The territorial organization: History, divergence and possibilities

Abstract

This paper introduces a new field to organization studies – that of organizational territoriality – as well as introducing the papers to the special issue on The Territorial Organization. Organization seen as territory may function symbolically, offering an additional metaphor to those suggested by Morgan, or materially, taking into account existing studies of organizational space and architecture. This paper integrates perspectives from anthropology, human and economic geography, psychology, philosophy, history and literature to provide conceptual tools for developing the field. This includes considerations of macro-level nation-state political economy and corporate power, with boundary marking and defence; the micro-level of psychosocial spaces; the meso-level of organizationally networked spaces; the role of maps and mapping; the materialities of landscape, terroir and practices of dwelling; the symbolic significance of taskscapes and vistas; mobile practices of wayfaring and nomadics; and processes of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. We argue that organizational territoriality studies (OTS) brings together a number of disciplinary perspectives that combine understandings of space and time with power, embodiment and materiality to shed new light on issues of culture, identity and meaning. As such it forms not simply a disciplinary subfield of organization studies, which in one sense it clearly is, but also a space of articulation, translation and exchange between disciplines.

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