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Organizing Space and Time Through Relational Human–Animal Boundary Work: Exclusion, Invitation and Disturbance

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Societies under Construction

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Abstract

Sage, Justesen, Dainty, Tryggestad and Mouritsen’s chapter examines the role that animals play within human organizational boundary work. They thus challenge the latent anthropocentricism in many, if not most, theories of organization that locate animal agencies outside the boundary work that is said to constitute organizing. Inspired by actor–network theory and animal geography, alongside animal encounters at an infrastructure project in the UK and a housing development in Scandinavia, they suggest humans may organize, even manage, by conducting relational boundary work with animal agencies, spacings and timings. With their conceptual and empirical engagements, they develop three concepts—Invitation, Exclusion and Disturbance—to help apprehend how such organizings of space and time are themselves dependent upon entanglements between human and animal agencies. These concepts are proposed to explain how animal, and perhaps other non-human agencies, might be better acknowledged as sometimes constituting human capacities to organize, even managerially control, space and time.

This chapter was originally published under the same title in Organization, reprinted here with permission of the publisher, Sage (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1350508416629449).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Daniel J. Sage

  2. Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Lise Justesen & Kjell Tryggestad

  3. School of Architecture, Civil and Building Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Andrew Dainty

  4. Department of Operations Management, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jan Mouritsen

Authors
  1. Daniel J. Sage
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  2. Lise Justesen
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  3. Andrew Dainty
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  4. Kjell Tryggestad
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  5. Jan Mouritsen
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Correspondence to Daniel J. Sage .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom

    Daniel J. Sage

  2. School of Business, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Chloé Vitry

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Sage, D.J., Justesen, L., Dainty, A., Tryggestad, K., Mouritsen, J. (2018). Organizing Space and Time Through Relational Human–Animal Boundary Work: Exclusion, Invitation and Disturbance. In: Sage, D., Vitry, C. (eds) Societies under Construction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73996-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73996-0_8

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73995-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73996-0

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