‘Leader, you first’: The everyday production of hierarchical space in a Chinese bureaucracy

Abstract

Recent studies highlight how organizational power relations are materialized in space. However, relatively little is known about how these spatialized power relations are reproduced on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on a ten-month ethnographic study of a large government office in China, we find that hierarchical space is produced through three intertwined processes. It proliferates as employees actively seek out signs of hierarchy in the organization’s space; it becomes familiarized as employees fabricate and circulate fanciful narratives about their spatial environs; and it is ritualized by employees acting out hierarchical relations across the organization’s space. These processes resulted in a hardening of the hierarchical relations of power. The study extends the existing literature by showing how hierarchical organizational space is not just something that is imposed on employees; it is also imposed by the employees themselves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 82 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.