I have long had a fascination with places. When I arrive somewhere, I like to walk the streets, the forests paths, or visit a supermarket. These all tell me something, albeit I am not always sure of what. And when returning to places previously visited, like Kraków, or more familiar places like my family´s country house, I am always seeing something new, big or small. Maybe the apple tree has been attacked by fungi, the berries I looked forward to eating have been snatched by birds (or the neighbor, who knows), or the restaurant I visited and remembered with warmth in the Kazimierz quarters of old town in Kraków is no longer in business. Since starting to exercise ideas of place, I have gotten a better understanding of the concept of nostalgia – a longing for something that is inescapably changed. But things change. Doreen Massey (2005), and many with her, describe places as relational, that is, made up of ongoing interrelations, interactions, but also all the non-meetings and exclusions. Place is therefore not static, but a flow of ongoings shaping those particular contexts.
Considering this in relation to Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson’s (2020) question Where is an organization?, I have been wondering where REKO is. Now, consider the places of your usual organization. It would commonly be described in terms of easily recognizable physical sites, such as buildings containing offices, warehouses, stores or cafés. And it would pay attention to the people populating the organization and their relations to those sites. REKO, on the other hand, does not offer ‘easy’ physical descriptors. Neither does it limit itself to a clear understanding of who its people are since there is no formality regarding membership. Maybe it would be better described as a here and now of interacting trajectories, borrowing Doreen Massey’s words. As such, we may also ask the question of who and what is part of the constitution of REKO?
Raising questions both of where, but also who and what is part of REKO, makes it an intriguing case. In our ongoing study, all those aspects are addressed, giving novel insights into the meaning and role of place to this informal form of organization. As our study emphasizes relational aspects of both human and non-humans in the constitution of organization (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren, 2018), we are developing our understandings of REKO as an unusual organization, happening in unusual places. For example, as there is neither formal membership, no formal documentation or registration, no explicit leadership or formal hierarchy, the question of what sustains REKO as an organization is key. Our preliminary results point to, what Wilhoit Larson (2020) called “a gradient of organizational spaces”, how different spaces variously contribute to the organization. There are two obvious places of REKO: I) activities on Facebook, and II) the site where goods exchange hands – the “pick-ups”. REKO makes use of Facebook groups for the announcement by producers and the food they are selling. In most cases, this happens on a bi-weekly basis, and on every occasion the products and the orders vary. These groups sometimes contain tens of thousands of “members,” however, no one has ever seen such number placing orders with the producers. The pick-ups are usually done during 30 minutes at a dedicated parking-lot, gathering from one up to 40-50 producers. Needless to say, these places play an important role in the REKO organization, and we can follow its different intensities, especially in relation to the seasons, where the winter months often mark a drastic decrease in activites.
Producers, administrators, and consumers interact via the digital platform, the parking lots, but there are also many other aspects of place relations shaping REKO, but REKO also shape these places. It establishes new food markets in the cities, with access to food produced nearby. Rural areas have variously been boosted by new connections between consumers and small-scale producers, and people visit farms they have not visited before, even though located only a few kilometers away. We also encountered producers telling of new relations providing ground for local initiatives of joint action outside of REKO activities.
People, parking lots, digital platforms, seasons, sensory experiences, and much more move variously in and out of REKO, making it difficult to clearly define who or what is part of its constitution, and not least – where it is. I am therefore very much looking forward to keep following REKO’s unusual organizational places.
by Daniel Lövgren
References
Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T. R., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional Amendments: “Materializing” Organizational Communication. The academy of management annals, 3(1), 1-64.
Cooren, F. (2018). Materializing communication: Making the case for a relational ontology. Journal of communication, 68(2), 278-288.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage.
Wilhoit Larson, E. (2020). Where is an organization? How workspaces are appropriated to become (partial and temporary) organizational spaces. Management Communication Quarterly, 34(3), 299-327.