Organizational presence and place: Sociomaterial place work in the Swedish outdoor industry

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the relation between organizational presence and the place in which such a presence is enacted. To this end I mobilize Doreen Massey’s processual conceptualization of place as an event consisting of a bundle of trajectories. By following the presentification of a Swedish company, Fjällräven, in the natural environment in the North of Sweden during Fjällräven Classic, I show that the organization is not made present in place, but through place production. I propose the concept of place work to express the work done by representatives of the organization, but also by other humans and nonhumans, to make the throwntogetherness of the place result in a rather coherent and stable construction through which the organization is made present. Place work is therefore work through which organizational presence and place are recursively co-creating. The concept of place work expands what we can learn about the “where” of an organization when building on an ontology of performativity.