Beyond flexibility: confronting conceived and lived spaces of New Ways of Working

Over the last decade, managerial interest for “NWoW” projects aiming at modernizing workspaces and work practices has sharply increased in various third-sector organizations. The present chapter holds that these projects are based on an ideal-typical depiction of organizational space, supposedly deterriorialized, fluid, differentiated, and horizontal. Through an empirically-grounded comparison between two firms having deployed a NWoW project, the chapter illustrates how middle managers and employees move away from this ideal-typical space. The chapter illustrates that, despite contrasted ways of conducting the change process in the two cases, employees and managers’ mode of space appropriation turned out to be strikingly similar. This suggests that social dynamics in the lived space seem to prevail over change management processes and strategies underlying NWoW implementation.