The Role of Space and Place in Organizational and Institutional Change: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

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.

Building an Outward-Oriented Social Family Legacy: Rhetorical History in Family Business Foundations

“…Indeed, while extant family business research has stressed legacy as a purely temporal matter, the narrative practice of emplacing the legacy enables a connection between the meanings attached to the places of the family and the family firm to the broader context in which they are embedded. Even if the place recalls the idea of boundaries (Crawford et al, 2022;Wright et al, 2022)thus providing a potential demarcation between places that are shared between the family and its stakeholders, and places that are not-we find that through this narrative practices, FBFs are better able to express and communicate the meanings of the social family legacy. By emplacing the legacy, FBFs can link their legacy to places that have been inhabited by generations of stakeholders, and provide a stronger connection between the place and the family as a legitimate subject actor that has been inhabiting such place.…”

Place in Entrepreneurial Storytelling: A Study of Cultural Entrepreneurship in a Deprived Context

“…These four forms of storytelling, drawing on projective and connective significance of places, laid the groundwork for storytelling with places as capability and status, elaborating the authoritative significance of places. It is important to note that we consider these various forms of narrative construction to be mutually constitutive and their relationships to be multi-lateral (Wright et al, 2022). Distinct ways entrepreneurs convey the public and proprietary places they leverage, and build do not arise in succession, but they are mutually defined in on-going storytelling and material development of places, reinforcing, and building on each other over time.…”

Buildings and Institutional Change: Stepping Stones or Stumbling Blocks?

“…Gonsalves, 2020;Rodner et al, 2019;Wright et al, 2021) indicate that buildings are important 'stabilizers' for institutions, but some commentators have also pointed towards the dynamic aspects of the relationship between buildings and institutions. Wright et al (2022) argued that empirical phenomena studied by management scholars begin to expose how spaces and places can drive and shape change in institutions; for example, the use of technology, climate change and the move to digital and hybrid work change our buildings, and consequently lead to change in organi-zations and institutions. Stephenson et al (2020) cast space as a process (rather than a physical location or an outcome), discussed the dynamic features that create and alter spatial arrangements and called for empirical insights into how spaces shape organizations and institutions.…”

“…Institutional change through the redesign of spaces Wright et al (2022) threw light on spaces as the broader context in which processes of change are situated. My study adds to earlier theorization of spaces and institutions by demonstrating that both those pursuing institutional change and those resisting change tend to use redesign to support their own agenda.…”

“…Architects, cultural geographers and sociologists have adopted many different perspectives on how spaces affect people and organizations (Dovey, 1999;Gieryn, 2000;Lefebvre, 1974;Massey, 2005;Soja, 1989). In recent years, management scholars have also joined these efforts, mainly focusing on the link between the physical form and the stability of institutions and institutional maintenance (Lawrence and Dover, 2015;Rodner et al, 2019;Siebert, Wilson and Hamilton, 2017;Siebert et al, 2018;Wright et al, 2021Wright et al, , 2022.…”