30 - Workplaces of the Future

Summary

Introduction

The prevalence of home-working for certain sections of the labour force during the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized with renewed vigour the importance of workplaces in instilling a separation of working activities from other spheres of life. Yet in demonstrating the possibility for alternative spatial arrangements of work, the pandemic has also shown that the ‘workplace’ is not in any simple sense given, but must be constructed through a range of institutional, technological and individual agents. For scholarship in economic geography, the workplace and its processes of construction have historically been something of a side focus, subsumed into broader concerns of labour geography and even the geographies of capitalism (Herod, 1997). This is not to say that workplaces have not featured in such research, but rather that the primary geographical interest was in the spatial distribution of jobs instead of in the taking place of work. Doreen Massey (1995: 3) set out a canonical challenge to such a perspective, arguing for an interpretation of economic geography in terms of the spatial organization of the relations of production (defined, according to her, ‘in the widest sense of term’), so that space was to be understood as ‘power-filled social relations’ rather than simply ‘patterns and distributions of atomized objects’ (see Chapter 1 in this volume). Massey's conceptualization of the socio-spatial structures of production can be interpreted to direct attention to workplaces in two ways.

First, foregrounding spatial structures showed how production always involved a co-constitutive relationship between employment and forms of work outside the employment relation, therefore encouraging examination of how work takes place beyond the formal designation of a workplace (McDowell, 1991; see also Chapter 6 in this volume). In particular, a focus on socio-spatial relations could disclose the connections between various forms of social reproduction – that feminists among others have shown are found beyond a formally designated workplace – and the production that they support. Second, it emphasized the importance of understanding change through place, which Massey called ‘localities’, as contingent articulations of social relations that are constantly being formed and transformed (1995: 333). Therefore, workplaces were not incidental products of spatially uneven economic processes but rather were arrangements through which such inequalities were constructed and played out (Pratt, 2004).