Spacing Resistance in a Business School Relocation

In this paper, we offer an in-depth longitudinal study of a business school relocation. Focusing on the relationship between spatial practices and resistance over time, we show how faculty appropriated, reappropriated, and disappropriated their business school space, and how this “spacing” built, modified, and diluted resistance to the managerially driven relocation. Our contribution is threefold. First, we theorize resistance to managerialism in business schools as processually enacted in and through faculty’s spatial practices. Second, we theorize the contested character of organizational space as it emerges through intertwined spatial practices. Third, we elucidate how combining ethnographic inquiry with collaborative autoethnography offers a meaningful new methodological approach to exploring the business of business schools. Overall, the paper offers insights into how the potentiality of business school spaces as spaces of resistance can be realized, understood, and empirically studied.