering through the streets posed a very real problem of access, which both interrupted my attempts to stroll through the space, and both annoyed and unnerved me. As well as omnipresent construction work, many streets were blocked off for no apparent reason, and attempting to take short cuts through side streets and alleyways proved frustrating and usually unsuccessful, as can be seen (figure 7.5 and 7.6) in the photographs below:

On one occasion, I was asked to stop taking photographs of the interior of the Royal Exchange; I was attempting to capture the stunning architecture of the interior. On another, I was prevented from accessing the ruins of a Roman Temple on a busy road by a security guard who explained that the land was private. Participants also described the sense of frustration that was experienced when trying to walk through the City, with many complaints about the endless construction and the privatization of public spaces such as parks and squares.

For Sasha, a sales executive in her twenties, what she describes as the ‘exclusive’ and gendered nature of the City space is a mirror of what happens within her organization, describing how ‘it’s like there’s a club of City men which women are not part of’. She describes how it is men who demonstrate spatial confidence on the streets, connecting this to the men who seem to know the ‘shorthand’ and banter which allows them to successfully network in their organizations, reminding us of Allen and Pryke’s (1994) description of the cohesive clubbiness of the City. This reflects my personal experience of working in the City, since one of my most vivid memories is the feeling of claustrophobia, in that I could never escape the sense that I was in a male bastion. This was not only because I was working in an organization where the senior positions were held by men, but because when I left the building, at lunchtimes and in the evenings, I seemed to be immersed in crowds of men, particularly in bars and restaurants. Women accounted for about 40 per cent of employees where I worked (mainly in support roles), but simply were not visible in the space in the same way as men were.

Most participants, whilst feeling that no firm would risk its reputation by not adhering to diversity regulations, did agree that women were far less visible on the City streets. Some had not consciously notice this until I asked what they thought in the interviews:

The rhythms of the global financial markets do instil a culture of long hours for which financial districts such as the City and Wall Street are infamous. When I worked in the City, it was common to hear people bragging about working the ‘banker 9–5’ (defined as 9 am until 5 am the following day). This demanding culture was described by all participants, even though many did not work in finance and some were ‘back office’ staff or support staff rather than traders or investment bankers. For most, the City is brutally exclusive:

Ian describes the type of person who ‘fits’ in the City as being: ‘young, energetic, ambitious, prepared above all to work really really hard.’ Drive, ambition and the capacity for working hard were universally cited as ‘City attributes’ for all roles in the Square Mile.

According to Phillip, the demands are endless: ‘There are no soft options in the City. No padding. You can’t just sit there filling your days, you’d be exposed. So much is demanded of you’. This idea that to earn—and keep—your place is linked to how you are seen to be filling your days was raised by many, ‘presenteeism’ being viewed as a key characteristic of City life. As Pete, an insurance specialist says: ‘You know, it goes down well if you’ve got in early and gone late, and … that certainly gets noticed. Not so much what goes on in between,’ and for others, it is associated with being a game that you have to play:

Anna, a Communications Director for an investment bank in her thirties, agrees that women are less visible on the streets, but she relates this to the pressures placed upon women to be visible inside the office, and to not leave their desks for fear of being seen as less committed than men, although she considers this directly in relation to working mothers. As she explains:

Jennifer, a chartered surveyor in her fifties, agrees that ‘you still need to be seen to be working twice as hard as the men, and always look like you’re keeping up’.

In this way, the sense of the City acting as a private organization is reinforced on the streets and through the ability to keep up with its rhythms; to exhibit spatial rhythmic confidence is a symbol of belonging to the City club. The temporal rhythms are equally demanding. But at the same time, the comments above relate the lack of women in the space outside to the ‘presenteeism’ faced by women (or some women) inside, and the need to keep up with the demanding pace. In this way, both the inside and outside space are organized in a gendered way.

The City as a Site of Order and Disorder

Most participants expressed a defensive reaction when asked about how they felt the City was perceived by those not working there. Whether their perceptions were positive or negative, fifteen of the eighteen respondents articulated a sense that ‘outsiders can’t understand’ when talking about the most recent financial crisis; this was raised spontaneously in interviews. Most conflated the place with a sense of urgency and with repeated cycles of crisis. As Nigel, an insurance broker in his forties says, ‘It’s so pressurized here—you can only ever understand if you work here’.

Rob connected the performative nature of the City with excessive behaviour for which the world of finance is well known. This perhaps explains the nervousness that interviews expressed when talking about this; they all felt tainted or judged in some way for the excesses of the City, and were keen to explain that they weren’t ‘like that’. Yet many acknowledged the extent to which that culture does still exist. Jennifer argued:

Jennifer also believes that the build-up and then release of pressure is a rhythmic characteristic of the City, one which is played out on the streets:

She describes the ‘underbelly’ of the City as being ‘not what it looks like on the surface. There’s a lot of, you know, unhappiness, and certainly where I worked there was a lot of drug abuse’.

This excessive behaviour seems to be at odds with the serious, focused, hard-working ethic of the City that was cited by so many as being its key characteristic. Yet this sense of it being a pressure cooker which needs to explode from time to time, and which forces, and even rewards, this type of performance, was also accepted. This coexistence of order and disorder was experienced as a rhythm by many participants; Jennifer and Rob both felt that the endless cycles of boom and bust, and the way that the intensity of City life builds to a crescendo, pauses, and then starts again, was a characteristic City rhythm. This was perceived not only as part of a wider global rhythm (the City will always be influenced and affected by the shockwaves of the global economy) but also as a very situated spatial rhythm, in that the intensity builds on the streets in the way that people move speedily and purposefully, and then ‘let off steam’ in a way that is played out on the streets. Certainly a view of masculinity as being at times out of control in the City was prevalent amongst participants. Many talked about the most recent financial crisis, and were uncomfortably aware of the public perception of the City as being about ‘loads of City boys doing dodgy deals and wrecking everything … they were out of control weren’t they?’ (Anna). Although most felt that post-crisis regulation had controlled some of this excess, as Rob says:

Lorraine, a personal assistant in her twenties, agrees that the public rejection of the excesses of the City has merely pushed this behaviour into the background: ‘It might have changed a little, but I think under the surface it’s still there. They probably feel that they can’t be too in your face yet, but it will go back to that, I bet.’

For Claire, it has always been this type of masculinity—loud, excessive, all about money, competition and status—which defines the City: ‘The predominant masculinity was always the hands-dirty traders who were grudgingly respected by everyone else’ as she describes.

Rob agrees that it is this behaviour which is not only accepted but rewarded here, and that is can never disappear entirely:

From these observations, we can see a connection between the world of finance as represented in popular culture, for example, the movies Wall Street (Pressman and Stone, 1987) and The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013), where masculinity is excessive, priapic and out of control. As McDowell (1997) described, ideas about potency dominate modern mythologies of men in the City. Characteristics such as being tough and ruthless, aggressive and explicit in terms of language are highly valued and inherently masculine.

From the participants’ accounts, it is the rhythms of place that force a strict performativity, which rewards periods of excessive behaviour, as long as profit is achieved and maintained, and which forces behavioural norms based upon dominant versions of masculinity. There is a rhythmic connection perceived, then, between the rhythms of global financial crisis and the situated spatial rhythms of the City streets. Again, the boundaries between what happens inside the organizations which make up the City, and what happens outside, become fluid.

The observational findings show that there is, therefore, a disconnect between the City as conceived space—abstract, rational, ordered—and the lived experience, or perceived space, which history demonstrates is about cycles of crisis and disorder. Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) argues that a central component of the overall dynamic of capitalist development lies in the production of the built environment and the process of city building. He conceptualizes cities as subject to implosion and explosion (see also Amin and Thrift, 2002; Thrift, 2005); their destructive social and environmental characteristics lead to cycles of instability and crisis.

Conclusion

The aim of this chapter has been to show how the foregrounding of the body can illuminate how place is used and sensed. Lefebvre reminds us that the human body lives polyrhythmically, but that bundles of rhythms from the immediate environment penetrate it. A rhythmanalysis is able to show how this interplay of rhythms is experienced and sensed, and through it a shared communality of performance, of situated and particular rhythms, can be described. Through its rhythms, therefore, the sense of how the City coheres as a space can be seen and how its distinctive patina (Thrift, 1996), which I conceptualize as performative, exclusionary and subject to cycles of disorder, is created. In this way, then the ‘patina’ of the City, it would seem, is shaped by performative, intense, focused rhythms, which are cyclical in terms of the temporal connections with global markets, with the linear rhythms of the working day, and in terms of the particular history and culture of this place, which is characterized by tension between order and disorder.

The fieldwork undertaken has enabled a view of the City as operating rhythmically on many levels—as a global financial centre, as a local ‘district’ within the larger city of greater London, as a historic setting which maintains its distinctive cultural and spatial traditions, and as a public space which often operates as a private space.

Methodologically, it is important to avoid privileging any one particular sensory perception, but to pay attention to ocular, auditory, and muscular sensations, as well as to the patterns of movement which unfold, so that a multi-sensory understanding of the rhythms can be experienced. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s (2004) concepts of eurythmia and arrhythmia, eurythmia in the City is characterized by navigational and spatial confidence and an ability to ‘keep up’ with the rhythms and to belong. Arrhythmia, on the other hand, is characterized by feelings of anxiety, fatigue and a sense of displacement and exclusion. In this research, feelings of eurythmia and arrhythmia emerged as analytical tools to help understand how feelings of gendered inclusion and exclusion can be expressed spatially.

The sense of both immersion within the rhythms, and an occasional detachment from them, in order to observe, is a difficult but important balance to maintain; in this study, time taken out from walking to pause in a coffee shop or similar public space helped to achieve this balance. This also helps with cultivating a reflexive approach; familiar places are the settings for rhythmically apprehended routines, but habitual processes and routines become unreflexive, so even in a situation or, in this case, geographical place which is familiar, Lefebvre’s cues to listen to it as if it were a symphony, or to watch it as a ballet, is useful. Understanding the rhythms of the City, and how they are experienced, extends our understanding of how work settings influence the lived experience of organizational life, and vice versa.

Methodological Reflections

Since the focus of this chapter has been on the application of rhythmanalysis for empirical explorations of workplaces, it is worth considering both its methodological limitations and its potential.

Using rhythmanalysis as a starting point allowed me to develop a sensory method of navigating and understanding the research setting. Through its application, I have been able to observe how the place is sensed and experienced, and how patterns of inclusion and exclusion are present, in a way that it would not have been possible to uncover merely through interviewing City workers, who are aware of the frenzied rhythms but do not, in general, have the time to step outside them. Observing the flows of crowds and developing notions of rhythm provide a means of engaging with how time, space and place interrelate. Lefebvre insists that to be a successful rhythmanalyst, you must experience the rhythms with your whole body in the same way that those you are observing do. As Lefebvre informs us, the researcher ‘must arrive at the concrete through experience’ (Lefebvre, 2004: 31). Experiencing the rhythms subjectively, and foregrounding my bodily responses and senses of bodily eurythmia and arrhythmia, which as explained above are key analytical tools when carrying out a rhythmanalysis, allowed a deeper understanding than would have been possible through interviews alone. The interviews added to this sensory methodology, however, by helping me to understand how City workers ‘make sense’ of the place cognitively. Whilst a case study or an in-depth ethnography would have yielded rich insights into the rhythms of a particular organization, my interest was in the setting as a whole and how the rhythms ‘outside’ interrelate with, and sometimes replicate, the lived experience of ‘inside’, particularly in relation to gendered practices on the streets and inside the buildings.

Whilst the practice of walking was both relevant in this setting, since it is representative of how City workers move around the setting, and generated rich data, there are other methods of analysing rhythms which could be explored as complementary methods. Whilst the participant interviews generated rich accounts of the experience of working life in the City, only one interview (with Claire) was conducted as we walked together through the streets, following the spatial shadowing method described in the methodology section. The rhythms of the City were emphasized during our interview with an emotional intensity that was stronger during this interview than any other. Kusenbach (2003), whilst discussing lived experiences of place, argues that sedentary interviews discourage context sensitive reactions of the interviewer and interviewee, and separate participants from their routine experiences and practices. Evans and Jones (2011) argue that walking interviews generate richer data because participants are prompted by meanings and connections to the surrounding environment, and claim that it is intuitively sensible for researchers to ask interviewees to talk about the places that they are interested in while they are in that place. My experience with Claire suggests that walking with an interview participant allows the narrative to evolve spatially rather than temporally, and produced more spontaneous and emotional data as the surrounding environment prompted discussions of place, and her bodily discomfort was evident as she became immersed once again in the rhythms of place.

To conclude, a Lefebvrian rhythmanalysis can furnish organizational scholars with an embodied, immersive way of exploring the subjective and cultural experiences of place. This is important as it adds to our understanding of how organizational settings are sensed and lived. The rhythms of place are not just individual, but collective. Analysing rhythm can show how this communal experience manifests in a particular place. Organizational setting can therefore be depicted, sensed and experienced through its ensemble of rhythms.