The postmodernist perspective
In the conclusion of his study Gieryn commented on the human tendency to tale the commonplace for granted
Buildings insist on particular paths that our bodies move along every day, and the predictable convergence or divergence of these paths with those of others is (in a sense) what we mean by structured social relations. If buildings silently steer us into associations or away from them, we hardly notice how (or question the rightness of it all)
Gieryn point resonates with critical postmodern claims that existing physical arrangements make it difficult to imagine other arrangements-we just start taking for granted that things like privacy or accessibility are determined by built spaces and unconsciously deal with their implications. Silence may help to make the associations of certain experiences with particular places meaningful, but it also renders them potentially sinister.
The potential of physical structure to communicate meaning gives designs and the managers who hire them access to symbolic power, for, if physical structures communicate meaning then careful design should be able to suggest, if not outright control, the meanings associated with it. According to advocates of the modern perspective, like Olins, this belief gives architects and designers a strategic role in organizations. For postmodernists, however, it makes them targets for criticism. As British critical postmodernists Gibson Burrell and Karen Dale put it, Buildings are all about control, one of their key achievements is to obscure the power they express and maintain
Reading built spaces like texts and deconstructing them to reveal the power relations they materialize is how many critical postmodernists deal with the topic of physical structures in organization theory. Their methods are similar to those of symbolic theorists who also read built spaces as texts, one clear difference being the focus on power that consumes most critical postmodern readings. But another difference comes through invocations of spatiality.
Postmodern geographies, for example, have accused the vast majority of organization theorists of promoting a-spatial explanations that are both disembodied and disembedded. French postmodern geographer Henri Lefebvre was among the first to accuse Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and their followers of ignoring space to the detriment of their theorizing. Such critiques open social theory for spatial reconstruction, as when British postmodern geographer Derek Gregory claimed that : social structures cannot be practiced without spatial structures, and vice versa.
A similar postmodern critique has been directed at the ways technological control disappears behind the benign appearance of physical structure. The assembly line invented by Henry Ford is a favorite technological target of deconstruction, which typically begins with the assertion that belief in the factory owners right to control how work is done, and there after the right to control labor. is built right into material aspects of technology that forces workers to perform actions defined by managers at a pace the managers regulate. Thus postmodernists argue, the assembly line has ideological content that privileges owners and managers over workers, and hides their conflicting interests within the machinery of capitalism.
Repression of conflict occurs, they further argue, because once it's installed the physical presence of line machinery precludes discussion of the right of management to organize work as they have. The choice has already been made and disappears into the machinery. As American economist Richard Edwards described the situation:
Struggle between workers and bosses over the transformation of labor power int labor was no longer simple and direct personal confrontation; now the conflict was mediated by the production technology itself. Workers had to oppose the pace of the line, not the (direct) tyranny of their bosses. The line thus established a technically based and technologically repressive mechanism that kept workers at their tasks.
At the point at which workers accept the mechanized assembly line, the physical structure of the production process organizes social relations of dominance and submission within the hierarchy of owners and workers. Each time the machinery is turned on it both reconstitutes the status quo and suppresses resistance to it.
By seemingly innocuous or by being difficult to change, physical structures normalize power relations by fixing them in stone, so to speak. This material fixation parallels the symbolic fixation that occurs through institutionalization. As Burrell and Dale not, the isomorphism and institutional mimesis between organizational and the architectural practices that serve them, forms an alliance that helps to ensure continuity of power and domination through built space. They give the stunning example of the global influence during the first three decades of the twentieth century of German-born American architect Albert Kahn.
Kahn designed factories for the mass-production of automobiles for Packard, Ford, and General Motors in the US, and, under Stalin's auspices, was responsible for all industrial building in Russia until the mid-1930s. Little wonder that his single storied mass production facilities covering acres of land, with their trademark sawtooth roofs providing daylight on the shop floor, became a defining symbol of the industrial age. As a major instrument of social order and control, Burrell and Dale claim, the Kahn style industrial factory helped to create the identities of workers newly arrived from the farm and thereby forged social changes that would one day resolve into modern capitalism.
it is important to realize that many of the new entrants to the plants of Detroit and Stalingrad came straight from agrarian roots, may not have spoken the language of the metropolis and were unused to the rhythms of the factory day. The control of their work-space allowed the efficient socialization of the worker in programmes of re-education: they were constructed as a new category of industrial employee.
The alignment of interests between architects and their clients observed in the construction of factories, occurs again in the development of the modern office tower a few years after this. Burrell and Dale reveal how chicago architects Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) exercised a far reaching influence similar to Kahn's through their design of the skyscraper that dominates and defines the skylines of all modern cities today, a particularly influential example of which was the Lever Building SOM designed and built in New York City in 1952 According to Burrell and Dale :
The success of SOM rests not only on the brilliant projection of corporate capitalism. but also its mimicry of these forces in its own methods and organization. As a house style the model of the Lever Building came cheap.... Walter Gropius (1955) said that the Lever Building relied upon prefabrication so that 85-90 per cent of the whole building was component parts ready-made in a factory, brought to the site and assembled there. It used mass production methods and components. What also down well with clients was the opposition in SOM to union or craft power. SOM followed this logic of efficiency and cost consciousness through into the organization of their own business... SOM might be seen as an expression of unalloyed corporate growth: the reflection of the vertical integration of large multinational companies. It embodies a large bureaucratic structure based on hierarchy and a division of labour... It did not attack the status quo but reinforced it.
Other postmodernists go beyond deconstruction of power and dominance as naturalized and hidden expressions of physical structures to demand that we learn to control or resist these influences and thereby free ourselves of unwanted influence and avoid abuse. To develop the means to do this they turn to Lefebvre's theory of how the powerful appropriate space to maintain their superiority over others.
Lefebvre argued that, starting with art in the Renaissance, modern thought came under the influence of perspectivalism, a way of situating the viewer spatially to give them a vantage point from above. This spatial orientation, Lefebvre claimed, naturalizes hierarchy and other hegemonic practices. You can experience this effect for yourself by looking at an upside down map of the world. Such reorientations give most people an unsettled feeling because their naturalized expectations are undermined.
Postmodernists believe that the very notion of space, which always presents a center and its margins, orients us to domination. At the same time it perpetuates this orienting function, it hides the linguistic tricks it uses in the spatially inflected notions that abound in language interior/exterior, private/public, local/global, top/bottom, and exclusion/inclusion-and that all intertwine in complex mutually supportive ways to convince us they are true when we see them every day in the way space presents itself.
For example, exclusion/inclusion is built into gated communities that place a society's upper reaches at the center of desire and ambition, while at the other end of the socio economic spectrum ghettos, slums, and favelas marginalize its bottom rungs. Or consider how, in many organizations, executives commission office buildings that provide them with exclusive executive suites they then use to symbolically reinforce their inclusion within the dominant upper levels of the hierarchy. These examples illustrate the postmodern point that, while built space is socially produced though relations of power, social power is practiced and reproduced through uses of space.
Offering the shopping mall as another example of power embodies by contemporary architecture, organization theorists Martin Kornberger, an Austrian, and stewart Clegg, from Australia, claimed that : Architecture is
The postmodernist perspective
In the conclusion of his study Gieryn commented on the human tendency to tale the commonplace for granted
Buildings insist on particular paths that our bodies move along every day, and the predictable convergence or divergence of these paths with those of others is (in a sense) what we mean by structured social relations. If buildings silently steer us into associations or away from them, we hardly notice how (or question the rightness of it all)
Gieryn point resonates with critical postmodern claims that existing physical arrangements make it difficult to imagine other arrangements-we just start taking for granted that things like privacy or accessibility are determined by built spaces and unconsciously deal with their implications. Silence may help to make the associations of certain experiences with particular places meaningful, but it also renders them potentially sinister.
The potential of physical structure to communicate meaning gives designs and the managers who hire them access to symbolic power, for, if physical structures communicate meaning then careful design should be able to suggest, if not outright control, the meanings associated with it. According to advocates of the modern perspective, like Olins, this belief gives architects and designers a strategic role in organizations. For postmodernists, however, it makes them targets for criticism. As British critical postmodernists Gibson Burrell and Karen Dale put it, Buildings are all about control, one of their key achievements is to obscure the power they express and maintain
Reading built spaces like texts and deconstructing them to reveal the power relations they materialize is how many critical postmodernists deal with the topic of physical structures in organization theory. Their methods are similar to those of symbolic theorists who also read built spaces as texts, one clear difference being the focus on power that consumes most critical postmodern readings. But another difference comes through invocations of spatiality.
Postmodern geographies, for example, have accused the vast majority of organization theorists of promoting a-spatial explanations that are both disembodied and disembedded. French postmodern geographer Henri Lefebvre was among the first to accuse Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and their followers of ignoring space to the detriment of their theorizing. Such critiques open social theory for spatial reconstruction, as when British postmodern geographer Derek Gregory claimed that : social structures cannot be practiced without spatial structures, and vice versa.
A similar postmodern critique has been directed at the ways technological control disappears behind the benign appearance of physical structure. The assembly line invented by Henry Ford is a favorite technological target of deconstruction, which typically begins with the assertion that belief in the factory owners right to control how work is done, and there after the right to control labor. is built right into material aspects of technology that forces workers to perform actions defined by managers at a pace the managers regulate. Thus postmodernists argue, the assembly line has ideological content that privileges owners and managers over workers, and hides their conflicting interests within the machinery of capitalism.
Repression of conflict occurs, they further argue, because once it's installed the physical presence of line machinery precludes discussion of the right of management to organize work as they have. The choice has already been made and disappears into the machinery. As American economist Richard Edwards described the situation:
Struggle between workers and bosses over the transformation of labor power int labor was no longer simple and direct personal confrontation; now the conflict was mediated by the production technology itself. Workers had to oppose the pace of the line, not the (direct) tyranny of their bosses. The line thus established a technically based and technologically repressive mechanism that kept workers at their tasks.
At the point at which workers accept the mechanized assembly line, the physical structure of the production process organizes social relations of dominance and submission within the hierarchy of owners and workers. Each time the machinery is turned on it both reconstitutes the status quo and suppresses resistance to it.
By seemingly innocuous or by being difficult to change, physical structures normalize power relations by fixing them in stone, so to speak. This material fixation parallels the symbolic fixation that occurs through institutionalization. As Burrell and Dale not, the isomorphism and institutional mimesis between organizational and the architectural practices that serve them, forms an alliance that helps to ensure continuity of power and domination through built space. They give the stunning example of the global influence during the first three decades of the twentieth century of German-born American architect Albert Kahn.
Kahn designed factories for the mass-production of automobiles for Packard, Ford, and General Motors in the US, and, under Stalin's auspices, was responsible for all industrial building in Russia until the mid-1930s. Little wonder that his single storied mass production facilities covering acres of land, with their trademark sawtooth roofs providing daylight on the shop floor, became a defining symbol of the industrial age. As a major instrument of social order and control, Burrell and Dale claim, the Kahn style industrial factory helped to create the identities of workers newly arrived from the farm and thereby forged social changes that would one day resolve into modern capitalism.
it is important to realize that many of the new entrants to the plants of Detroit and Stalingrad came straight from agrarian roots, may not have spoken the language of the metropolis and were unused to the rhythms of the factory day. The control of their work-space allowed the efficient socialization of the worker in programmes of re-education: they were constructed as a new category of industrial employee.
The alignment of interests between architects and their clients observed in the construction of factories, occurs again in the development of the modern office tower a few years after this. Burrell and Dale reveal how chicago architects Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM) exercised a far reaching influence similar to Kahn's through their design of the skyscraper that dominates and defines the skylines of all modern cities today, a particularly influential example of which was the Lever Building SOM designed and built in New York City in 1952 According to Burrell and Dale :
The success of SOM rests not only on the brilliant projection of corporate capitalism. but also its mimicry of these forces in its own methods and organization. As a house style the model of the Lever Building came cheap.... Walter Gropius (1955) said that the Lever Building relied upon prefabrication so that 85-90 per cent of the whole building was component parts ready-made in a factory, brought to the site and assembled there. It used mass production methods and components. What also down well with clients was the opposition in SOM to union or craft power. SOM followed this logic of efficiency and cost consciousness through into the organization of their own business... SOM might be seen as an expression of unalloyed corporate growth: the reflection of the vertical integration of large multinational companies. It embodies a large bureaucratic structure based on hierarchy and a division of labour... It did not attack the status quo but reinforced it.
Other postmodernists go beyond deconstruction of power and dominance as naturalized and hidden expressions of physical structures to demand that we learn to control or resist these influences and thereby free ourselves of unwanted influence and avoid abuse. To develop the means to do this they turn to Lefebvre's theory of how the powerful appropriate space to maintain their superiority over others.
Lefebvre argued that, starting with art in the Renaissance, modern thought came under the influence of perspectivalism, a way of situating the viewer spatially to give them a vantage point from above. This spatial orientation, Lefebvre claimed, naturalizes hierarchy and other hegemonic practices. You can experience this effect for yourself by looking at an upside down map of the world. Such reorientations give most people an unsettled feeling because their naturalized expectations are undermined.
Postmodernists believe that the very notion of space, which always presents a center and its margins, orients us to domination. At the same time it perpetuates this orienting function, it hides the linguistic tricks it uses in the spatially inflected notions that abound in language interior/exterior, private/public, local/global, top/bottom, and exclusion/inclusion-and that all intertwine in complex mutually supportive ways to convince us they are true when we see them every day in the way space presents itself.
For example, exclusion/inclusion is built into gated communities that place a society's upper reaches at the center of desire and ambition, while at the other end of the socio economic spectrum ghettos, slums, and favelas marginalize its bottom rungs. Or consider how, in many organizations, executives commission office buildings that provide them with exclusive executive suites they then use to symbolically reinforce their inclusion within the dominant upper levels of the hierarchy. These examples illustrate the postmodern point that, while built space is socially produced though relations of power, social power is practiced and reproduced through uses of space.
Offering the shopping mall as another example of power embodies by contemporary architecture, organization theorists Martin Kornberger, an Austrian, and stewart Clegg, from Australia, claimed that : Architecture is
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