1 Introduction

Henri Lefebvre and Organization Studies

Sytze F. Kingma, Karen Dale, and Varda Wasserman

Introducing Lefebvre

One of the most important points to make right at the start of this book is the need to not stereotype Henri Lefebvre solely as a theorist of space, as Shields (2001) puts it. Thus we begin with a very brief overview of Lefebvre’s life and work, in an attempt to avoid the “mis-recognition” that has tended to characterize Lefebvre’s categorization by Anglo-American readers, as Aronowitz (2015: 73) argues, where he is ‘placed’ only in relation to a very partial view of his work and life.

Henri Lefebvre was born in 1901 and died in 1991, his life thus covering most of the twentieth century with its profound changes and disruptions. He was born and died in the south-west of France, near the Pyrenees, in the intervening decades seeing the transformation of the rural peasantry and the growth of urbanization processes, becoming a key observer and theorist of both. Lefebvre’s life and work span not just time, but also academic space. He originally graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne, but later took up a post in sociology at the University of Strasbourg. In other words, his work defies easy definition and categorization; he speaks and has had influence across multiple academic disciplinary boundaries. As Shields notes, in the 1950s and 1960s, Lefebvre was one of the most translated of French theorists, known predominantly at the time for his work on dialectical materialism. His later work on the production of social space has had a different reception (not originally well received in France and in the context of Marxism, but taken up from the 1980s as a central theory in relation to studies of urbanism) and ‘translation’ (not being translated into English until 1991, and taken up in relation to critical geography and through this route tending to wend its way into other disciplines in the English speaking world). And his work is much broader than these two examples. He wrote over 60 books and 300 articles. Stanley Aronowitz (2015) comments that the relevance of his work to ecology and to art and aesthetics has still not been recognized. Many of his works were dictated and he did not tend to return to edit them. This makes them challenging to read and interpret. But Lefebvre’s life was not confined to academic debates. His whole life was one of activism and is criss-crossed with the influences of this. He joined the French Communist Party in 1928, and provoked his expulsion from it in 1958 after finally acknowledging the influence of the work of Sartre. He then became one of the critics of the continued Stalinism and structuralism of the Communist Party, and was associated with other activist groups including the Situationists and Maoist groups. He was an active opponent of the Vichy regime during the Second World War, and he was centrally involved with the student occupations of 1968, and the political events during the 1960s which led up to this. Among his students can be counted Jean Baudrillard and Manuel Castells. Both his activism and his diverse working life—at various times he was a factory worker, a taxi driver, the artistic director of a radio station, and did military service—feed in to his approach to his writings. His development of acutely perceptive theory is underpinned throughout with political consciousness and a deep concern for everyday life.

Many details about his life and work can be found in already available excellent introductions to Lefebvre. We will focus on how the significance of Lefebvre and his approach have been portrayed and could be made relevant for organization studies. The most systematic and comprehensive of the introductory texts include Rob Shields his Lefebvre, Love & Struggle (1999), Stuart Elden his Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (2004), and Andy Merrifield his Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (2006). In addition, we refer to an edited volume by Kanishka Goonewardena et al., Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (2008), which offers 15 chapters by a range of authors discussing various aspects of Lefebvre’s work. These publications (re)present different versions of Lefebvre’s ideas, and together, we believe, offer a thorough introduction to Lefebvre’s work. In some respects, the works are complementary, although there is, of course, great overlap in the themes covered. As a crude indication, one could perhaps say that Merrifield offers a more emphatic entry to Lefebvre, Shields focusses on the internal coherence of his work, Elden is very comprehensive in interpretations and contexts, and, if you specifically are after particular aspects and backgrounds, Goonewardena et al. would be a good start. The introductions all offer overviews and insights into Lefebvre’s ideas and intellectual life, his broad philosophical interests, his dialectical materialist methodology, his lifelong engagement with a broad range of topics, including everyday life, time, space, the urban, politics, the state and globalization. Introductions necessarily offer fragmented impressions of the original works, summarize, prioritize, reorganize and schematize arguments, and frame the work in a different context of scientific debates. This in itself is a valuable and necessary contribution, and a precondition to make original works accessible and understandable, especially in the case of Lefebvre.

The works mentioned are all meant to be introductory texts and, for that reason alone, organization scholars who seek to contribute to Lefebvrian organization studies are well advised to consult the original Lefebvre texts they refer to. This is not only because ‘second hand’ accounts may raise crude, partial or even false impressions of the original, but also because of the nature of Lefebvre’s work: his methodology, use of concepts and particularly his style of writing. His complex philosophical style makes his works difficult to read. The major arguments and concepts are also often difficult to grasp because Lefebvre almost never presents these in a straightforward way. Concepts and insights are gradually developed throughout the texts in which they are empirically and philosophically grounded and contextualized, and repeatedly nuanced, redefined and elaborated upon. In this respect, Lefebvre’s writing style is demanding to readers who want to grasp and deduce the basics of his ideas from the text as a whole. This means that the introductory volumes not only come in handy but, paradoxically, may even be considered necessary for readers to grasp the meaning and significance of the original texts. Indeed, for readers who are not yet familiar with Lefebvre’s work, it is recommended to start with a good introduction, especially Elden’s (2004), not only because this introduction is the most comprehensive but also because it offers a good entry to Lefebvre’s work because of its enriching and insightful endnotes. Zhang (2006), one of the contributors to the current volume, explicitly advocated Elden’s introduction as an ‘indispensable commentary as well as general guide’ for organization scholars.

This introductory chapter proceeds as follows. We start with a brief sketch of the influence of Lefebvre’s work and how this can be made relevant for organization studies. Secondly, we discuss how Lefebvre was adopted and gained a new relevance in organization studies. Finally, we offer an overview of the studies presented in this volume, and indicate how they might be pertinent for spatial organization studies as an emerging field of interest. In this introduction we do not offer suggestions for future research. Instead, we decided to end the volume with a separate chapter on possible future directions for research into spatial organization.

Lefebvre’s Influence

The Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]) is by far Lefebvre’s most influential work and will also be frequently referred to in this volume. Lefebvre almost never writes in a programmatic way, that is, a way in which the major contributions, ideas, concepts, arguments and methods are outlined in advance, and subsequently explained and substantiated in a linear fashion. In this respect, his style is essayistic and very French. A notable and important exception concerns the first chapter of The Production of Space—explicitly titled ‘plan of the present work’—in which Lefebvre provides the reader with a formal account and definitions of the three epistemologically different but always complementary spatial perspectives his work is renowned for—often briefly addressed as Lefebvre’s ‘spatial triad’.

For Lefebvre, there are always two opposed understandings of space, the mental space referring to the images of space as conceived by experts, such as a map, and the concrete space referring to the real material properties of space we may all perceive. However, and this is the key of his approach, Lefebvre argues that, in addition, there always is a third understanding of space, which combines the two and mediates between the two. This is our understanding of the simultaneously real-and-imagined space we deal with in everyday situations. The logic behind this third perspective, the ‘lived space’, is that Lefebvre recognizes that all social actors combine the two poles and entertain ideas about the concrete spaces which constitute their life—this logic is akin to that of the living brain, a thinking substance. Lefebvre’s triad thus consists of three distinct but related spatial perspectives, the ‘conceived’, the ‘perceived’ and the ‘lived space’. Zhang (2006) usefully highlights Elden’s reading of this, that the lived space addresses our purely subjective informal knowledge of space—which always relates to the conceived and perceived—and that the three perspectives should be understood as particular points of view on the whole space and in this respect overlap, not juxtapose, one another.

However, and the authors of the introductory texts agree, this does not mean that the background and meaning of this deceptively clear classification of perspectives, and the way the perspectives relate or can be put to use, is immediately evident from the first account. This one can find out only by following Lefebvre’s uses of the concepts, discussions of the philosophical backgrounds, his comments and applications in the subsequent chapters of the book. For instance, Schmid (2008) argues that Lefebvre’s triad can best be understood with reference to ‘the trinity of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche’. What is more, The Production of Space can be understood as a culmination of a large part of Lefebvre’s previous work, which constitutes a voluminous but in many respects closely connected oeuvre. In his previous works, especially his works on ‘everyday life’ (Lefebvre, 1991 [1947]), ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]), he gradually developed and grounded various aspects of his arguments and already offered basic rationales and provisional formulations of his spatial perspectives. This implies that one should ideally read a significant part of Lefebvre’s work in order to reach a proper understanding of his spatial theory. Furthermore, this argument applies not only to the works previous to The Production of Space, but also to the subsequent works; his masterpiece on ‘the state’ (not translated into English and out of print in French), and especially Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004 [1992]), which he himself addressed as ‘an idea that may be expected to put the finishing touches to the exposition of the production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 405). For this reason, one can hardly do without good guides such as the introductions mentioned. Although in these ways necessary, the introductions are, of course, not sufficient for developing Lefebvrian organization studies; they need to be supplemented with a close reading of relevant parts of the original work and with contemporary applications in organization studies, such as the ones discussed further on and the ones written for this volume. Finally, in order to actually bring Lefebvre’s approach to life, this will have to be tested, applied and specified in actual organizational research practices. The proof of the pudding ultimately lies in the eating.

Another important observation about Lefebvre’s work is that his work was taken up on a significant scale by international social science only after his death in 1991, also the year the English translation of La Production de l’espace—already published in French in 1974—was released. In the 1990s, this work had a significant impact in the field of social geography and was assigned a prominent role by, in particular, Mark Gottdiener (1985), who discussed The Production of Space seriously; David Harvey, who wrote an afterword to The Production of Space; and Edward Soja, whose book Third Space (1996) in title and content was directly inspired by Lefebvre’s approach. Soja was also instrumental in connecting Lefebvre’s work with the broader expansion of the interest in space in the wider social sciences, particularly in the cultural studies field. This ‘reassertion of space in social theory’ (Soja, 1989) was part of a general post-modernist critique of modern social science because of its prioritizing of time and history over space and geography (cf. Jameson, 1991). Kipfer et al. (2008: 3) regard the political-economic geography reading as a ‘first’ and the post-modern cultural reading as a ‘second’ reading of Lefebvre. They argue for a ‘third’ more comprehensive reading which overcomes and combines the two and fuses and balances Lefebvre’s political-economic considerations with those of subjectivity and identity. We suggest that the appropriation of Lefebvre in organization studies can by and large be inserted in this third stream of readings of Lefebvre. The first tranch of organization studies papers to make reference to Lefebvre’s triad, which we will further discuss below, appeared only in 2004 and 2005 (Ford and Harding, 2004; Dobers and Strannegård, 2004; Dale, 2005; Watkins, 2005).

The late, post-mortem, recognition complicates the application of Lefebvre’s work in organization studies. First, by the time that the significance of Lefebvre’s work had been recognised in organisation studies, the field had developed sophisticated contemporary approaches in a different direction, of which, for example, neo-institutional theory is a strong example (see Drori and Preminger’s discussion in the current volume). Consequently, the more organization studies evolved into alternative directions and developed a framework of reference of its own, the bigger the gap—in time and empirical topics—between organization studies and Lefebvre’s approach became, and subsequently the more difficult to overcome. Second, this effect was aggravated because also outside the field of organization studies, and even in the French context, the work of Lefebvre was not systematically built upon, applied and developed further conceptually and empirically. His work seems somewhat frozen in time.

This does not mean that Lefebvre’s work was not influential. On the contrary, Lefebvre’s work should be regarded as highly influential both upon contemporaries and successors, but this influence was largely indirect and hardly recognizable. On the one hand, Lefebvre did not follow a standard academic career. Although he wrote for a large part of his adult life, his interests and work often were not directly connected to academic positions. Lefebvre was a controversial figure, as Merrifield (2006) points out in some detail, and as much a neo-Marxist thinker and intellectual outside of academia as inside. He can also be considered a left-wing activist, although with his writing and commentaries he was an activist in words rather than deeds. He was an active member of the French communist party (PCF) for 30 years (from 1928 to 1958). He is also known for his support and analysis of the May 1968 student movement (Lefebvre, 1969 [1968]). In French sociology courses, so we have been told, Lefebvre is mainly mentioned with reference to The Sociology of Marx (1982 [1966]), a rather straightforward introduction to Marxism but not a significant part of his own contributions. The enormous range of Lefebvre’s writings also makes his work difficult to classify. Lefebvre’s work went in many directions. He advocated and practiced multidisciplinary approaches, and incorporated economics, politics, philosophy, psychology and the arts. His work was as much grounded in phenomenology as in semiology. His major contributions concerned not only spatial analyses but, equally important, the history of ideas, particularly the ideas about space (remember, there are always two spaces, the ‘mental’ and the ‘concrete’). In his thinking and writing, he extensively engaged with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and many more. All these factors make his work difficult to classify and to access.

On the other hand, there are also reasons external to Lefebvre’s person and work which may account for the poor integration of Lefebvre’s work in mainstream social science. This has to do with a particular feature of French sociology, or for post-World War II continental European sociology as contrasted with Anglo-Saxon sociology—this feature may even be typical for a specific phase of development of social science. Leading sociologists developed almost egocentric conceptual frameworks with attached series of studies, which resulted in largely self-referential and closed theoretical systems. This scientific practice characterized Lefebvre’s oeuvre but equally that of, for instance, Baudrillard, Foucault or Bourdieu. This practice may lead to a strong internal coherence, diachronic grounding and depth in concepts and studies. However, at the same time, this leads to weak external coherence, synchronic grounding and superficial connections between the various schools of thought. The various sociological schools developed their insights in relative isolation and virtually ignored each other, with some exceptions. A notable exception would be Lefebvre’s comments on Foucault’s work, which he regarded as particularly ‘powerful’ but criticized for its neglect of the wider spatial context of the state (Elden, 2004: 240). At the same time there are all kinds of hidden connections in contacts and themes.

As opposed to Baudrillard, Foucault or Bourdieu, Lefebvre’s approach remained academically isolated and was hardly translated, applied, elaborated or debated by others. Although not in an explicit manner, large parts of the work of Manuel Castells—in the late 1960s an assistant of Lefebvre—and David Harvey can easily be portrayed as a continuation of Lefebvre’s interests and work on the urban. Ironically, both Castells and Harvey initially thought that Lefebvre had developed a flawed Marxist approach to the city, and sought to correct this with a more structuralist focus on the economic forces of production (Elden, 2004: 142). However, in their later work they revised their Marxist position and their work evolved in a direction which was arguably more in line with Lefebvre’s approach. In the 1990s, as mentioned above, Harvey was also instrumental for integrating Lefebvre’s sociology of space in Anglo-Saxon social geography. By that time, Castells had shifted his interests from the city to a new material phenomenon, that of information technology and the network society, and wrote an ambitious and voluminous sociology of The Information Age (Castells, 1996); this development and topic definitely would have fascinated Lefebvre—and he undoubtedly would have commented upon the book. And although without reference to Lefebvre, Castells’s work on the information age very much resembles Lefebvre’s approach, in style, method and neo-Marxist reasoning. Another intriguing, but different, kind of parallel between Lefebvre’s work and contemporary social theory concerns his ideas about the ‘colonization of everyday life’ by the market and by the state. This is a prominent theme in Lefebvre’s three volumes of Critique of Everyday Life (2014 [1947, 1961, 1981]) but also a key concern, albeit much more abstractly developed, in German sociologist Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action (1984 [1981]), a resemblance explicitly pointed out by social geographer Miller (2000: 42–43). Lefebvre surely would have criticized Habermas’s approach for not being rooted in materiality; at least this is what he criticized Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger for.

Comparing various sociological approaches and schools of thought, and how they do or do not relate, we can better leave to historians of science. Suffice it to note here that the distanciation of Lefebvre’s work from organization studies, both because of the time gaps and the intellectual space gaps noted above, raises hindrances which make it comparatively difficult to pick up and integrate Lefebvre’s work and develop Lefebvrian organization studies. In any case, in order to apply Lefebvre to contemporary contexts, as suggested by Brenner and Elden (2009), who sought to apply Lefebvre to the field of international political economy, ‘Lefebvre’s key concepts and analyses must be pushed, challenged, updated, and rearticulated in order to be made relevant’ (Brenner and Elden, 2009: 374). The difficulties, perhaps, make it understandable (but not justifiable) that the most abstract parts of Lefebvre’s work, such as the triad, appeal to contemporary scholars of organization.

The Influence of Lefebvre’s Work in Organization Studies

In this section we discuss how Lefebvre’s work has been appropriated in organization studies. The objective here is not to describe in detail the research which has utilized Lefebvre nor is it able to cover all of such studies (and we apologize now to readers for our omissions and for foregrounding our own work), but to delineate some of the main themes and also, importantly, to consider what strands have not been paid as much attention to thus far.

The interest in Lefebvre’s ideas and their application to organizational studies does not constitute a linear history. There are some references to Lefebvre’s work in organization studies from the 1990s, such as in Mary Jo Hatch’s (1997) Organization Theory, which was novel in including a chapter on ‘the physical organization’ which refers to Lefebvre along with David Harvey and Edward Soja. However, possibly the first paper to draw significantly upon Lefebvre’s spatial triad in order to derive a new approach to organizations, is Yeung’s (1998) paper in Organization on ‘The social-spatial constitution of business organizations: a geographical perspective’. Yeung argues that organizations are not only socially but spatially embedded, and that their geographic relations need to be understood because the networks of relations that businesses engage with in order to exist are linked to specific territories. This paper goes further than solely considering the physical location of organizations, in applying Lefebvre’s spatial triad to understanding how the practices of organizations are embedded within and transform spatial relations beyond the entity of the organization itself. In this way it connects with Lefebvre’s broader concern with the capitalist relations of production, and how these are spatially produced and reproduced.

Lefebvre’s triad has certainly found a central place in the literature on organization space, although much of the literature which has taken this up has tended to apply it at the level of the organization itself, with less concern for the perspective across different spatial scales that characterizes Lefebvre’s writings. Yeung’s (1998) paper therefore marks a less common approach within organization studies (as opposed to economic geography), in arguing for a move from the ‘spaces of firms’ to understanding how companies are embedded in geographically specific ways within ‘spaces of network relations’. In a related though different vein, the second part of Dale and Burrell’s (2008) book follows Lefebvre in arguing for a ‘political economy of space’ that moves beyond ‘the spaces of organization’ to consider the bigger picture of ‘the organization of space’. To date, this has not really been taken up within organization studies. In this way, we can see that there have been restrictions not only in the narrowness of the range of Lefebvre’s work which has been taken up within organization studies, but also in the tendency to decontextualize the spatial triad from the broader framework of the abstract spaces of capitalism within which Lefebvre clearly places it.

A further related but different kind of restriction in the early appropriations of Lefebvre’s work concerns the often subsidiary role attached to Lefebvre’s approach. There is a tendency for Lefebvre’s approach to be ‘merely’ used as a tool. Instead specific organizational processes, such as processes of meaning making, control and resistance are considered to be the main objectives of the analysis. This is understandable, but there is a risk here of imposing a separation between method and theory. This may paradoxically lead to a discussion of organization processes without taking space sufficiently into account. In other words, space can come to be seen merely as ‘influencing’ organizational processes, simply ‘adding in’ space rather than developing an integrated account about for instance ‘spatial control’ and ‘spatial meanings’.

However, it is perhaps not surprising that certain elements of Lefebvre’s work become foregrounded and others are relatively neglected within organization studies. The papers which have drawn upon Lefebvre’s work have tended to articulate it within those issues and debates which have currency within the discipline of organization studies, and perhaps particularly around areas of lived experience, embodiment, sociomateriality, aesthetics and identity. It is also consistent with the dominant approach within the discipline that most studies which use elements of Lefebvre’s work focus at the level of the spaces of the organization. It is apparent in many of these papers that a key impetus is to try to get to grips with organizational life as lived experience and to move away from more abstract notions about organizations. Thus, even though Lefebvre’s writings on the critique of everyday life are not often explicitly cited, his concern with the quotidian communicates and resonates with many of the concerns of contemporary organization theory. This is also why, as discussed earlier, we would classify much of the appropriation of Lefebvre in organization studies as being part of a third reading of Lefebvre, combining the ‘geographical’ and ‘cultural’ reading.

Whilst it is Lefebvre’s spatial triad that has generated the greatest interest in organization studies, the ways in which this central analytical device has been taken up are extremely diverse. Watkins’ (2005) analysis of theatrical performance has the explicit purpose of introducing Lefebvre’s work into organizational analysis, arguing that all three elements of Lefebvre’s spatial triad need to be integrated for a deeper understanding of organizational space. He connects the constrictive nature of the dominance of a conceived or of a perceived space with the concerns raised in critical organization literature against the dominance of mental constructions which are detached from their physical and social context (Knights, 1992). According to Lefebvre, such an approach may lead to ‘descriptions of’ or even ‘discourses on’ space but it cannot contribute to a true ‘knowledge of’ space (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 7). Thus Watkins uses Lefebvre’s triad both as a critique of organization studies and as an alternative tool for a comprehensive understanding of the actual organization and use of space.

The dialectical relationship between the different aspects of the spatial triad articulated by Lefebvre has been used by a number of writers to cast light upon organizational-spatial dynamics. For example, Kingma’s (2008) analysis of Dutch casino spaces shows how a logic of pleasure was historically and spatially produced through the perceived space (in dynamic interaction with the conceived and lived) by a dual process of the ‘dissociation’ of gambling from the urban environment by the casino building, combined with the ‘association’ of the casino building with an urban entertainment district. In the conceived space, this logic was spatially achieved through ‘scripting’ gambling as entertainment combined with the physical ‘constraining’ of gambling behaviour through access strategies and game area divisions. Lastly, in the lived space this logic was reinforced by constructing professional gamblers and addicts as ‘exceptions’ and by reducing the gambling experience to ‘illusions’ of profit and luxury which are confined to the premises of the casino. This work further argues that the controversial entertainment view of casinos can only be fully understood with reference to the wider scale levels of the nation state, of urban space, and of capital accumulation in consumer society (Kingma, 2004, 2011).

Some more recent studies have developed reflections of Lefebvre’s work beyond the spatial triad. For example, Wapshott and Mallett’s (2011) discussion of home-working is unusual in that it adapts Lefebvre’s ideas about dominated and appropriated spaces to discuss multi-dimensional aspects of home/working spaces, and how these co-exist in a state of dialectical tension. This argument also recognizes the Marxian history of the concepts in Lefebvre’s work, and addresses how the boundaries between ‘home’ and ‘work’ are constructed and dismantled in ways which typically relate to the broader relations of production.

A number of studies use Lefebvre’s concepts to explore aspects of control and resistance within organizations. This can be seen in Dale’s (2005) study of a new building for a privatized electricity company, which attempted to integrate a new set of organizational values into the design of the space and thus to influence the ways in which employees might ‘live through’ these spaces. Changes within the company influenced changing experiences of the building, illustrating how conceived, perceived and lived aspects of space are not fixed but in a dynamic interaction with each other. Wasserman and Frenkel (2011) also utilize the spatial triad to analyse attempts to build certain sorts of organizational, cultural and national identities through organizational aesthetics, the lived experiences of this, and the resistances it produces. Aesthetics expressing a desire to connect with modern Western-European culture and distinguish itself from traditional Israeli culture were incorporated into a new Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. The attempt to impose these aesthetic and cultural values generated various acts of resistance, especially through acts of ‘culture jamming’—for instance by ‘ridiculing symbols’ and ‘disturbing order’. These can be interpreted as reflecting inherent contradictions between the conceived and lived spaces of the Ministry’s building. Zhang, Spicer, and Hancock (2008) examine the relations between control and resistance in social space through the use of J. G.Ballard’s novels. The interactions of the dialectical relations of social space are shown when they discuss how hyper-organized—strictly designed and regulated spaces—forms of planned space may in themselves produce novel forms of lived space. Their paper also provides a useful corrective for a sometimes almost romantic assumption of the superiority of ‘lived space’ over conceived and perceived space, as through the novels of Ballard what we see are ‘the seemingly antithetical rationality of debauched lived space’ (p. 900) taking over whole communities. ‘People’s ability to re-interpret and creatively misuse planned spaces’ (p. 904) is not necessarily positive.

A number of papers have explored how power relations are reproduced not only through the conceived spaces of organizations, but through spatial practices and lived spaces. Zhang and Spicer (2014) argue that spatial practices are not solely about expressing resistance to dominated spaces. They analyse how minute practices such as walking and daily rituals, as well as apparently ironic stories and mocking jokes, contribute to reproducing rather than challenging hierarchical and bureaucratic power relations. This continues the thread of a number of writers who have pointed to the significance of the micro-relations of social space, such as Beyes and Steyaert’s (2012) discussion of the importance of bodily movements, successions of actions and affects, and configurations, in seeing ‘spacing’ as a process and performative rather than as an object to be fixed and reified.

These perspectives relate also to one of the particular resonances which Lefebvre’s work has had within organization studies: the emphasis that Lefebvre puts on human embodiment. As he powerfully expresses it: ‘the whole of (social) space proceeds from the body’ (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 405). Ian Lennie uses this to look at management from an embodied and lived perspective in his book Beyond Management (1999). Dale (2005) and Dale and Latham (2015) combine Lefebvre with studies of material culture and particularly Merleau Ponty’s (1965 [1945]) theorization of ‘embodiment’ in which the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’ are not dichotomized but entwined. Wasserman and Frenkel (2015) use Lefebvre’s triad to explore the relations between organizational spatiality, gender and class exposing the role of space and its embodied enactment by women of various classes in constructing and reconstructing inequality regimes within organizations. Tyler and Cohen (2010) also explore the interrelationship of embodiment of gender performativity and organizational spaces. In doing this, they bring together Lefebvre’s conceptualization of representational space with Butler’s work on gender performativity. Further, importantly, ‘Lefebvre (1991: 17, 35) argues that the social production of space “implies a process of signification” in which subjects “must either recognize themselves or lose themselves”’ (Tyler and Cohen, 2010: 181).

One key observation of the way in which literature on organizational space has developed: that is the tendency to combine Lefebvre’s approach with other, more contemporary, literatures. This tendency is both understandable and necessary. It is understandable because other literatures are perhaps more familiar and accessible, having a more long-standing contribution to understanding organizational dynamics. It can also be regarded necessary to actualize Lefebvre’s approach and connect his work with contemporary organizational contexts, developments and discussions. There is a risk in this of watering down or distorting Lefebvre’s approach, but there are also rich possibilities for different ideas intersecting and informing each other. Ford and Harding directly confront the potential dangers of bringing together different approaches by describing their reading of Lefebvre through a postmodern lens as ‘an insouciant perpetration of violence upon his Marxist perspective’ (2004: 817). However, despite this rider, their detailed use of the spatial triad in an analysis of how different staff understand their relationship with the merger of two health service trust organizations brings together both the Lefebvrian sense of embodiment in the production of social space along with a recognition of the political nature of how the abstract spaces of capital are produced, and the violence inherent in this. They contrast how non-management staff have an embodied and embedded sense of place with how senior management perceive the organization, which is conveyed through numerical codes such as budget figures, numbers of staff, numbers of beds, all held together by management structures. As in Tyler and Cohen’s work they dovetail their case study with insights from Butler and the power relations of performative spaces which come to constitute the subject.

In another example, Dobers and Strannegard’s (2004) paper on the spatial ‘adventures’ of a Danish experimental design object, a chair called the ‘Cocoon’—designed for possible use in public space to take moments of relief and shelter from our hectic everyday lives—fuses Lefebvre’s approach with Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT). This connection makes sense because in ANT attention is paid to the translation and transformation of objects as they travel through social space. Furthering this, Peltonen’s (2011) analysis of the architecture of a Finnish university brings Lefebvre together with the work of Callon, and Callon and Law, to discuss the idea of buildings as scripts, as producing obligatory passage points and evolving assemblages. These appropriations reveal that Lefebvre’s approach in several respects pre-figures and parallels other relevant approaches in organization studies to which it may be fruitfully connected. This approach of weaving together conceptual insights from Lefebvre with other literatures is continued in some chapters within this current text, with some novel combinations.

The range of areas where Lefebvre’s writings have been appropriated into organization studies is diverse and it is impossible to do justice to them all. Contributions of comparable significance to the ones discussed in this introduction include for instance Hirst’s (2011) analysis of the differential appropriation of flexible offices spaces; Verduyn’s (2015) use of Lefebvre in developing a process view on entrepreneurship; and Petani and Mengis’ (2016) analysis of the role of ‘lost spaces’ and ‘remembering’ in processes of space planning. These works should all be regarded as indicative of the rich potential of a Lefebvrian approach for organization studies. We have discussed a few articles in more detail to draw attention to the disparate ways in which Lefebvre’s concepts have been and can be put to use. In their influential review of studies of organizational space, Taylor and Spicer (2007) also recognize and discuss different approaches to space across the literature, categorizing these as studies of space as distance; studies of space as the materialization of power relations; and studies of space as experience. They link these to Lefebvre’s triad, which they characterize as practising, planning and imagining. However, they go further than this through an analysis of spatial scale, influenced by Lefebvre’s perspective on spatial scale as socially produced (Spicer, 2006). As well as using this to enable the different elements of the triad, or different approaches to space in organization studies, to be articulated in a dialectical way with each other, this also allowed them to explore how the literature in organization studies tends not to range across multiple scales and the interplay between them. This is a state of play which has largely continued through the intervening decade since Taylor and Spicer’s analysis, though we hope that some of the chapters in this present book might indicate how engaging with spatial scales might open up productive possibilities (see especially the chapters by Lacerda, Nash, and Zhang).

Another, more general, observation is that Lefebvre’s work has been appropriated in a restricted way, with an overwhelming concentration on his model of the spatial triad (particularly Chapter 1 of The Production of Space). Although restricted, this ‘model’ has proved very powerful for first turning space into an object of social analysis and second for analysing the production of the spatial organization as the outcome of dialectical interactions between experience, power and meaning in relation to space. Regarding the use of this model, we would point to the risk of taking this model too literally as a prescriptive objective of static spatial analyses instead of a dynamic heuristic tool. Beyes and Steyaert (2012: 49) explicitly remarked that in the use of the triad, in their view, there is a ‘tendency to reify space, to turn spatial becoming into representations of the beings of organizational spaces, to prioritize the spatial products over the processes of their productions’. For a further critique, see also Beyes’s chapter in the current volume. In this respect, it is relevant to point out that Lefebvre himself at the end of The Production of Space explicitly warned against such an interpretation of his approach, which would ‘obscure’ his true objective—which is not an analysis of space, but a critique of the established knowledges associated with space—and that he definitely is not aiming to produce ‘models, typologies or prototypes of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 404–405). Instead, Lefebvre is concerned to see an ‘exposition of the production of space’, meaning that he seeks to focus on the dynamics behind the processes of production. According to a number of commentators (including Shields (1999), Elden (2004), Merrifield (2006) and Goonewardena et al. (2008)), Lefebvre does not always live up to this ideal in his work, perhaps especially in his extensive overview of the ‘history of space’ in Chapter 4 of The Production of Space, in which he alternates between a process view and rather essentialist accounts of the historical succession of spatial situations and systems. However, Lefebvre clearly formulates his analytical ideal in terms of an orientation or a perspective which overcomes the distinction between the process and the product, ‘in an organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a directly lived movement progressing towards the horizon‘ (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 423). One way to counter the risk of reification, in our view, is to read and use the triad more explicitly in relation to Lefebvre’s work as a whole, and relate it to his philosophical discussions and notions of time, the body, everyday life, technology, the urban, the global and abstract space. On the other hand, Lefebvre’s radically open approach, and his reluctance against, a distinction between the process and its product, can perhaps also be considered as a shortcoming, as argued by Neil Smith in his introduction to The Urban Revolution (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]: xiv). Smith argues that this prevents Lefebvre from seriously considering ‘how certain social meanings become fixed, however temporarily, in and as space and place’. In any case, an analysis of which differences in spaces are made and remade maybe against his ideal but is not entirely at odds with Lefebvre’s own substantive analyses. And, as suggested by Smith, this ambivalence might perhaps be overcome by defining spatial products against the backdrop of time.

Outline of the Present Work

This volume offers a range of Lefebvrian inspired discussions and spatial analysis of organization processes. With this, the volume seeks to explore, and draw attention to, a new approach in the field of organization studies, a field that is currently dominated by a focus on discursive approaches (Carlile et al., 2013). The Lefebvrian (spatial) perspectives can be regarded both as alternatives and as complements to mainstream organization studies. They are alternatives because they place organizations in a new and different light, and offer new insights and interpretations for the social construction of organizations and for the controversies over the products, services and (unintended) consequences these organizations contribute to the wider society. They are complements because they show that organizations are more diverse and complex than specialist spatial analyses or the disembodied and dematerialized accounts of many organization studies seem to suggest.

In some respects, the chapters bring to the surface submerged traditions in organization studies, as is the case with detailed workplace studies, organizational history, geography and design. In other respects organizational analyses are extended in new and relevant directions, as is the case with rhythm-analysis, the urban and the role of the state. The varied contributions all draw upon Lefebvre’s work in various ways and connect them to various extents with contemporary illustrations and case studies. They express in all cases a spatial orientation. Serious attention is drawn towards rituals, symbols, meanings, values, legitimations, power relations, (informal) work-relations, and the artifacts involved in the (re)production of spatial organizations. The case studies provide rich and detailed descriptions, they cover a range of organizational sectors, and they stem from a range of countries, including Brazil, Israel, China, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Switzerland and the UK. Although the global and national connectedness of the organizations will be evident, at the same time the case studies stress the unique local embeddedness of organization processes. We do not suggest that the chapters represent a common understanding of Lefebvre or that the editors and the various authors would necessarily agree on each other’s uses and interpretations of Lefebvre. We do suggest that there is agreement on the great potential of Lefebvre’s work for developing organization studies, and that all contributions share Lefebvre’s work as a point of departure for linking his approach to contemporary organizational contexts.

The volume follows a logic of scope, and is organized into parts on theoretical considerations, spaces of organizations, and the organization of spaces, although inevitably there is overlap between the parts. The first part which focuses on theoretical contribution offers discussions on how to broaden the appropriation of Lefebvre’s approach, the idea of ‘absent spaces’ in architectural design, the idea of ‘spacing leadership’, and a comparison between institutional and Lefebvrian analysis in organization studies. The spaces of organizations part addresses the private and everyday life aspects of organizations, regarding for instance the embodiment of work practices, rhythm-analysis, and the significance of informal spaces and practices at work. The organization of spaces part considers intermediate relations and makes clear that processes of organizing affect and penetrate societies at large, often in many and profound ways. This part includes analyses and considerations of the historical and abstract space relations involved in the spatial construction of the urban and the (nation) state.

Part I (Theoretical considerations—process, absence, power, institutions) starts with a chapter by Timon Beyes about politics, embodiment and everyday life as possible themes for extending the significance of Lefebvre’s work for organization studies. From the perspective of this volume, Beyes’s chapter offers a good start because it shares a key concern of this introduction and this volume, namely that Lefebvre’s work can be regarded as of greater relevance for organization studies than the spatial triad alone. Beyes extends our understanding of Lefebvre by situating The Production of Space in the broader context of Lefebvre’s oeuvre and shifting attention from the triad to three themes on which Lefebvre’s insights are considered equally valuable and which have great potential for, and connect with, current interests in organization studies: ‘dialectic materialism’, ‘everyday life’, and the ‘human body’. These themes reflect ‘problems of spatial organization’ and are important for further developing, as Beyes stresses, the study of spaces of organizing. The themes are in Beyes’ terms helpful for formulating and addressing the ‘how’, ‘where’ and ‘what’ questions. Dialectical materialism (the ‘how’ question) concerns the way Lefebvre conceptualizes the production of space. Lefebvre—different from and against Hegel and Marx—always considers three dimensions which are continuously affecting each other and which, therefore, produce a dialectic and a change process which is open ended by definition. It follows, argues Beyes, that spatio-organizational analyses should focus on the process of production, the emancipatory moments of change, and the significance of self-organization—autogestion, in Lefebvre’s terms. With the concept of everyday life (the ‘where’ question) Lefebvre extended his analyses beyond the economic sites of production such as the workplace to include questions of social reproduction, cultural life and the urban. Lefebvre regards everyday life as a key domain for sensing alienation and developing resistance against the forces of organized capitalism and the state. Beyes considers it important to prioritize the study of the mundane aspects of organizing, and participant-observation, over the structural analysis and spatial set-ups of formal organizations. For this purpose he also considers the body (regarding the ‘what’ question) and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis as important in organizational research. Beyes particularly argues for a critical and politicized engagement with processes of organization.

In Chapter 3, Fabio Petani and Jeanne Mengis consider the use of Lefebvre’s spatial triad for analysing the role of ‘absent spaces’ in a space planning process. Planning always involves the exclusion of alternative possibilities and the production of a range of plans and variations of which only a part (and often nothing) will be materialized. However, argue Petani and Mengis, we need to better understand how, in the practice of conceiving space, discarded spaces may remain relevant and how presences and absences interact over time. This also involves a consideration of how absence and disposal in the pre-production phase of conceiving is ‘lived’ and experienced by those involved. Petani and Mengis actually understand absent space as ‘an expression of how a once conceived, but then disposed space becomes lived’. Theoretically they project this absent space as a mirror image of the perceived space, and as a dialectical moment, in Lefebvre’s triad and the production of space. Petani and Mengis illustrate the dynamic of how absent spaces become significant in the narratives of practitioners through two complementary examples from their research on the building of a public culture centre in a small city in Switzerland. These examples concern the inclusion of a museum which was initially excluded from the plans, and the exclusion of a park which was not considered a significant loss. The strategic disposal of the plan for the museum for reasons of cost-cutting was successfully resisted by planners and other stakeholders who emotionally invested meaning in the museum. However, in the complementary case of the park such emotional investment was virtually lacking and the disposal was consequently not regretted. Following Petani and Mengis, a consideration of absence and disposal may reveal hidden meanings and interests in the planning process.

In Chapter 4, Perttu Salovaara and Arja Ropo introduce the notion of ‘spacing leadership’ in a discussion of changes in organizational power relations from ‘power-over’ to ‘power-with’ orientations in the design of a new work space. Salovaara and Ropo compare and combine Lefebvre’s understanding of power relations with critical leadership studies in which increasing attention is drawn to the role of materiality and space in leadership. In these novel approaches leadership is considered as a collective rather than an individual activity and not only as a relation between people but also between people and the material environment. The human-material leadership relations Salovaara and Ropo consider in terms of ‘spacing leadership’. For this they specifically draw on Lefebvre’s analysis of the natural rhythms and constraints of rural life in peasant communities, in which leadership is in their view conceived in terms of collective actions across informal networks. This notion of leadership compares to Mary Parker Follet’s notion of ‘power with’ (as distinguished from ‘power over’), a democratic horizontal approach to leadership. Salovaara and Ropo illustrate their dynamic Lefebvrian understanding of spacing leadership with an analysis of a spatial renovation project in a Finnish university building. This case study was characterized by the unique feature of a close involvement of the university staff in the design process. Salovaara and Ropo posit, among other things, that the immediate involvement and influence in the change process by personnel led to a greater sense of ownership and belonging in the new work spaces.

In Chapter 5, Drori and Preminger compare and combine Lefebvre’s spatial theory with neo-institutional theory, a dominant theoretical framework in contemporary organization studies. They illustrate their approach with an analysis of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. What is called ‘neo institutional theory’ represents a popular and dominant stream in organization studies which, similar to Lefebvre, is characterized by a multi-dimensional approach. But different from Lefebvre, these theories hardly take materiality into account. Institutional theory largely relies on discursive analysis. Drori and Preminger argue for a need to include spatiality in institutional analysis and build on recent initiatives to do so with their reading of Lefebvre’s spatial theory. Lefebvre offers in their view ‘new paths for conceptual and empirical advances’. They first show that recently space has been incorporated in institutional theory as a ‘relational sphere’, a ‘professional domain’ or as a ‘legitimation tool’. Difficulties in comparing the two approaches arise because of the differences in ontological backgrounds—Weberian with a bias on legitimation in the case of institutional theory and Marxist with a bias on power in the case of Lefebvre. Neo-institutional theory might in Drori and Preminger’s view benefit from Lefebvre’s approach by broadening the scope of spatial analysis, by adding a new dimension or ‘sphere’ to theoretical considerations, by a stronger focus on power and hierarchy, and by furthering the study of global organization. In their empirical illustration of the holy monument of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Drori and Preminger distinguish between three spatial dimensions of the Western Wall, those of logics—of religion, archeology and nationality—and the subsequent sensemaking and enactment of these logics. Drori and Preminger’s exercise reveals some of the difficulties but also the possibilities for integrating Lefebvre’s approach with mainstream organization studies.

In part II (Spaces of organization—everyday work life, embodiment, rhythms, boundaries) the focus shifts from theoretical considerations to Lefebvrian analyses of small-scale organizational practices. This second part starts with Chapter 6 by Sarah Warnes, who takes the reader to an English Cathedral where she studied the everyday life aspects of the work of employees and volunteers from an embodied spatial perspective. Warnes shows how organizational members deal with the tensions generated by the dual objectives of this Cathedral, which serves as a religious site for contemplation but also depends on tourism. The analysis is built up from Lefebvre’s notions of rhythms and the ‘spatial body’, which consists of thoughts, movement and gestures that are able to ‘fuse a prescribed space with a different space, a lived space’. Warnes seeks to analyse an ‘experiential understanding’ of how value clashes are mediated by the body. Concepts of ‘dwelling’ and ‘dressage’ are of particular relevance here. As a participant-observer in the Cathedral, Warnes focused on the mundane routines of workers, and how they dealt with the differences, combinations and tensions between sacred and secular activities and spaces. She particularly shows how the body is effective in managing the competing value clashes which characterize the organization’s problematic. She explains, for instance, how the experience of church workers is one of dwelling at work: feeling comfortable and inhabiting the space through a personalized workplace territory with meaningful pictures, paintings or a screen-saver, which may trigger feelings of being ‘at home’ or of a momentarily relief from the pressures of work. Other examples relate to organizational dressage in which workers were ‘playing out’ conflicting values, such as challenging the prescribed walking routes they take through the Cathedral, or the way some challenged prescribed work routines in the Cathedral’s shop, which played a key role in terms of revenue generation. In this analysis Warnes uses Lefebvre’s approach as an alternative way to explore issues of organizational belonging, identity and resistance, and to further an understanding of spatial production through bodily movement.

In Chapter 7, Louise Nash explores the relevance of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004 [1992]) for organization studies in her study of the public space of the financial district of London City. Here Nash seeks to research the broader spatial context of a work setting through the experiences of those employed there, thus bringing meaning, space, and organizational-geographic sector together. Nash refers to Thrift’s notion of ‘patina’ to address the City’s distinctive aura, appearance and cultural meaning. Rhythms in Nash’s research are not only important objects of research but also a methodological key to unlock the experience of this setting, which requires both an immersion in the rhythms and a detached observation of those rhythms. To understand rhythms, the focus falls on the conjunction of time and space, in particular the ‘sense of urgency’ Nash felt in the City as well as the loss of confidence from the financial crisis which started in 2007. Nash analyses the City’s distinctive patina in three themes: the hectic performance of business life; the masculine privatized corporate space—both inside and outside; and the rhythms of order and disorder including the (legitimate) release of pressure in excessive behaviour and cycles of financial crises. Nash sees the City thus as linked with the linear rhythms of the workday and the dynamic of a global financial centre, as a localized part of Greater London and as a public space which often operates as a private space.

Chapter 8 by Tuomo Peltonen and Perttu Salovaara focuses on the tension between the conceived space and the everyday enactment of the perceived and the lived space to better understand the political aspects of the social space. Focusing on a case study of the Lunch Beat disco—Scandinavian workers dancing during lunch breaks—Peltonen and Salovaara exemplify a collective, artistic carnival that attempts to transcend the existing capitalist order. As an embodied practice, dancing during the working day demonstrates not only how body and mind are intertwined in organizational everyday life, but also posits a liminal space where workers could escape to during the day. However, as they claim, a ‘reading of the Lunch Beat through Lefebvre’s politically expanded triadic model, the movement [the Lunch Beat] had potential for a larger emancipatory effect, but this remained unfulfilled’, because it remained oriented towards an increase in productivity and was experienced as a means to enhance well-being at work and produce a motivated, happy employee. Escape practices were reframed as work-oriented tools and consequently, instead of challenging capitalist power relations, the movement has reproduced them.

Chapter 9 by Harriet Shortt focuses on Lefebvre’s triad as well and analyses food and eating in workplaces as a mundane and routine activity that takes place in specific spaces. Shortt urges us to take into consideration that space has an important role in constructing social interrelations, and she thus uses the term ‘foodscape’ to highlight that in order to understand eating as a socio-cultural phenomenon, it is crucial to critically examine how spaces of food are consumed, planned, controlled, resisted, embodied and lived. Based on a study conducted in a governmental organization that was relocated into a new building, Shortt demonstrates how different locations for eating were experienced and interpreted differently by the workers. The tensions between the conceived space and the perceived and lived spaces are exposed through four main themes: conversations during food breaks which took place in various locations, usually not in those which were designated for this purpose, thus creating alternative collaborative working environments; workers seeking ‘unmanaged’ experiences by escaping to private dining areas within and outside the organization, thus avoiding the organizational expectation ‘to socialize’ with others; smell as an embodied spatio-cultural experience that disrupts the formal, planned spaces of organizations; and lastly healthy foodscapes imposed by the organization subverted by employees through sharing sweets and cakes in liminal spaces. The chapter is divided into dishes—appetizer, starter, amuse bouche, main dish and dessert—which gives the reader a highly embodied experience. In this respect, the chapter provides a rich Lefebrian analysis which integrates many of Lefebvre’s ideas in regard to everyday life, power, domination, resistance, appropriation, politics, embodiment, and socio-cultural production of space.

Part III (Organization of spaces—Capitalism, urban- and state relations) is devoted to macro analyses of the production of space and it starts with Chapter 10 by Zhongyuan Zhang on the spatial dynamics of the Chinese city, Hangzhou. Zhang encourages organizational scholars to draw much heavier on Lefebvre’s early writings on urban space, looking at the underlying processual dimensions of the city and the dynamic interrelations between the conceived, perceived and lived spaces. Based on Lefebvre’s The Right to the City and the Marxist concepts of exchange-value and use-value, Zhang analyses the reality of the city both as a product that can be traded and consumed and as an oeuvre that people can use in non-economic ways. In this sense, Zhang continues the previous chapter’s emphasis on the tension between power and resistance, domination and appropriation. In the chapter, three urban processes/practices are examined: redesigning roads by narrowing bike lanes and abolishing sidewalks thus revoking pedestrians’ territorial rights; appropriation of the sidewalk by citizens who (mis)use it for various domestic purposes (such as drying laundry, cooking and eating) and thereby reclaiming their right to space; and square-dancing that often evokes conflicts between residents and dancers that are mediated by local governmental attempts to regulate these activities. In his conclusion, he offers some insights about the implications of his study on the city for organizational studies: putting more emphasis on unintentional subversions of controlled spaces and avoiding an overly romantic view of the resisting power of the lived space, paying more attention to changes in organizational spatial layouts to reveal hidden power rationales and revealing new liminal, in-between spaces within and outside organizations.

Chapter 11 by Inbal Ofer is also based on the concept of the right to the city, but it adds an historical angle to Lefebvre’s writing focusing on urbanization processes in Madrid from Franco’s dictatorship to the democratic regime. Ofer draws our attention to the state level and their planning regimes by analysing the formation of the city and the changes that occurred in Madrid from a highly segregated and dominated urban space (imposed by the state officials) to the vernacular, informal, resistant spatial practices (carried out by the city inhabitants, the citizens). Ofer shows that even in dictatorial regimes, power is not complete and planned spaces are always disrupted and recreated, but, on the other hand, citizens’ participation in democratic regimes is also not exhausted. The chapter is divided into three historical periods: the first refers to Madrid under Franco’s regime in the 1950s and 1960s, in which market-driven, hierarchical, and rational planning brought about functional zoning and to highly spatial segregation that reinforced the state’s domination; the second relates to the emergence of sporadic, illegal and informal counter-spaces in the late 1960s which offered the citizens much more independence and flexibility and a way to cope with the alienation of the segregation; and third considers the democratization of Spain which brought about new forms of urban knowledge through the participation of citizens in the planning processes. Even though Ofer outlines a process of urban democratization in which new forms of knowledge could emerge from the participation of citizens in planning processes, she doubts the ability of democratic authorities to allow citizens to gain their full rights to the city and to take an active part in designing and regulating their own living environment.

Chapter 12 by Daniel Lacerda also deals with the state’s role in urbanization and in its attempts to regulate citizens’ appropriation of space, but theoretically it is much more focused on power and even violence. Focusing on the case of Brazilian favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Lacerda examines the various ways the violence of abstraction is perpetrated by the state’s attempts to take control over the social space in the favelas. Based on observation, interviews and visual methodologies, the chapter offers an analysis of the coercive practices of the state and of the police, whose aim was to fight against the drug cartels that dominated the favelas but also provided basic public services that the residents did not get from the official state authorities. By applying the Lefebvrian triad and putting a special emphasis on the abstract space, Lacerda describes the struggle between these two entities as contesting political and economical ideologies and violent spatial practices. By analysing this extreme case study, the chapter raises important questions regarding the ‘totality of space’ and ‘the abstract space of capital accumulation’ and suggests some insights on how to implement these ideas in the field of organizational studies.

In this introduction, we have not aimed to provide a complete overview of the significance of Lefebvre for organization studies. Likewise, this is not the aim or pretension of the volume. Our objective was to make clear that Lefebvre’s work is only beginning to be appropriated in organization studies and that this volume illustrates different possible ways of using Lefebvre. The chapters of this volume only represent part of the possible routes that have been or could be taken towards developing Lefebvrian organization studies; i.e. to studying ‘spatial organization’. We will return to and specify this approach in more detail in the final chapter of this volume on ‘future directions’. The authors and studies are brought together in the hope that this selection will inspire and challenge organization scholars and practitioners across the world to further explore and develop the rich potential of Lefebvre’s work for organization studies.