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Record W4256201963 · doi:10.32920/ryerson.14654067

Personalia and women’s spatial practices in the routine office

2021· preprint· en· W4256201963 on OpenAlexaffabout
Lynn Chalmers

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCultural Industries and Urban Development
Canadian institutionsToronto Metropolitan University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDeskSpace (punctuation)WorkforcePublic relationsPromotion (chess)SociologyHegemonyWork (physics)Gender studiesPolitical scienceEngineeringLawPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Office design is a contemporary cultural discourse, where space is conceived in abstract terms. Organizations mission and purpose are translated into the spatial design of workplaces. In the most dominant sectors such as finance and banking neoliberal organizations operate around the space of flows, generated by globalization, technology and postmodernity (Castells, 2000). The space of flows is also manifest in the spatial design of the workplace shaping employees’ working identities and behaviours. The dissertation asserts that there are two classes of office workers evolving in the workplace: the professional knowledge workers who are increasingly mobile and autonomous; and the routine clerical workers who are captive in a hegemonic system that keeps them doing clerical work with little prospect of promotion. It is significant that the clerical class is composed mostly of women. Personalia and Women’s Spatial Practices In The Routine Office examines the head offices of Investors Group in Winnipeg, Canada, in terms of how the company’s offices both reflect and generate spaces of flows. Women’s participation rates have grown from being a small minority in the 1900s to approximately 70% of the clerical workforce in the 2000s. Through microanalysis of previously unexamined personalia, or personal objects at the desk, the dissertation finds work spaces are expressive of women’s lived experiences of work. By conducting interviews and photographic studies of the workspaces of 11 women at Investors Group the research uncovers the ways women use the personalia at their desks to reappropriate the everyday spaces of the office. The identification of the term personalia becomes a key concept in the work and a contribution to the study of the close environment of the office desk. Social networks with co-workers, past and present are honored in the personalia at the desk; and tactics such as repurposing office supplies as gifts, along with numerous individual and heterogeneous behaviours demonstrate that routine work spaces are not neutral spaces, but are open to the expressive practices which de Certeau calls operations. The ways that women make space for themselves and push against the hegemony of the neoliberal organization are specific and instructive. They reflect women’s values and the identities crafted for public and private consumption. The research closely examines the practices of women in the financial services industry through the filter of Lefebvre’s trialectic for the analysis of space (1991), de Certeau’s ways of operating and tactics (1998), and Franck’s interpretation of Women’s Ways of Knowing (1989; 2000). The research demonstrates how personalia in the contemporary workplace reflects women’s values, and how women’s values have influenced the design of the workplace.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.050
Threshold uncertainty score0.099

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0110.023
Scholarly communication0.0070.003
Open science0.0010.006
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.093
GPT teacher head0.344
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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