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.

Keywords:

• organizational territoriality
• organizational space
• terroir
• taskscape
• landscape
• deterritorialization
• reterritorialization
• vistas
• nomadics

Notes

This special issue began life as a stream – The Territorial Organization: Social Terroir and Organizational Assemblage – at the 27th European Group for Organization Studies Colloquium Reassembling Organizations in Göteborg, Sweden, 7–9 July 2011.

Weick puzzlingly specifies Switzerland, whose longstanding policy of armed neutrality and forbidding defensible terrain has successfully rendered it impregnable to invasion since before the First World War: there was, however, considerable military activity along the Austrian–Italian Alpine border during that war, and Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 2004, the frozen and partially preserved bodies of three Austro-Hungarian troops were found near the peak of San Matteo in the Italian Alps, presumed killed in the fighting there on 3 September 1918.

In the section on “Terroir”, we draw upon and extend the entry by Maréchal (2010) on the topic in the Encyclopedia of Case Study Research. We are grateful to Sage Publications for permission to use some of this material.