A break room as spatial and material order for interaction

ABSTRACT

This research aims to understand break rooms through the lens of everyday interaction as places where practices are both created and resisted. Emotion work present in all interaction between people is connected to power relations and cultural meanings that are central to people’s investment in their place of work and each other. The study asks how break rooms as spaces are integral to interaction and emotion work and in what kinds of performances and interactions, they invite people. The focus is on how break rooms shape interaction and what the significance of break rooms is for people. The data consist of data collected in workplaces in the 1980s, 1990s and the 2010s. The emphasis of the analysis is in the data gathered in the 2010s. The paper suggests that resistance, critical attitude, emotional coping and developing certain kinds of service skills are key to break room interaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Break room
• social interaction
• emotion work
• Goffman
• backstage
• activity-based office

Introduction

In her book Hope in the Dark (2016, 25), Rebecca Solnit writes about the ‘history of shadows’, about how traditional versions of history create stories in which those high up in the hierarchy act on a metaphorical stage, in limelight, leaving all else in their shadow and obscuring everything around them. Such traditional versions of history strengthen the idea that there is nothing outside the stage. All important events and decisions are made on stage by those who hold the power. The light shined on the stage blinds and makes it hard to notice things outside the limelight, in the shadows and behind the scenes. This version of history creates a drama that further emphasizes the powerlessness of ordinary people especially when they are facing changes. It also means that we must shine a light on social relations, practices, and actions hidden in the shadows to ensure that we recognize them and make them visible. According to Solnit (2016), we may find resistance in the shadows that can challenge the prevailing order and, thus, find genuine hope and the possibility for change.

This article explores break rooms as the metaphorical backstage, the area behind the scenes that workers often overlook as being significant for work-related activities. What initially drew our attention to break room interaction was the consistent pattern observed among the workers in the data: they consistently downplayed the significance of the break room, while simultaneously wanting to discuss it extensively. Consequently, official work with its negotiations and routines is believed to transpire in the facilities reserved for work. Operating rooms, auditoriums, classrooms, and meeting rooms represent the illuminated stages of work. Usually, the break room is a space outside these premises of work; a place where you enjoy a hot drink and chat about mundane matters. The break room is so self-evident that it may come across as trivial and insignificant in its everydayness. It may mean vinyl floors, casual chat, forgotten food in the fridge, mugs in the sink, and packed lunches. Our aim is to dismantle the ‘most striking and most powerful’ familiarity of the break room (Wittgenstein 1984, no. 129) and to better illuminate how the break room becomes part of everyday life at the workplace as a significant platform for work (Holmström, Rauniomaa, and Siromaa 2021).

In the article, we suggest that the break room as a space somewhat twists the hierarchy of a workplace. It is a space where those without formal power offered by status are more ‘at home’ than those higher up in the hierarchy (see also Brassier-Rodrigues 2015). As a result, the break room as a space enables the development and presentation of alternative interpretations and resisting the organization’s official strategies and visions. Firstly, it enables emotion work as part of the break room’s collegial guidance. Secondly, the break room is a place where certain kind of service skills, the hostessing work (see Veijola and Jokinen 2008) can be recognized, renewed, and developed together. This work can be considered as a certain kind of housekeeping of offices which helps ensure effective and smooth work processes. It does not have an official status, as no strategy mentions that Maria, for example, has always accepted the responsibility for reminding colleagues that they need to reorder a password for a certain online system before it expires or that Elisa always anticipates and attends to the arrival of a large shipment by reminding the production of it. Therefore, this kind of work very rarely, if ever, receives attention in official meetings or on development days. We suggest, however, that the break room is often the most important venue for recognizing and developing old and new service skills at the workplace.

We approach break rooms with Goffman’s (1959) theories of social interaction. His dramaturgical sociology perspective on society and coexistence leads us to examine the practices for everyday interaction. The beauty of the perspective is that it does not see small and ordinary practices for coexistence as insignificant. Instead, it aims to illuminate how they help to create what we call work and work life. The viewpoint highlights how situations and settings make individuals act according to the rules.

In the article, we ask what break rooms as material orders enable and to what kinds of performances and interactions they invite the participants. The paper analyses the special nature of break rooms as a premise and performative situation within organizations. We also look at how break rooms as spaces are constitutive of interaction and emotion work, and how a break room is reflected in the social interaction and emotions at workplaces and in everyday work. We also point out how redesigning break rooms in the 2010s has sometimes complicated or even destroyed the creative potential of break rooms as backstages.

Material and analyses

We have analysed office workspaces and their changes in the 1980s, 1990s and 2010s. We have explored older 1980s and 1990s workspaces through long-term follow-up material gathered as part of the project ‘Changes in Officials’ Workplaces’ (Korvajärvi 1998; see also Peteri, Lempiäinen and Kinnunen 2021). However, in this article, we concentrate on the material gathered in the late 2010s. The material from the 2010s consists of interviews and observations collected in 2017 and 2018 from three typical white-collar organizations in both the public and private sectors. The organizations had implemented the idea of the activity-based office. In practice, the activity-based office means that none of the workers have assigned desks or private offices, and the logic of office spaces rests on the idea that work activities dictate who sits where and when. Most of the office space is open-plan. There are also some spaces for tasks that require a quiet environment, a few spaces for official meetings, and a break room.

The data includes notes of the workspaces before and after the new space designs were completed. The ethnographically-inspired material has been obtained through interviews, observations, informal discussions, and the gathering of documents and other research-related data (see Atkinson et al. 2001). The interviews consist of four group interviews and eight individual interviews (altogether 22 people took part in the interviews). The process of collecting material involved walking around, engaging in conversations with workers in the corridors and the breakroom, and dedicating time to observing the everyday activities within the organizations. Data collection methods involved audio-recording speech data during observations, as well as creating unstructured field notes that recorded elements such as initial interpretations of actions. Notes were also taken when attending meetings where the management teams of the organizations discussed the design plans of the new office spaces and also in the organizations’ communal meetings. The data has been thoroughly anonymized (locations, workplaces and workers).

In Finland, having a coffee break is a statutory right of workers. Workplaces have break rooms specifically designed for that purpose. (Helisten and Siromaa 2022). It is also typical in Finland, as illustrated in our material, for every worker, regardless of their position in the organization, to share the same break room. Before the 1990s, break rooms along with the rest of the work environment in Finnish organizations were quite plain. A break room was typically at the end of or between corridors or at the fringe of the work premises. A break room could also be located between two corridors at the heart of the workplace. As a space, a break room was typically an enclosed room in which you could have a conversation without being overheard in the corridors. The room tended to contain a long table, which could also be used for communal meetings. Sometimes, there were also a couple of sofas and chairs and a low coffee table-style set up as well as a bookcase for storing professional publications. One wall featured kitchen units and a coffee maker. At its most austere, the kitchen would only feature a sink, a tap and a coffee maker.

As a setting, the break room of the 2000s resembles largely what is described above. However, something has changed. In the 1980s, break room furniture did not yet evoke ideas of coziness or coffee shop atmosphere. Break room furniture featured more functional, practical items, which performed their role rather matter-of-factly. Furniture did not aim to solemnly draw your attention to their nature as objects. Particularly in the 2010s, office aesthetics have been more noticeable and flashier than before. However, paying attention to interior decoration is not altogether new and is evident in the ethnographic material already in the 1990s as an expression of pride towards the work community’s modern practices and arrangements or the organization’s desire to follow trends. Branding organizations using interior design is, however, particularly clearly visible in the material from the 2010s onwards.

Based on our material, while redesigning and changing the organizational space the break rooms were changed from separate rooms into big, partly glass-walled, open-plan café-like milieus, which resided in the center of the work premises. Common among the break rooms in the material from the 2010s are large windows offering scenic views that dominate the break room space. There are more glass walls, that separate the break room from the rest of the premises, allowing light to filter through. Consequently, the spaces resemble somewhat of an aquarium. However, one of the break rooms has fewer glass walls and is more open to office areas. The newer break rooms now resemble café environments, featuring versatile furniture arranged in small groups Some of the seats have imaginative shapes, and the textiles are vibrant, with green being a favored color, seemingly connecting the spaces with the surrounding greenery. Plants adorn the spaces, sometimes creatively placed on the ceiling and walls. Perhaps due to the increased size of the break rooms, there is a noticeable volume of loud conversation.

Everything appears highly stylized, even prompting a sudden wish from the researchers for smarter attire. Entering the refurbished break rooms also brought about new choices and accompanying insecurities. Whereas the previous break rooms had one long table or several long tables where everyone sat together, the new break rooms feature smaller tables for two or four people. Consequently, individuals must decide with whom to sit or whether to sit alone and maybe browse their cell phones.

Based on our material, the aestheticization of premises has been intensive in the 2010s. Using Böhme’s (2003) terminology, we might speak about the aesthetic value or staging value in which setting up work premises more obviously as a stage and Gesamtkunstwerk becomes a value in itself. This new kind of ‘staging’ has worked almost like a classical ‘breaching experiment’ (Garfinkel 1967) as our initial focus was on office work areas (the frontstage), but the workers that took part in the research often brought up their new break rooms and the difficulties the new designs had generated:

I was enjoying coffee with Hanna, Paula, and Sofia in the break room when they voiced their frustration regarding the lack of employee involvement in the design of the break room and office spaces in general. They also lamented about the impracticality of the furniture. Hanna specifically pointed out the absence of chairs with high backrests, emphasizing that aesthetics seemed to have been prioritized over functionality. ‘Nothing should obstruct the view,’ she remarked. Paula agreed and added that conversations in the break room now tend to happen in smaller groups rather than larger discussions on shared topics, which was the norm when there used to be a single large table. (Fieldwork Diary 2017)

It seems that the staging value has become the most important thing of the interior and not whether the seats for example support the workers’ backs. The facade of the building aims to create a connection to the outside as part of the city’s park and street landscape. The utilization of green color in furniture and textiles also seems to emphasize the interior spaces opening up to the landscape outside. Simultaneously, the backstage of the workplace with its break room starts to open out into the public sphere of the workplace and the cityscape. The new break room designs challenge common understandings and expectations of what a break room as a space should promote. Thus, the changes also highlighted the social and cultural practices and conventions of what it means to take a break in a break room.

Break room as a backstage: Goffmanian sociology

Analysing the material dimensions of modern organizational life and culture has in recent decades become a rich and growing field of social scientific research (see, for example, Peteri, Lempiäinen and Kinnunen 2021; Peteri 2019; Cluley 2023; Dale and Burrell 2007; Ekstrand and Damman 2016; Gabriel 2005; Harjunheimo and Peteri 2024; Parviainen and Koski 2022; Strati 2010; Taylor and Spicer 2007; Watson, Ward, and Fair 2021). This field of research shows how the design of workspaces is a physical embodiment of an organization’s culture and values. The staging of organizational spaces also shapes workers’ identities (Ekstrand and Damman 2016), affects atmospheres and emotions (Watson, Ward, and Fair 2021), and arranges relationships between performers (Cluley 2023).

While workspaces shape workers’ identities, they also invite and inhibit social action. The materiality of spaces could be said to ‘translate our relation to the world’ (Illies and Meijers 2009, 423). Thus, agency, social practices and spatial arrangements intertwine so closely that they cannot really be understood as separate entities (Foucault 2003, 372). For example, glass walls in a corporate cafeteria encourage certain actions and discourage others as the workers are staged on the inside to be viewed from the outside. Glass walls turn workers into cast members, who are exposed to the potentially critical gaze of audiences (customers and co-workers) (Gabriel 2005, 19). The cafeteria, which was a private resting area and a backstage before the glass walls, has partly changed into a semi-public frontstage, that does not offer workers similar opportunities to spend time ‘off stage’.

We approach break rooms through Goffman’s (1959) sociology. According to the Goffmanian view, society and community are built on the consistency of interaction and performances in certain situations and settings entailing gestures, speech, postures and actions as well as some material elements. According to Goffman, people perform in different areas of which he uses the names frontstage and backstage. The frontstage is the place where the ‘Performance’ (in this case the official work duties) takes place. Frontstage behavior is designed to keep up a certain formal appearance. On the frontstage, workers may have to dress, act, and speak in a formal manner. In a clearly enclosed break room, they can ‘sit down, have some coffee, and relax for a few minutes before continuing the show at hand’ (Kivisto and Pittman 2007, 281).

In Goffman’s (1959) treatise, social analysis targets ordinary, actual, and everyday behavior. Habitual rituals, such as drinking coffee, do not necessarily involve any significant decision-making except for the common rules on how coffee drinking is organized. This social situation forms a physical stage in which people are influenced by the presence of others, and the situation involves emotions just as any other interaction. In backstage, ‘the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character’ (Goffman 1959, 112). It is in the sphere of the backstage, Goffman argues, ‘where the suppressed facts make an appearance.’ Goffman emphasized that managers and workers may define frontstage and backstage as well as their boundaries differently (Goffman 1959; Halford 2008).

The metaphor of the backstage may lead to an idea that the interaction behind the scenes is somehow pure and authentic and that the symbolic center stage represents less genuine interaction, ‘acting’, but the division is not as simple as that. From a performative point of view, we should not differentiate between ‘authentic’ and ‘performed’ or ‘acted’ interaction. ‘Authentic’ interaction in the break room is constructed by performing ‘coffee break’ (See Larsen 2005, 422). It is more meaningful to think that the encounters and performance control behind the scenes are different from those on the stage itself.

Drawing from Goffman’s work, Helisten and Siromaa (2022) have shown how meeting colleagues in the break room are not isolated episodes but part of a series of encounters in the workplace. This is evident in the ways in which workers walk into the break room and simultaneously greet others by nodding, smiling, or talking while still orientating towards their action, be it washing a coffee cup, finding a tea pot, or opening the fridge. After greetings, the arriving worker often starts conversations by paying attention to some concrete aspect of the material environment of the break room. This produces a shared experience of something that is ‘our business’ and an everyday activity that establishes the workers in the break room as ‘we’. Siitonen and Siromaa (2021) have analysed the linguistic practices utilized by workers during a coffee break and when leaving the break room. Based on their analysis, the practice of citing work duties in order to account for departing from the break room and leaving the company of colleagues is linked to maintaining and promoting social solidarity. They note that these accounts can be considered courteous and seen to be produced for the benefit of the other participants to preserve solidarity between colleagues (Siitonen and Siromaa 2021, 178–179; see also Siitonen et al. 2022 about video-mediated virtual breaks). Thus, these small everyday activities all aim at producing a certain sense of community (Holmström, Rauniomaa, and Siromaa 2021).

Coffee makers, furniture, and different layouts steer the actions of and offer a setting for those operating in the break room. Interaction has different aims depending on the situation, setting, and spatial and material order. In recent years, there has been a shift in perceiving the materiality of organizations as dynamic and vibrant rather than merely serving as a static backdrop. These perspectives have challenged Goffmanian sociology by contending that it often overlooks the active role of materiality and physical elements when viewed mainly as symbolic (Cluley 2023; Smith 2023; Thomson 2020).

However, Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology offers tools for anthropologizing the break room. It allows us to cast the necessary strangeness to a familiar subject by demonstrating how a break room as a setting and an interaction is created in everyday life. Furthermore, the ritual order of a break room space and its materiality are exposed when the order is disturbed. For example, when a new coffee table replaces an old one, new interaction patterns may also be created. Although people perform similarly in specific situations, such as drinking coffee with their colleagues, the material space can change the routines (Goffman 2012, 51–64; Goffman 1955, 222–231).

A break room as a setting can also foster resistance and critical attitudes. As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, coffee houses that preceded cafés and break rooms were understood to have radical, critical potential. Pub culture was not considered in the same way threatening as the new café culture. Pubs were places for consuming alcohol, which had a dulling effect and only produced occasional disorganized brawls. In coffee houses, people met others with different social backgrounds to themselves, and they sat down to discuss matters with them and enjoy drinks with a stimulating effect. At the same time, outside the coffee houses, people lived in a reality in which social status was of considerable importance. Thus, coffee houses and drinking coffee together formed a type of setting in which the significance of social class momentarily faded, and information could be shared and built across boundaries. Coffee houses became places that defied social order. (Cowan 2008; Sennett 2002/1976; Trolander and Tenger 2015).

However, those who lack social power must pay attention to the dominant social norms even in their backstage behavior. For example, women can talk about their traditionally less feminine qualities in the break room, but they have to balance this talk by more conventional views on femininity. They can share stories about behaving badly or not being nice, but they must also express ambivalence towards these aspects of themselves. In other words, the backstage allows people to reveal themselves as all-round social actors. At best, these kinds of backstage actions can work as rehearsals that produce new kinds of frontstage behavior, or at least they provide an outlet for the frustrations of having to comply with more dominant norms on the frontstage (Coates 1999).

Even though Goffman also acknowledges that certain suppressed issues may appear in the backstage and that there may be differences between workers on how they define the backstage and frontstage, the core of his analysis does not include social analysis of power and resistance. Therefore, we complement the Goffmanian perspective on performativity with the feminist theoretical view of performance as something with the potential to reinvent whilst dismantling and questioning repetition and power relations. According to Judith Butler, we should consider ‘power as resignification’ and ‘as the interarticulation of relations of regulation, domination, constitution’ (Allen 1998; Butler 1993, 240). Power is articulated and worked upon inside interaction and space may be understood ‘as the constant open production of the topologies of power’ (Massey 2005, 101). As shown before, the orders of spaces, practices, cultural meanings, and subjects using break rooms engender spaces and the users themselves (Peteri, Lempiäinen and Kinnunen 2021).

We have also been inspired by Massey’s (2005) way of understanding space and place. Massey’s conceptualization brings forward the social associations of place and space so that various power relations (power geometries, Massey 1991) come alive through social action of different groups. In space, we encounter existing differences that are continuously worked upon, and at the same time, the identity of place is also produced (Massey 2005, 9–14).

Using our research subject as an illustration, the break room, as a space, embodies openness and hybridity, possessing its distinct identity while being intertwined with social relations. Employing Massey’s framework, we can observe societal and global influences at play within this gathering place, such as the intersection of coffee culture and market dynamics, as well as employment contracts delineating break boundaries. Additionally, cultural disparities stemming from differences between employees and employers, as well as between genders, contribute to the multifaceted nature of this space. In previous work, we delved into the gendered interpretations of space, a crucial aspect in studying organizational environments (Kinnunen, Lempiäinen and Peteri 2017; Massey 1992). The analysis presented herein seeks to integrate Massey’s and Goffman’s theories on space. Massey’s theories (2005) demonstrate that even within mundane settings like a workplace break room, social interactions extend beyond physical confines to encompass broader societal connections. Conversely, Goffman (1959) emphasizes the significance of everyday interactions in shaping societal constructs. We perceive these two approaches as complementary and indispensable in our research endeavors (See also Weinfurtner & Seidl, 2019).

Unfettered interaction in break rooms as an achievement

The break room as the backstage lowers the criteria on what is important or a sufficiently significant topic of conversation. The most important thing is that the conversation appears and feels unfettered. It would be too simple to think that the break room is a backstage that is free from all kind of performance – or self-control. In a break room, we can witness what our cultural understanding of unfettered interaction at a workplace is. In the extract below, three workers comment on the nature of break room interaction as they discuss what the significance of one of the organization’s professional groups moving to the same premises as the other workers has been:

Anna:

It’s easier to ask and find out about their opinion and.

Laura:

It is. It really is. Yeah.

Anna:

It is, now that we share the break room.

Laura:

Exactly.

Anna:

It would be interesting to measure the noise levels there. When you go there at 11, you face a wall. [Laughs]

Sofia:

You really notice it when you’re trying to have a meeting in one of the rooms next to it.

Anna:

Hmmm. Yeah.

Sofia:

And it’s pretty much the same in the morning, but you should, of course, be able to talk about whatever you wish in the break room.

Anna:

As you should.

Sofia:

And laugh and … 

Anna:

Indeed. Yeah.

Sofia:

So, it shouldn’t be about having to be quiet as someone’s having a meeting near-by.

Relaxed interaction as the norm in break rooms is in itself a feat and a performance of its kind. People arrive in a break room to perform ‘casual’ conversations and socialize. In the break room, the norm of interaction is the freedom from the norms of interaction of your work. You must be able to speak, as Sofia states ‘about whatever you wish in the break room’. The break room is a place where you have to be able to laugh freely, even if it might cause a disturbance for meeting rooms next door. In this case, the freedom in the break room is of such value that it must not be restricted even if it may at times disrupt work. Holmström, Rauniomaa, and Siromaa (2021) have analyzed break room interaction and proved in their analysis, how the participants determine the topics of discussion during breaks. Therefore, ‘speaking about whatever you wish’ always depends on the participants. However, they also establish the uniqueness of the workplace’s break room compared to other places where breaks can be taken. It is a place where one can talk about anything, whereas in public spaces, one cannot. (Holmström, Rauniomaa, and Siromaa 2021). The fact that workers must be able to feel relaxed and informal in the break room does not mean that there are no rules to the interaction in the break room. For example, workers must not behave in the break room as if they were in a meeting, except if a meeting is organized there. This became evident once when one of the authors went to the break room to write down notes. Several workers asked, what the writer was doing. Taking notes and sitting alone at a table in the break room clearly broke the norm of the break room customs. You do not sit alone and write there. If you do, you must be prepared to explain your bizarre behavior.

The sociable nature of the break room is reflected in the request to join a colleague for a coffee, which is interpreted as a speech act meaning that the colleague wishes to have a chat. ‘Should we grab a coffee’ is, thus, an invitation for interaction and conversation and not just a suggestion for a quiet coffee together. (Stroebaek 2013). The furniture in break rooms also invites social interaction. Break rooms do not contain seating or reading nooks for sitting alone. The furniture aims to encourage people to spend time together. The social aspect of break rooms is emphasized by their location either in the middle of the premises or in a corner at an intersection of corridors. Placing a break room in a central spot makes it into a space that inspires and encourages social interaction. However, break rooms have traditionally expressed their identity as a space behind the scenes. This has been created by having walls around it and separating it with a door or doors that can be closed. Quite often the space is located away from the premises where work itself is performed.

Traditionally, people sit in the break room around a table or tables facing their colleagues. In an interactive situation, sitting face-to-face could potentially also be awkward. A coffee cup or some snacks at hand often facilitate interaction. This may come across as self-evident but serving coffee and coffee cups are used in some treatment and guidance situations deliberately to enable interaction particularly if the parties are not accustomed conversationalists or the topic is sensitive. Van Huis and van der Haar (2015) note that it is important to observe the significance of the role of coffee cups and other materials in shaping interaction. They continue by saying that coffee drinking and holding a coffee cup also offer an excuse to have quiet moments unlike sitting at a table without a cup. No one expects you to speak, but positive facial expressions allow you to communicate that you are part of the interaction.

The significance of the break room for promoting a sense of community and social interaction does not mean that everyone would be talking to one another on the same topic and in the same situation. The material includes observations of workers recognizing how the experience of kinship and community is strengthened when they merely see colleagues in the break room and perhaps greet them (see also Helisten and Siromaa 2022). The physical presence alone in a shared informal situation in the backstage seems to create a feeling of community in a different way than seeing colleagues only in official situations such as staff meetings. A few workers noted that the sense of community provided by the break room facilitated cooperation particularly when workers had to work on a concrete task with less familiar colleagues. Approaching a person one has spent time with in the same informal room and setting is easier even if you have not had a proper conversation with one another.

Based on our material, physical presence in the break room in itself seems to communicate that the person in question wishes to seek informal interaction with their colleagues. If you wish, you can enjoy your coffee and sit quietly listening to your colleagues’ conversation and, thus, communicate by purely participating in the break room ritual that you are part of the work community. The voluntary nature of stepping into the break room signals the person’s desire to be part of the community on a more informal basis.

However, whilst the break room can, as a space, create a feeling of community, its spatial practices can also encapsulate experiences of organizational changes. In our data, the break room goods sometimes convey tacit knowledge of the potential friction that may appear between official change visions and the unofficial culture. The friction may surface in the negotiations of the kind of coffee maker and coffee brand used and who may drink it. In some of the organizations in our material, different departments have kept their coffee maker even after a merger, and thus, on the level of the unofficial culture, the old department organization is still manifested in the break room. In one break room, five different coffee makers stood side by side, and all of them were in use. They all belonged to different departments that had been reshaped in an organizational change into one big department just over a year earlier.

The quiet parallel life of the coffee makers could, of course, in the above example be nothing but a practical solution. A big new department requires more coffee and coffee makers. However, the workers in the break room explained the coffee makers by saying that they had wanted to maintain their old coffee communities. The new shared break room had at least so far not automatically created an experience that the new community would have completely replaced the old one. The coffee makers were marked with stickers stating the nicknames of the old departments. Firstly, using the nicknames could be interpreted to communicate that the workers are well aware of the fact that the old departments no longer exist. Secondly, the use of the nicknames could also be saying that the unofficial culture is like a resistance movement that will not simply vanish when the official order changes. Thirdly, the nicknames may communicate a warm, tender and authentic relationship with the old department and order.

In the material, the management sometimes refer with a certain ironic amusement to the workers’ concerns about issues such as how the break room will work in the new set up. By naming the coffee makers, the workers maintain another, unofficial order. It can also be interpreted as quiet resistance to official strategies which are used to chop organizations and rearrange them without paying much attention to what the workers identify with. Three workers, Laura, Maria and Nina discussed how the organization had been chopped and rebuilt with new pieces many times before this recent organizational change. They all agreed that changes came so often that, as Nina stated: ‘I have experienced so many changes and worked in so many organizations that I’m not that bothered by this change’. Maria and Laura agreed, and Laura continued that after the recent organizational change ‘the biggest concerns are who will make coffee for whom and who will provide the coffee’. Others agreed and Maria added that she also wondered whether some departments and workers would get better coffee than others. From the management’s point of view, these concerns may seem irrelevant, but from the workers’ point of view, the coffee breaks and the break room offer something significant for coping with work.

Emotion work as part of the interaction

When workers pay attention to the importance of the coffee break and the break room as part of their workday, they tend to laugh it off or note that the observation is trivial. The laughter and comments can be interpreted as the speaker’s wish to indicate that they understand that coffee breaks are officially insignificant and seeing them as anything else can be regarded as superficial or even a sign of poor work morale. However, visits to the break room are associated in the material as a key to coping and recuperation. In workplaces where workers sometimes handle emotionally difficult issues, coffee breaks and a separate break room seem to carry particular importance. The workers brought up how the altered work premises and the loss of a personal office space led to a situation in which old colleagues only met occasionally along corridors and in the break room and certain collegial supervision and emotional unwinding was no longer available.

Alex: These little things make me wonder if they [the management] understand our work; that my day may consist of a visit from a person whose loved one has been knifed to death, then I meet with a rape victim, and then a person who has experienced severe workplace bullying and lastly maybe a person who is coping with a child’s illness. If I have no other contact on that day, apart from these customers, does the management understand the mental burden it leads to, and you must just think to yourself that just keep hammering on a bit more and meet with your customers alone in that cubicle of yours with as tight a schedule as possible. That it is quite a burden to carry.

Since the workers in new premises no longer have their own offices, they cannot just go and ask their colleagues for a coffee, because they never know which space they are in that day. When you stop by the break room, you may not find any of the colleagues in your professional group there to discuss your customer meetings, and that leads to increased ‘mental burden’, as the workers stated. The workers lambasted the attitude of the management for being directed by financial results, and thus, the attitude is, as Alex emphasized, to ‘just keep hammering on a bit more and meet with customers alone with as tight a schedule as possible’. Alex summarizes that ‘it is quite a burden to carry’. The increased burden can be interpreted to be the consequence of two issues: the fact that colleagues can only occasionally talk over emotionally difficult issues and the experience that the management doesn’t recognize the importance of relieving the burden. The new spatial arrangements seem to have produced in the workers a new understanding of the significance these informal meetings have to recuperation.

The significance of break room interaction seems to be somewhat contradictory. It is on the one hand understood to be something extra, something external to work and unconnected to it. But on the other, the changes have made the workers realize that break room encounters involve something hugely significant for work. Talking about the significance of break rooms and coffee breaks evokes justifications or laughter, which are used to mark the time spent in break rooms as something small and mundane. However, the experiences of change also produce an understanding of the importance of these breaks for coping with work and for work development. It may be difficult to talk about the importance of coffee breaks to management because the breaks are obviously considered as something that is not part of work although they are regarded as permitted or at least tolerated time off work.

Distancing from the emotions experienced when carrying out work duties becomes increasingly important in the leisurely interaction of the break room. When personal emotions are described to colleagues in the break room, the norm of the interaction seems to be that you do not identify with the emotions in exactly the same way as you did in the situation in which you experienced them. This detachment may come up in the way the workers speak about emotions as part of the day-to-day routines of work and work strategy or as a humorous description of the events. A work role may require confronting customers’ emotions with sincerity and compassion whilst also controlling your own empathetic reactions. Control means emotion work (Hochschild 2012/1983), which in itself results in stress and emotional burden. Emotion work is seldom recognized as a special work-related skill and requirement, and thus, the stress and emotional load it produces also remains unrecognized (McDowell 2009). Since emotion work itself is rarely recognized, the ways to ease emotional loads are often also not identified. The interaction through collegial guidance and humor taking place behind the scenes, in this case in the break room, is central to relieving stress caused by emotion work (Cain 2012).

Collegial guidance, as part of the break room’s emotional expression, can even be the unofficial rule of break room interaction. Based on our data, when professional guidance discussions are not included in the ‘emotional tirade’, emotional expression may gain significance as inadequate. Kim expressed in an interview that, after moving to an activity-based office, lunch encounters with her professional group members have become merely coincidental. After that, the nature of the interaction in the break room has changed:

Kim: That short lunch break is when you can sort of see and diffuse. And then sometimes it turns into problems, I’ve noticed. For me and others it then sort of just falls out and nowadays there is no constructive discussion and conveying a message, but just an emotional vomit of how things are today.

When lunch encounters in the breakroom become merely coincidental, the nature of the interaction changes. So much so that the situation sometimes leads to further problems. The emotional unloading has turned into an ‘emotional vomit’ with an emphasis on ‘how things are today’ without any constructive discussion. The arbitrary nature and briefness of meetings seem to make interaction hasty. The intention is to quickly unload the accumulation of day-to-day emotions, but, as a result, these collegial encounters lack a mutual constructive discussion. When the emotional unloading is no longer coupled with a helpful discussion, the conversation seems to also be lacking certain soothing elements. The workers may have time to tell what is on their mind, but not to build a shared strategic outlook on the emotion work connected to the issues that are preoccupying them.

The enclosed break room creates the backstage where interaction can mean the rehearsal of the official interpretations and practices but also the criticism, expansion, and questioning of those practices. In the 1980s and 1990s, smoking rooms and breakrooms served as spaces where the researcher sensed a hint of counterculture, or at the very least, resistance to the formal organization of work – particularly among female office workers. Here, individuals aired grievances about their workload, shared anecdotes about challenging clients and uncooperative managers, contemplated intricate work issues, and exchanged personal stories. In these settings, people frequently found humor in management decisions, unnecessary changes, and even in their own actions. (Peteri, Lempiäinen and Kinnunen 2021).

Based on our material, it is evident that in the break room, the expertise of the masters of the work practices – the most experienced workers – gets recognition in a different way than in official work situations or staff meetings. Brassier-Rodrigues (2015) has made a similar observation in her study on the ritualistic significance of coffee breaks in offices. She noticed that those with more work experience in an organization have more say in the break room than those exercising more official power. The special nature of the break room is partly linked to the fact that the wider knowledge of work practices and processes is recognized in the break room as a source of prestige and specific type of knowledge. This change of position is evident in the material, for example, in that the more mature workers are more likely to raise difficult issues and challenge those higher up in the hierarchy in the break room than for example in communal meetings.

Korczynski (2003) has evolved Hochschild’s idea of emotion work as a coping mechanism for work communities. What is characteristic to coping in these communities is that the interaction with which help and consultation between colleagues is found and given is informal, casual and face-to-face. Often interaction that aims to build shared experiences of coping takes place either behind the scenes, in a dressing room, corridor, or breakroom. Korczynski (2003) notices how the formation of the communities of coping poses a challenge to the management of work communities. On the one hand, discussing issues together and consulting colleagues promote coping at work. This may be manifested in fewer absences and an increase in productivity. Furthermore, coping together may strengthen the experience of being part of a team and the feeling that everyone is working towards a shared goal. Thus, the activities of the communities of coping are consistent with the management’s goals. On the other hand, the communities of coping may simultaneously also form a powerful unofficial culture, whose interpretations and knowledge can differ from that of the management. Therefore, the communities may at once both maintain social order at a workplace and resist the management’s visions and interventions. The resistance may at times become organized as more systematic activities, for example, through labor unions. As a result, the management has its own intentions to steer the forms of emotion work towards something easier to manage Korczynski (2003).

Staged authenticity: changing break room interaction

The material collected in the meetings of management teams demonstrates that organizations’ premise rearrangements in the 2010s have aimed to produce interiors that turn workers into more sociable members of staff. Permanent offices have been replaced by open-plan offices and spaces that can be booked for various purposes. The idea is for workers to alternate their workspace depending on the task at hand. The intention has been to create spaces that promote the interaction of people who do not normally collaborate or interact with one another. The vision contains the assumption that creative and innovative ideas are generated primarily when strangers meet, not in relationships that share a historically longer connection or when people have worked together for a while. (Peteri, Lempiäinen and Kinnunen 2021; Peteri 2019).

Daniel and I walk to the break room. He tells me that the purported concept behind the new break room was to encourage interactions among colleagues, especially those who are not well acquainted. However, it seems that it hasn’t materialized as intended. There has been a decline in social interaction and serendipitous encounters, making it less convenient for people to meet, Daniel explains. Many find it challenging to initiate spontaneous conversations because workers are encouraged to use the break room also for work meetings. It seems that people are less inclined to casually drop in for a chat in the break room, where they can potentially disrupt others while having a work-related meeting. (Fieldwork Diary 2018)

Understanding break rooms as part of the strategy of productivity has been based on the idea that increasing interaction means that break rooms must be opened up and reorganized into spaces that resemble marketplaces enabling meetings between smaller groups (see Bates 1999; Heinonen and Hiltunen 2011; Waber, Magnolfi, and Lindsay 2014). In some organizations, these spaces are called ‘coffices’ or working cafés. Simultaneously, the number of individual workstations and offices is being cut down in organizations, as was also the case in Daniel’s organization. The aim is to increase productivity by building open-plan premises for enjoying coffee as well as working, which may be bigger in square meters than the organization’s previous enclosed break rooms. Respectively, the floor space of traditional work areas is reduced.

The stylized break rooms in workplaces with café-like settings may aim to offer a space in which different kinds of people meet as equal participants in conversations. However, a break room and its practices and materials can at times expose an organization’s struggle for definition and power in slightly peculiar ways. Our material from the 2010s includes several examples of management or interior decorators intervening with the coffee maker type or the design of dishes or even coffee or tea brand used in the break room. When the break room is turned into an aestheticized artwork and stage, you may strip off all the elements that connect it concretely to the workplace and the team. This may mean giving up coffee makers as well as cartoons and cards stuck on the fridge as well as personal mugs. It might entail forbidding any kind of personal self-expression in the break room, which has now turned into a sort of café milieu, although one used by a certain organization and closed from outsiders.

Cutting back on character has in one of the organizations been justified by saying that workers do not have good enough taste to recognize what is stylish, in good taste, or even tasty in the case of coffee or tea brands. In these cases, the significance of the break room as the backstage enabling freer self-expression and activity is the object of intensive re-definition. The break room as a place of power for those holding less power is being transferred, in these cases, into the official hierarchy, under the management’s power of definition. Allowing someone to generally determine that a certain drink and a coffee-making method is better than some other infantilizes workers making them child-like and powerless (Author 1 2019). Thus, it could be said that management is almost like a patient adult who teaches from above to children why you must not ask to have ketchup in a fine dining restaurant and why organic wheatgrass cranberry juice really is better than normal juice. Workers become signified as subjects who do not understand their best interests and whose palate is childish and even a bit common.

The new break rooms are more reminiscent of café milieus in which people sit in smaller groups to enjoy their coffee. The café-like setup, however, seems to disrupt the experience of being part of a larger community. The smaller tables and lack of one long table appear to have produced an experience of cliques, leaving individual workers without communal discussions and interpretations and more dependent on occasional encounters. The new break room aims to produce social encounters and conversations in smaller groups with new people. However, the lack of a long table appears to paradoxically have had the opposite effect.

Goffman (1959/1990, 133–134) noted that individuals higher up in the workplace hierarchy tend to have fewer informal interactions with others in the workplace. Consequently, those in management positions are less frequent visitors to the break room and when they do visit, they typically exhibit less relaxed behavior compared to other workers. This phenomenon becomes more pronounced after facility alterations, with management sometimes choosing to have their coffee either in meeting rooms during formal meetings or at their own designated small table in the break room. As a result, the introduction of smaller tables accentuates the visibility of the hierarchical structure in this context.

In the interviews, the workers often brought up their old break rooms and how they had one long table inviting a larger group and the community to come together:

Laura:

Our shared break room in itself plays a role in that there are more cliques now. I guess the interior decorator is somehow connected to this, the way they’ve arranged the tables. In the previous place, I thought it was really nice to just go there to have a chat with anyone, and there was that one big dining table where you could talk no matter who was there, but now people go with those they know. Join the same group.

Anna:

Yeah. They do. Yeah.

Sofia:

That’s absolutely true. It can’t be denied that when you go to the break room you scan to see who’s there and who you’d like to sit down to chat with.

Laura:

Yes. Absolutely.

Sofia:

Basically, do I want to sit down and have a chat with someone I know, or do I want to go and see and hear something new.

Anna:

Yeah.

Laura:

Yes.

Sofia:

That’s exactly how it is.

Laura:

If you think about someone joining the firm now, when I came as a new employee into the old premises, I thought it was absolutely lovely to join the community because it was so easy to get to know everyone, so I don’t know if new people were to join now how difficult it’d be for them to get in or would it be easy.

The above extract shows how the threshold to take part in conversations between less familiar people is higher if the tables are smaller. A big table signals that every member of the community, whatever their position in the organization, is welcome to join in. Smaller tables send a message that those sitting at them have chosen to eat and drink exclusively in that group. This may lead to more intimate groups and cliques that form their own frame. In this case, the new café-like setup has not worked as a good ‘meeting place’ where new interpretations and ideas could be generated; instead, people are left feeling that they miss out on shared explanations and information produced together. The information built in smaller groups has not been subjected to more communal inspection and scrutiny and, thus, becomes ‘cliquey’ as several workers remarked. This may lead to many parallel interpretations, and people may recognize the limited nature of their knowledge whilst not gaining awareness of other people’s interpretations. One worker noted in the break room that experiences cliques had produced a lot more rumors. He expressed that this was very convenient for the management as the work community could not operate as a real community to challenge their decisions anymore. These experiences demonstrate how seemingly small decisions (changing to smaller table arrangements) have reduced conversations in which larger communities would come together to discuss and develop work content.

Iris:

We used to be able to have such good consultation and discussion in the break room. Sometimes in leisurely discussions things come up that you didn’t even know about, normally something about IT but sometimes also customer-related things. And now, we have very few occasions for chatting as a team or a group of some sort.

Frida:

Yeah, there is none of that.

Iris:

Leisurely you know. So, you then have to go or phone maybe send an email … 

Interviewer:

So, has that changed from the previous premises?

Iris:

To some extent, yes. There is that shared break room, but the morning meeting was organized there [previous premises], so it somehow brought people together better.

Frida:

And we had those large round tables that fitted as many as eight people around them. Now we have these small ones for four people. So, I think it has reduced … 

Iris:

Yeah, it has reduced shared conversations (…) We don’t have mutual discussions as we used to do when I joined seven years ago, and I really admired how we had those meetings for different expert groups to discuss issues.

In the extract, Iris calls the interaction in the old break room a discussion and a consultation. This demonstrates the insight that break room conversations are part of work and work development because the discussions have a consultative nature. In the material, the workers often mention the informal nature of the conversations in the previous break room. The changes in the break room have created an understanding that the freedom and the unrestricted character of the discussions are of intrinsic value in producing information that an individual worker could not have asked about because they did not know it existed. That is why these leisurely conversations are important as a characteristic and maintained achievement of break rooms.

In office workplaces of the 1980s and 1990s, spaces such as breakrooms and smoking rooms, corridors and photocopier rooms served as areas where advice was sought, situations were clarified, explained, and anticipated, problems were solved, and common interpretations of tasks and objectives were established. These conversations in breakrooms or smoking rooms were routine occurrences. These informal discussions formed the basis for mutual understanding of work tasks. They were not formal negotiations or meetings but rather essential practices for the smooth functioning of daily work, although their significance was often overlooked. In these settings, women found opportunities for private, informal conversations and a temporary escape from male supervisors. These spaces provided women with a venue to communicate and share experiences (Peteri, Lempiäinen and Kinnunen 2021).

In the above extract, Iris mentions how things that were previously discussed in the break room are now dealt with over the phone or in an email. The organization’s workers had even formed a WhatsApp group called ‘Break room’ in which they tried to have those conversations that they used to hold in the break room. The experience of those workers who had participated in the WhatsApp group was that the break room was no longer a place for coming up with any genuinely new ideas that would reform old models of thinking and doing things. When break rooms are adopted into the stage design and their value within that design becomes central to what they are, they lose some of their critical potential, democratic nature, and creativity (see Giroux 2004, 497). However, creating a WhatsApp group can be seen as a form of resistance, akin to the actions observed in our data from the 1980s when several female office workers would gather for their ‘secret coffee’ in a small, curtained space. This space, originally designated as their own small break room, had been taken over by higher-ranking office workers. The women sought to reclaim their space by making fresh coffee for themselves. By creating their own secret space these women did not challenge the power-geometry of the workplace, but they nonetheless actively changed spatiality (see Massey 2005, 183). The making of coffee became a means for them to expand their embodied subjectivity and the tranquility it required. Enjoying a moment of ‘secret coffee’ brought them pleasure as part of their daily routine and strengthened their sense of subjectivity. Additionally, drinking coffee became a form of peaceful resistance for the women office workers.

Conclusions

The scheme to open up spaces and, thus, create new café culture in workplaces to establish new innovative encounters is, in historical terms, not such a bad idea. Richard Sennett writes in his book The Fall of Public Man (2002/1976) how coffee drinking and coffee houses that preceded cafés and break rooms helped build a new discussion culture between men in European metropolises in the eighteenth century. Women’s access to public spaces was still very restricted at the time, and thus, only a few upper-class women could enter the coffee houses of the day. (Ellis 2008; Trolander and Tenger 2015). At the time, coffee houses became the primary places for information distribution. Coffee houses were places where men went to read papers and where new, more equal, and democratic interaction was established. The rule of café culture at the time was that anyone could freely participate in any conversation held in the coffee house. Although the men’s backgrounds were clearly visible in their way of talking and their clothes, the custom was to ignore that during the conversations. Thus, a new forum in which workers could share their narratives with gentlemen had been created around coffee drinking (Ellis 2008; Sennett 2002; Trolander and Tenger 2015).

Drawings of these coffee houses have been preserved, and they show that a long table that could accommodate a large number of conversation participants tended to run across the floor. A long table at the center of the room offered a material setting for as many different listeners and storytellers as possible to take part in a shared conversation. The fact that everyone had the right to speak and that the speeches were expected to be moderate was evidence of the egalitarian nature of the discussions. The appeal and topicality of discussions were highly respected characteristics. As was the notion that the participants should hold a view and an opinion on the conversation topic. The conversations aimed to form a shared vision; thus, the key principle of the discussion was that the most well-founded and attested view was the one that the participants together assumed and accepted at the end of the discussion (Ellis 2008).

Although the 17th and eighteenth-century coffee houses were in many ways different from workplace break rooms, we wanted to bring up this historical perspective, so that some characteristics of workplace break rooms could be better perceived. A workplace break room is not a public space in the same way as urban cafés are. Simultaneously, however, break rooms have in recent years been adapted to resemble public cafés. In the older ethnographic data from the 1980s and 1990s, separating a break room from work premises holds two different meanings. On the one hand, the break room remains clearly the backstage enabling interaction and gatherings that are freer, and less dependent on the official hierarchy. On the other, locating the break room further away from work premises and customer areas and separating it with proper, non-see-through walls means that the workers in the break room are not put into the position of an audience or actors on a stage.

While we believe that the theater metaphor effectively serves as a useful tool for analyzing the material order in organizations, it’s important to acknowledge that if all spaces are considered, more or less, part of the front stage, the power of the stage metaphor could diminish. In our material, the backstage of the workplace with its break room also starts to open out into the public sphere of the workplace and the cityscape. The organizational space becomes more like a plateau and it might invite more cinematographic metaphors. In a Deleuzeian sense, we might be moving from the ‘stage’ to a continuous ‘stage’ of events. (de Vaujany 2023; see also Wood 2002).

The new break room designs challenge common understandings and expectations of what a break room as a space should promote. Holmström, Rauniomaa, and Siromaa (2021) noticed how the relocation of some researched workplaces to new premises, resulted in changes to both the break room and break-time practices. Holmström, Rauniomaa, and Siromaa (2021) suggest, that the participants in breaks can be seen as continually creating and shaping an interactive space anew whenever they meet in the break room. The changes to break room spaces also highlight the social and cultural practices and conventions of what it means to take a break in a break room. The changes have made the backstage aspect of the break room more apparent in some respects. While workspaces have undergone numerous adjustments and redesigns in the past, our data from the 2010s indicate that currently, the backstage areas are losing some of their significance as informal backstage spaces, consequently altering social practices and relationships in the workspace, also shaping the interactive space anew. Therefore, future research could also hold on to the stage metaphor and investigate where the backstage may now be concealed.

We suggest that the break room as a space to some extent still reorganizes and questions the hierarchy of a workplace. It is a space where those without formal power offered by status can act with more liberty. They are still more at home in the break room than those higher up in the hierarchy. In more simplified terms, it can be said that organizations’ official rules, values, and interpretations come up in meetings, performance appraisals, and documents. The unofficial practices and alternative interpretations deviating from the official ones are more likely to be established in the break room, especially so if it is a clearly separate space.

Brassier-Rodrigues (2015) argues that the break room is not only a significant ritual but seems to also genuinely increase the workers’ efficiency. Based on our observations, we suggest that the break room can increase efficiency exactly because it twists the hierarchy. Thus, it allows us to recognize certain kinds of expertise. The break room can be a place where certain kinds of service skills become recognized, and renewed and, thus, can also be refined and developed together. Because these kinds of service skills as a form of work are often informal jobs for women in workplaces, the housekeeping of offices, it is often left outside the official development tasks, meetings, and strategies. It could even be said that the break room may offer a forum for identifying the everyday service design that transpires in workplaces. Thus, these service skills (McDowell 2009) and new solutions for them can be discussed in the break room.

Official strategies can become the object of criticism, and the expertise of experienced workers appears high in the break room hierarchy. Thus, the informality of participation as well as challenging the hierarchy are at the center of the more casual interaction Therefore, the break room is where we can find resistance in the shadows that can challenge the prevailing order and produce genuine possibilities for change.

In many work communities, the management’s aims to govern and control the work community’s unofficial culture may be evident in its pursuit to mainly offer methods focussing on individuals and small groups as its tools for emotion work. The official strategy of a work community may even state that in a difficult situation, the worker should not, in the first place, discuss the matter with colleagues but try to cope with the situation alone (Hochschild 2012). The management may offer courses or materials that provide mental practice or stress control techniques to support coping with work. The employer might guide individual employees to seek work guidance in which the employee can, with the help of a professional, try to recognize their resources and coping strategies, or resilience may be emphasized in recruitment. These offer ways to adapt ‘coping’ towards activities that are less communal and more individual. One efficient way to control the communities of coping is to adapt work premises. Creating break rooms that open out to the general workspace poses a potential risk to social interaction as the employer removes the key arena for the formation of the communities of coping.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The research for this article has been supported by the project Ergonomics Gone Naff? The Biography of Ergonomics as Knowledge and Practices in Finland funded by the Academy of Finland (grant number 326547).