Considering the social, spatial and material in flexwork studies: Spacing identity and the (re-)constitution of communities in an Insurance company

Flexwork practices cross a wide array of arenas, ranging from work schedule flexibility to teleworking but also including office designs, what suggests that flexibility may incorporate variability in location and time. While often associated with positive outcomes, recent studies on flexwork have shown that such practices may not have the expected effects in terms of employees’ well-being, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, or retention. Among the avenues raised to understand such often-contradictory results, critical studies have pointed to the fact flexworkers had to construct a new subjectivity, involving an identity dimension and calling for more qualitative and contextualized research work. Then came the intuition that considering the social and spatial material dimension of flexible work practices could allow to better understand what was at stake in such environment. A large part of the research carried out in this perspective borrows the conceptualization of space proposed by Henri Lefebvre according to which space is not only the passive container of social relations but also the product of it. Recently, the need to consider the dynamics by which social relations produce space and space produces social relations has been raised—beyond the rhetorical application of Lefebvre’s triptych. Especially, it has been asked for research focusing on the role played by the actors themselves, in that production of sociomateriality, instead of considering individuals as passively conforming or producing norms derived from their mere appropriation of space. In that vein, and drawing on notion of ‘spacing’, we mobilize the notion of ‘spacing identity’ to understand how identity is performed through social and spatial-material dimensions. In exploring how social relations are (re-)shaped when flexwork get introduced, we build upon work on organizational space, the sociomateriality of identity and, specifically, on ‘spacing identities’. In this article, we empirically demonstrate how the flexwork practices deeply questions the sense of identity. By refurbishing the workplace, by introducing homeworking and, by abolishing the clocking system, the company we investigated turned from a place where everyone is in the building and work the “right” number of hours to numerous places and times where work might be performed. At first, the implementation of such practices redefined how work should be individually and collectivity performed. Among others, the social, and spatial-material reconfiguration encompasses an individualized relation to work, an instrumentalized collaboration, and a more activity-based work. Interestingly, we observed a counter-movement through which employees spontaneously re-invested—socially and spatially—their original workplace, defining moments dedicated to sharing, meeting and mingling. This collective re-appropriation expresses the actors’ ability to contest the way flexwork questions their identity, but also how they re-appropriate spaces in order to (re)define their identity in this new context. By approaching this process as a dynamic through which identity is performed, our work offers a different perspective of organizational politics, allowing to understand how relationships are redefined in a collectively re-enacted space.