The role of space and place in organizational and institutional change: A systematic review of the literature

| Asma Zafar, Journal of Management Studies

As organizations are responding and reacting to the broader environment that encapsulates them, how does the role of place and space inform that change?

This project is a systematic review that identified 290 empirical articles published between 1979 and 2020 that attended to organizational or institutional change and also engaged with space or place.

The analysis generated four archetypal perspectives that represent qualitatively different ways of viewing the role of place and space in how organizations and institutions change: functional perspective, situated perspective, experiential perspective, and mutually constituted perspective.

These four perspectives were synthesized into a typology that reveals different levels of attention to change as process and to place and space as lived or physical phenomena, and shed light on different assumptions about the relationships between change and place or space that can guide future research.

The review found that place and space have the potential to inform and be informed by organizational change. When people inhabit space, they come to really affiliate with it so any organizational change process should be informed by it. Researchers hope that this will facilitate further research in the area by integrating the two topics together.

Wright, A. L., Irving, G., Zafar, A., & Reay, T. (2022). The role of space and place in organizational and institutional change: A systematic review of the literature. In Journal of Management Studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12868