Through its focus on the City of London as a particular work sector and setting, this paper emphasizes the symbolic and material significance of place to understanding the lived experiences of power relations within organizational life. The socio-cultural and material aspects of the City are explored through an analysis of the rhythms of place, as well through interview data. Using a methodological approach based on Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis (2004) in order to develop an embodied, immersive sense of how the City is experienced as a workplace, the paper makes a methodological, empirical, and theoretical contribution to an understanding of the way in which rhythms shape how place is performed. Using rhythmanalysis as a method, the paper shows the relationship between rhythms and the performances of place, foregrounding a subjective, embodied and experiential way of researching the places and spaces of organizing.
This article is concerned with the relationship between gender performativity and organizational place, taking the City of London as the focus for the empirical research, and extending a Lefebvrian understanding of space through the practice of flânerie. The article explores how the City is imagined, constructed and experienced in and through gender performativity. This is explored with reference to fieldwork including photographic and interview data, as well as through an embodied, immersive methodology based on the observational tradition of flânerie, showing how this can help to both sense and make sense of organizational place, particularly in terms of how such places can compel feelings of belonging or non-belonging. The research looks beyond the spatial configuration of a single organization to encompass the wider geographical location of multiple organizations, in this case the City. The analysis highlights the interplay between two dominant forms of masculinity, emphasizing how the setting both reflects and affects this interplay. In this way the article contributes to scholarship on organizational place and the placing of gender performativity, and extends Lefebvre's theories of space as socially produced by (re)producing the City through peripatetic practice based on the tradition of the flậneur.
This article uses Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis as a foundational text for researching boredom, and offers a critical analysis of UK-based media commentaries about boredom and homeworking written during 2020 and 2021. We situate the discussion within the rhythmic rupture caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and foreground rhythm as a lens for understanding reported experiences and reflections on boredom and work. For non-essential workers, lockdown offered an opportunity to reconfigure working lives away from the constraints of commutes and everyday work settings, yet our findings highlight the narrative representation and experience of a particular type of boredom and inertia known as acedia. The analysis discusses the presence of acedia and absence of rhythm across three themes: acedia and being stuck in time and space; embodiment, movement and rhythm; and the relationship between the present and the future. We conclude by considering what the experience of boredom might mean for how we reconceptualise our post-pandemic working lives.
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