Enacting Airports: Space, Movement and Modes of Ordering

Abstract

In the era of an increasingly 'light' and 'liquid' modernity (Bauman, 2000) airports appear to be privileged and distinctive sites of organization, constitutive of what Castells calls a 'space of fl ows' that is helping to extend and integrate the so-called 'network age' of global economy and 'glocal' culture. This paper draws on original empirical research at Fulchester International Airport and studies the movement of various subjects and objects (including passengers, bags and aeroplanes) as they are assembled and disassembled by 'modes of ordering' to facilitate the fl ows of exchange and interaction that for Castells binds the physically disjointed positions of social actors in contemporary global organization. Our study explores the ways in which digital information and communications technology creates 'spectral' and uncanny phenomena that feeds back into the here-and-now of mundane, organizational reality.

Flying high (in the competitive sky): Conceptualizing the role of airports in global city-regions through “aero-regionalism”

“…Analytically, the concept focuses on air infrastructures' sociospatial relations to their regional political economic context, opposed to ''aeromobilities'' and Foucauldian studies that examine the spatiality of airports as sites of ordering, discipline and affect (e.g. Adey, 2010;Knox et al, 2008;McNeill, 2010;Salter, 2008a). Aero-regionalism aims to reveal the context for strategic state selectivity and key mechanisms for scaling state action surrounding global air infrastructure in an era of city-regional urbanization.…”

Becoming an airline passenger: Body, luggage, and documents

“…Beyond its orienting role, and as far as people with hold-baggage are concerned, the boarding pass is often also the document to which a bar-coded sticker is attached, corresponding to an identical sticker which is attached to the traveller's hold luggage (sometimes the sticker is attached to the passport). The actual suitcase would now begin its own journey on a conveyor belt to the belly of the aircraft (Knox et al, 2008). Yet, the physical separation of body and luggage solidifies the durability of the BLD.…”

Materiality and Space

“…Halford & Leonard, 2006;Tyler & Cohen, 2010). A challenge is to study organizational spaces as they are being performed (Beyes & Steyaert, 2011), particularly with a focus on different changing modes of materiality as artefacts move and shape spaces and simultaneously change the artefacts and their materiality (Knox et al, 2008). In this chapter we draw upon two different but overlapping strands of research: the study of organizational spaces and materiality.…”