Pretty Pants and Office Pants: Making Home, Identity and Belonging in a Workplace

Abstract

This chapter is based on an ongoing ethnography of a British university campus. The principal research focus is on rethinking and diversifying notions of openness, space and organisation, in terms of how formal and informal social spaces make, and is made by organisational culture. Themes of homely/personal spaces and intimacies emerged during the study. Production and consumption are not separate practices, nor are these monolithic terms helpful in understanding the processual, contingent character of relations and interactions between people and things. The ways in which people shape work, place, and time around them using varieties of materials to make, maintain and perform identities are probably infinite — since they can be the work of a moment. Rather than provide a summary, therefore, the chapter offers four accounts of making home, identity and intimacy at work. And as the research materials include field notes, lists, photographs, film, drawings, audio recordings (and later transcriptions) of interviews in offices, on walks and in ‘smokers’ corner’, the chapter also reflects these variations, rather than following a uniform pattern.

Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise. Most of us would indeed feel safer if our experience could be hard-set and fixed in form.

(Mary Douglas, 1966, p. 163)