Framing Power: The Case of the Boardroom

Abstract

Spaces in organisations are increasingly recognised as socially constructed places, where organisational power is experienced and signalled in multiple ways. One such ambiguously vocal space is the boardroom, where aesthetic knowledge, material culture, and organisational practice combine to frame a space which creates power through its history, its artefacts, and its organisational use. This paper uses Harvey's (1989) framework of material spatial practices, representations, and spaces of representation to examine how the organisational practices used in boardrooms and more particularly the aesthetic objects within the rooms, work to create co-constructed places of power and oppression. The players in this oppression are not only those with coercive and material power in the organisation, but also the silent material players of the artefacts: portraits and tables, carpets, and other pictures. The nature of the power network thus created is seen to be ambiguous, working to shape the identity and practices of those who supposedly sit comfortably and legitimately in the space as well as those who are excluded.

‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

“…Following Betts’ (2006, p. 161) study of corporate boardrooms, our research into these settings and the artefacts displayed within them placed considerable methodological emphasis on the ‘value of looking’. In practice, this meant drawing on methods of visual analysis (Acevedo, 2014; Berger, 1972; Rose, 2007), focusing on their content as well as context, including their framing, positioning and spatial organization.…”

“…6 These paintings appear to have been hung so that they could be viewed from several angles, but most obviously by looking up at them; they occupy an imposing, authoritative position (by our estimation, the lowest-hung one was at least eight feet from ground level). As Betts (2006, p. 162) notes in her account of commemorative portraits hung in corporate boardrooms, the positioning of these paintings brings together both the organizational status and the symbolic importance of the subjects. The portraits are to be looked up to; they demonstrate their continued authority over those they look down upon and their positioning means they are able to ‘keep an eye on the whole organization’.…”

“…Conversely, failure to be able to find recognition in these symbolic orders thus also conveys a message, that one’s face does not fit, that one is outside the norms of membership, that one is effectively forgotten or invisible to organizational memory. As Jan Betts (2006, p. 157) has emphasized in one of the relatively few publications to consider how commemorative portraiture ‘frames power’, such artefacts work to reproduce patterns of legitimacy and exclusion.…”

“…It is therefore important to consider how commemoration reflects and reproduces organizational hierarchies of recognition and repression (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013; Orr 2014) in ways that potentially undermine a rhetorical commitment to equality, reproducing ‘appropriate’ individuals according to a relatively narrow set of idealized criteria. Yet with a few notable exceptions (Acevedo, 2014; Betts, 2006; Davison, 2010), commemoration continues to be a relatively neglected theme in the study of organizational life. Indeed, as Bell (2012) has noted, we rarely consider the kinds of repetitive imagery that characterizes the commemorative cultures of the organizations we inhabit.…”

Introduction: The Spatial Turn in Organizational Studies

“…A treatment of the intentions of organizational leaders and their architects that assumes that design elements will shape employees' and others' behaviours without according them agency of their own, and without considering the possibilities of voice or exit, along with loyalty (to borrow Hirschman's 1970 title), is, today, theoretically and intellectually untenable. As space commonly embodies relations of power, they, as well as possibilities of resistance to it, must also be engaged and theorized in organizational space studies (see Betts 2006).…”