Workspace’s organisation in the face of financialization

The advantages and disadvantages of teleworking

With the lockdowns, telework is now the subject of entrepreneurial and media attention, as well as renewed interest in academic research ^[1] . Gabrielle Schütz observes that most research is produced by management sciences which focus on the advantages and disadvantages of telework, in a generalizing discourse often disconnected from singular situations ^[2] . This polarization of the debate, however, obscures another issue, despite its apparent obviousness: the real estate issue. By reducing the occupation of offices, telework makes it possible to arrange offices in “flex-office”: an arrangement where “the workstations are not nominative and are fewer in number than the employees for whom they are intended” ^{[ 3]} .

The financialization of business real estate

Business real estate and office development professionals play an important role in the development of these forms of spatial organization of work. This may seem paradoxical: professionals are working to reduce offices even though these are their core business. To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to take an interest in the office market and the development activity of these professionals. With the financialization of business real estate, in the sense of the introduction of goods and services on the financial market ^[4] , offices will be at the heart of tension concerning the attribution of their (economic) function. Mainly occupying a production function until the 1990s, they also become a financial asset to be valued. How do planning professionals take into account in their work this double constraint, financial and productive?

Translated from french and extracted from an article published in Sociologies pratiques 44, 2022 – Presses de Sciences Po

^[1] Gabrielle Schütz and Camille Noûs, “ For a sociology of teleworking rooted in organizations ”, Practical Sociologies 43, no 2 (December 8, 2021): 1-12.
^[2] Schütz and Nous.
^[3] Schütz and Nous.
^[4] Céline Baud and Ève Chiapello, “How firms finance themselves: the role of regulations and management instruments. “, French Review of Sociology, Vol. 56, No. 3 (2015 September 30): 439-68.

Alexandre Butin is preparing a thesis in the sociology of work at IDHE.S, University of Paris-Nanterre. His research topic focuses on the issues around the development of offices in a context of financialization of business real estate. For 5 years, he carried out several research assignments on the work of office furnishing professionals. His mission at Waitack consists, through a scientific investigation process, in identifying the needs of his clients to enable the development of new performance indicators in the management and layout of office space. But also to support customers in the use of new decision-making tools.