The Power of Corridors: Connecting Doors, Mobilising Materials, Plotting Openness

Abstract

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of corridors in a large university building, originally built to house local government in the early 20 th century. By attending to their huge physical presence in the everyday culture of an institution, the paper shows how corridors matter. Too often invoked as iconic, intangible metaphors, the presence of corridors as cultural materials can be forgotten. Conversely, as incidental -or even detrimental -remnants of past design trends, they are perceived parts of a divisive, hierarchical organisation of space. As the open-plan office, indoor street, forum and atrium displace them in a new design for 'openness', the study focuses on the mobilisation of corridors in the daily, sometimes momentary re-arrangements of meaning in an organisation. In conclusion, I discuss how the new architecture of 'openness' might be reconfigured through mobile understandings of everyday 'openings' and 'closings'.

A Place for Emotion: How Space Structures Nurse-Parent Interactions in W. African Pediatric Wards

“…This study also offers important insights for the literature on the influence of space and place on social life (Bazerman and Gino 2012;Hurdley 2010;Lebaron and Urgen 1997;Zhao 1998). The importance of backstage areas for workers trying to gain control of negative and disruptive emotions adds to a growing literature on the sometimes surprising benefits of safe and private settings within organizations (Bernstein 2012;Kellogg 2009).…”

Materiality and Space

“…A workspace invites interaction only if it balances proximity, privacy and permission (Fayard & Weeks, 2011;Parkin et al, 2011). Moreover, some authors emphasize the importance of spaces that are not dedicated to the organization's core activity but where interactions may occur (Goffman, 1997;Allen & Henn, 2007;van Marrewijk & Yanow, 2010), such as corridors (Hurdley, 2010;, or coffee machines and photocopier rooms . In spaces that are outside the actual workspace but within the organization, the affordance of 'permission' -also called 'social designation' by -is really important to allow people to stay and talk to each other.…”

In the Picture or Off the Wall? Ethical Regulation, Research Habitus, and Unpeopled Ethnography

“…In turn, these moments and their men, commingled with spaces and their things (or things and their spaces), were also the focus of this article's substantive twin (Hurdley, 2010). Of course, it was written as partly as a story, a picaresque journey, bringing the human body back into the picture.…”

“…This materio-centric analysis opened up how a seemingly flat democracy of things was deeply implicated in everyday microprocesses of separation and difference. After returning participants to their proper places in this spatialized, materialized interpretation of how social organization works as everyday process, I could then construct an ethical, peopled ethnography of The Power of Corridors (Hurdley, 2010).…”