ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND SPACE: A CONCEPTUAL LINK

The study of organizational change has been studied under different perspectives including positivistic and interpretive approaches with varieties of methods. While mainstream approach focusing more on the causal-effect relationship between the change variables and organizational change, interpretive approach focuses more on studying change as a process in which change is perceived as socially constructed, in a perceived unique organization. Therefore, interpretive researchers tend to study the process of organizational change by taking into account the inner and outer contextual issues of an organization. Although the contextual issues like the role of key actors, leadership, significant events, time, technology, power, culture and etc. have been extensively studied but even until recently only relatively little is known about the role of space in organizational change. Considering that space bears different meaning under different perspectives, this study conceives space as the manifestation of lived human experience which resides both in the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of the physical representation of space. Finally, to guide the research, interpretive qualitative case study method should be employed as the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of the study. Using this approach, the subjective nature of space embedded in the archival documents, culture, human experiences, physical architecture and other physical representation can be fully captured and explained.