Open door environments as interactional resources to initiate unscheduled encounters in office organizations

ABSTRACT

In this article, we show how a common type of material environment in office organizations, namely offices with doors left open, enables and sustains the initiation of unscheduled, informal encounters. Using video recordings of naturally occurring interactions, we identify and describe a recurrent practice whereby visitors, mainly through their embodied conduct as they approach the doorway, are recognized by their recipients as initiating an encounter. We unpack the systematic practices and resources involved and analyze a series of variations through which co-workers deal with three interactional problems: obtaining the office occupant’s attention, negotiating availability, and negotiating entitlement. The article (1) demarcates a set of practices typical of unscheduled encounters in office organizations; (2) sheds new lights on how shared and fractured visual spaces can be used as resources to produce complex organizational meanings; and (3) proposes an approach of organizational activity and knowledge as inherently interactional, embodied and material.

KEYWORDS:

• Face-to-face interactions
• negotiation of availability and entitlement
• office organizations
• opening of unscheduled encounters
• open door environments

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sylvaine Tuncer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2307-956X

Notes

1 These activities are mainly static ones, achieved in offices: public relations, computer development, human resources, research and development in IT, managerial and executive positions, design and communication.

2 This number understates the phenomenon since, first, many visits happen during recording breaks, and second, we excluded from the collection many other visits fir which the quality of the recording did not allow a proper analysis.

3 Visitors will be called V and office occupants O for the rest of the article. In shared offices, the different occupants will be called O1, O2, etc.

4 Each image in the transcript displays two opposite views of the office: on the left a view of the door from O’s position; on the right a view of O from near the door.

5 Each image in the transcript shows on the left a view of the room and the door from O’s left, where only his arms on the keyboard are visible; and a view of O’s upper body from his right.

6 O1 shares his office with O2, who faces him and does not appear on either of the two cameras. The specific camera angle does not allow for a proper analysis of V’s embodied conduct while he approaches the door.

7 The pseudonym given to a partner company.

8 In another encounter where V has walked into the office only to shake hands with O, the latter rushes to initiate a question before V gets to the door.

9 The images in the transcript are taken from O1’s right; a second camera, no image of which is reproduced in the transcript, shows both O2 and O3.

10 For a discussion of how participants involved in an interaction can suspend it and initiate a multiactivity episode in order to deal with an event, see Licoppe and Tuncer (2014).

11 There would be no literal way of translating from French “Je t’en prie,” a polite way of inviting someone to continue.

12 As in Extract 4, O2 is O1’s colleague sitting at the desk facing her, not visible in these images but from a second camera.

13 We have one other instance in the collection where V takes a frozen position looking towards the camera, and thus already introduces the camera as the first topic (see Tuncer 2016).