Despite the adoption of collaborative buildings and office spaces to improve collaboration, the expected benefits of spatial interventions often fail to materialize. In a study of an ostensibly ‘collaborative building’, we identified strategies that employees use to avoid collaborating (i.e. ‘focusing on existing collaborations’, ‘reinforcing group boundaries’, ‘enacting legacy policies’ and ‘minimizing social interactions’). These strategies combined to minimize serendipitous encounters, which led to the avoidance of new collaborations. Our findings address a theoretical tension in the literature as to whether proximity facilitates or inhibits collaboration. We also show that, while it is often difficult to facilitate serendipitous encounters in an ostensibly collaborative building, serendipity nonetheless plays a central role in the development of new collaborative partnerships.

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We present a systematic review of empirical articles investigating the role of place and space within the organizational and institutional change literature. In taking stock of the change literature, our aim is to better understand the nature and degree of scholarly engagement with concepts associated with place and space to inform a future research agenda. Our systematic review identified 290 empirical articles published between 1979 and 2020 that attended to organizational or institutional change and also engaged with space or place. Our analysis generated four archetypal perspectives that represent qualitatively different ways of viewing the role of place and space in how organizations and institutions change: functional perspective, situated perspective, experiential perspective, and mutually constituted perspective. We synthesize the four perspectives into a typology that reveals different levels of attention to change as process and to place and space as lived or physical phenomena, and cast light on different assumptions about the relationships between change and place or space that can guide future research.

Many organisations have adopted open-plan offices, rooms with few barriers between desks that are shared by more than four people, to facilitate collaboration, productivity, and innovation. iii

This article explores how learners transition through the liminal space when they engage with and master threshold concepts. We investigate this question through a qualitative study of undergraduate students as they grapple with the threshold concept of Evidence-based Management as a disciplinary way of thinking and practising. Our findings elaborate threshold concept learning as a cumulative process of learner engagement with the troublesome, integrative-and-bounded, irreversible, and transformative elements of a threshold concept. Through this elaboration, we show how transitions through liminal spaces in threshold concept learning play out as an interrelated cognitive and affective process. We identify key transition points and mechanisms related to doubt, high-activation negative emotions, regret, and emotional resolution that trigger entry into, progression through or getting stuck within, and exit from a liminal space when a learner engages with and masters a threshold concept. Our research therefore contributes processual insight into liminality in threshold concept learning by opening up the transitions and emotions that play out for learners in the liminal space. We also contribute to wider debates about student engagement with disciplinary ways of thinking and practising in management.