8 Lunch Beat, Lefebvre and the Politics of Organizational Space

Tuomo Peltonen and Perttu Salovaara

Introduction: Lefebvre’s Triad and Its Interpretation in Organization Studies

Research into organizational space has advanced notably in recent years (e.g. Beyes and Steyaert, 2011; Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Dale, 2005; Dale and Burrell, 2008; Hernes, 2004; Kingma, 2008; Taylor and Spicer, 2007; Watkins, 2005), and Henri Lefebvre’s writings on space, particularly his 1991 book The Production of Space, offer a comprehensive framework for the field. In particular, Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space—comprising conceived, perceived and lived space (Lefebvre, 1991a)—has been widely used for spatial analysis in organization studies.

However, the theoretical and philosophical commitments informing Lefebvre’s work have not yet received the same level of attention as the triad (for exceptions, see Dale and Burrell, 2008; Beyes and Steyaert, 2011; Zhang, 2006). As a consequence, the spatial triad has largely become detached from the critical societal analysis with which his larger oeuvre is engaged (Elden, 2001, 2004a; Merrifield, 2000). The surge in interest in Lefebvre’s work is cause for both celebration and concern, as Elden (2001, 2004b) warns. There is a risk that his background in philosophy and Marxism may remain unnoticed, causing him to be categorized as, for instance, a ‘postmodern thinker’ or ‘philosopher of space’. This may result in ‘his political edge [being] blunted and his philosophical complexity [being] denied’ (Elden, 2001: 810).

The aim of this chapter is to situate the triadic model in its wider context and reconsider the meaning of this in terms of spatial analysis. Re-evaluation is necessary to address the concern that the triadic model may be too easily used as a ‘tool’ for spatial analysis without consideration of the more broad social, economic and cultural aspects of spatial production. The chapter studies how everyday life, even its emancipatory aspects, is constructed by the capitalist modes of control and production. For this purpose, we examine ‘Lunch Beat’, a 2010 fad in Scandinavia in which people were offered a chance to disco dance during their lunch break.

The chapter begins by providing the broad intellectual background of Lefebvre’s social and political thinking. This is followed by an overview of the current use of Lefebvre’s spatial triad in organization studies. Using the case of Lunch Beat, we then show how Lefebvre’s spatial triad allows for not only analysing space and movement within a place but also obtaining insights into the ‘organized society of controlled consumption’ where ‘everyday life has become an object of consideration and is the province of organization’ (Lefebvre, 1971: 72). We conclude by arguing that the Lunch Beat movement ‘failed’ because it did not stop re-affirming the conceived space of work; a lunch disco mirrors the canteen work tradition and occurs within the given one-hour lunch period. In its dual opposition to the workplace, it remained defined by the cultural and political discourses attached to work.

The Philosophical, Political and Social Context of Lefebvre’s Work

The literary output of Lefebvre is vast and varied, comprising 72 books, numerous articles, and writings on the works of Marx, Hegel and Lenin (Elden, 2004a: 4). In 1975, Lefebvre said, ‘I write a lot, a lot more than I publish, but I do not consider myself as a writer’ (Lefebvre, 1975: 9). Maybe because he processes his ideas through writing and continues to think throughout the work, his texts seldom speak for themselves; one has to understand the background, context, audience and French influences in order to understand Lefebvre’s work.

Lefebvre was a practicing Marxist. He was not only a professional academic devoted to publishing papers on capitalism, social critique and social change but also a member of the French Communist Party and a socialist and revolutionary in many forms and contexts (Merrifield, 2000; Elden, 2004a: 3). Lefebvre’s Marxism is evident in the way he aimed to incorporate traditional concepts such as exchange value and the capitalist mode of production into a nascent spatial analysis (Lefebvre, 1979, 1980). Space, for him, was not merely a site or context for establishment of relations of production, but something produced according to the logic of capitalist accumulation. Lefebvre (1991a: 104) writes about a ‘political economy of space’, suggesting that spatial dynamics constitute a central political issue in industrialized societies, where ‘space has taken on … a reality … much like … money and capital’ (Lefebvre, 1991a: 26).

For Marx, money ‘serves as a universal measure of value’ (Marx, 1887: 67), and it thus provides a means for assessing the value of various commodities. For Marx, the value of a commodity corresponds with the amount of labour it took to produce the commodity. Therefore, the exchange value of a commodity does not depend on it as an object, but on the process of production and the way this production is economically organized and societally governed. Marx emphasizes that the exchange value of a commodity—its value in money—is misleading; production comprises various conditions required to produce the commodity. When raw materials and distribution—including branding, marketing and sales—are considered, the social nature of value creation becomes more explicit.

Lefebvre adapts Marx’s value creation theory to space, conceptualizing space as a social production. For Lefebvre (1991a), it would be too simplistic to assume ‘correspondence between social actions and social locations, between spatial functions and spatial forms’ (p. 34) as the value of a space, place or building is not determined only by its physical form. Rather, in general, conceptualizing space requires consideration of the social context that brought it forth. Any space—Lefebvre uses a courthouse and a cathedral as examples—is a product of its time and of the politics that gave birth to it. These buildings depend on ‘the creative capacity … of a community or collectivity, of a group’ (Lefebvre, 1991a: 115) that is capable of investing in and providing resources for construction. Even the countryside, as a (human) cultural production, relies on ‘peasants to give it form’ (Lefebvre, 1991a: 115). Space is a social production in which a set of ideas, values, principles and practices are moulded into action. ‘The analysis of any space’, Lefebvre (1991a: 116) writes, ‘brings us up against the dialectical relationship between demand and command, along with its attendant questions: “Who?,” “For whom?,” “By whose agency?,” “Why and how?”’ These questions indicate that space is not non-historic since its production is related to history, politics and society. Thus, space cannot be analysed within the triad as a non-historic entity either. Through discussing the case of ‘Lunch Disco’ in relation to its social production, we hope to create a new, more complex interpretation of the event.

Lefebvre (1991a: 116) is interested in the ‘history of space’ as a ‘social reality’ and as ‘a set of relations and forms’. This implies a Marxist undercurrent in Lefebvre’s thinking, according to which understanding space requires articulating the political and social context of that space and the capitalist nature of its value creation. Acknowledgement of these interests, which underlie spatial projects, creates limits for what is new and for what should diverge from the ordinary. Our study of Lunch Disco below shows a case that failed to realize a space that served as an alternative to dominant modes of capitalist spatial production.

Domination and Control Through Spatial Organization

In the history of organization, one of the most prevalent ideas about control involves bringing a workforce together and binding them within planned spatial arrangements, such as farms, fields, factories, work sites and offices. In his early work, Lefebvre (1957/2000, 1963) discussed natural boundaries and how regions used to be divided according to mountain ranges, rivers and lakes, forests or other natural signs as well as how this system in advanced modernism was replaced by the rational calculations of the capitalist era. This distinction between natural and rational boundaries reflects the difference between the phenomenological experience of lived space and the conceived, more abstract representation of space. The way in which a space is perceived has an impact on social formations; practices that occur in the space, that is, the way in which people relate to a space and interact with it, are constructed over time as routines and cultural habits (cf. Dale, 2005: 656–657).

Applied to today’s context, this means that workplaces such as offices as well as city planning are, in contemporary Western society, not something that emerges organically or that is designed along natural boundaries, but is planned on an architect’s drawing board. The interests of various stakeholders; politics, managerial and administrative discourses; and current concepts regarding organization and productivity influence the planning process. Yet, these discourses highlight that the planning process is dominated by rational and abstract terminology. This creates a constant tension between the abstract space of regulation and control and perceived—lived spaces. Merrifield (2000: 175) observes that

Lefebvre seems to suggest that, particularly in the context of Western modernity and capitalism, the contestation between the conceived and the lived space might characterize critical dynamics regarding the production of space. This tension reveals the dialectics of power and control that affect the production of space. Although it is theoretically possible for the lived space to take a leading role in the performance of a social space, this is less typical in Western societies and institutions than in, for example, Eastern cultures (Lefebvre, 1991a). This interpretation reflects that societal control mechanisms are not value-neutral since abstract conceptualizations are preferred over embodied experiences in the context of societal decision-making in Western cultures.

Lefebvre is neither a straightforward analyst of contemporary structures and ontologies of the political economy similar to, for example, Baran and Sweezy (1966) or Braverman (1974) nor a pure theorist of alienation and cultural hegemony in the tradition of Frankfurt Critical Theory (Held, 1980). Instead, it is good to remember that his early work on peasant life in Pyrénees shows his engagement with rationalized capitalism as socio-practical, aesthetic and highly philosophical. As useful as the triad seems to be for providing a wide context for spatial analysis, we argue that the model tends to be used as a tool for adding multiple perspectives to organizational analysis, although this instrumentalization may neglect the larger space-external social, political and economical environment. Following Lefebvre’s main argument, any space—an office space, home, governmental structure or cityscape—is a product of its time and can be best contextualized by the circumstances, questions and needs of the time that produced it. Analysis of a space without such consideration may be incomplete and possibly even misleading, as we suggest below.

In Lefebvre’s critique, abstract spaces, no longer adjusted or unique to a situated community of practice, conceptualize space as a commodity in global networks of power and control. However, the term ‘lived space’ expands the conceptualization of space towards a more processual and fluid ontology. As Beyes and Steyart (2011) describe, lived space is not only an embodiment, representation or entity, but conveyed in ‘intensities, capacities and forces; rhythms, cycles, encounters, events, movements and flows; instincts, affects, atmospheres and auras; relations, knots and assemblages’ (p. 47). Considering organizations and space as processual, evolving concepts and able to be re-produced through, for example, scholarly work, offers a reason to suggest that space is performative and name this quality ‘spacing’. The performative homogeneity of capitalist space—where spaces represent consumption and control—undermines the social effects of space.

The presentation of lived and perceived spaces alongside dominant abstractly conceived spaces needs to be understood as a political act in Lefebvre’s work. He wants to overcome the separation between ‘institutional’ and ‘everyday’ meanings of space, pointing to the possibilities inherent in the dialectics between the two. Lived and perceived spaces are forms of resistance, akin to de Certeau’s (1984) practices of consumption enacted within the micro-moments of everyday life. According to Merrifield (2000: 176), Lefebvre’s analysis of social space focuses on the informal moments of spatial doing and imagining; ‘everyday life … internalizes all three moments of Lefebvre’s spatial triad’. In this politicized sense, Lefebvre’s theory of triadic space represents a critical attempt to address the inherent shortcomings of institutionalized description of spaces as the standardized ‘managed spaces’ of capitalist institutions.

Festival: Spatial Emancipation

If conceived space aligns with attempts to control, lived space can be connected with life and experience and, as said above, with resistance. Yet, an understanding of the triad as a contestation between the conceived and lived space should be tempered with the argument Lefebvre makes in The Production of Space: that the three aspects of space are inseparable, and all are needed to inform what he calls a ‘unitary theory’ of space (Lefebvre, 1991a: 11). He makes an analogy to the human body, illustrating how bodily operations (perceived), knowledge and ideology related to human sciences (conceived) and partly unconscious symbolizations and emotions—the ‘heart’ of the body (lived)—are all needed for a complete, functioning subject. The three dimensions are ontologically interconnected, yet not equally present; they are fluctuating constellations: ‘it is reasonable to assume that spatial practice, representations of space and representational space contribute in different ways to the production of space according to their qualities and attributes, according to the society or mode of production in question, and according to the historical period’ (Lefebvre, 1991a: 46). When there is an aspect of control to the triad, it takes place in a fluctuating fashion. This applies to the emancipatory aspect, too.

Taking into account Lefebvre’s intellectual background in Surrealism and Situationism (Ross and Lefebvre, 1997), it is plausible to deduce a considerable normative emphasis in his work on the subversive potential of lived space to serve as the realm of fantasy, symbolism and the unconscious. The Surrealist movement tapped into Freud to inform a Marxist method of exploring and discovering the transformative powers of the collective subconscious (Carr and Zanetti, 2000). Untamed inner fantasies and irrational dream-like visions offer a reservoir of potential resistance to the alienating powers of capitalist representations and normalizations, even though the two are always relationally unified.

The festival is a concrete manifestation of the absent potential of subliminal moments in Lefebvre’s work (Grindon, 2013). To him, the rural festival represents a joyful ‘taking of the space’ that celebrates the release of suppressed passions and desires as a form of resistance and upheaval. He thought that the excess of the festivals could be transported to urban and industrial contexts, where it might subvert the bureaucratic order and control associated with the hegemony of the conceived space. A festival for peasants ‘is a day of excess (le jour de la démesure). Anything goes. This exuberance, this enormous orgy of eating and drinking—[has] no limits, no rules’ (Lefebvre, 1991b: 202). Festivals emancipate the oppressed by revealing the absurdity of everyday life and space (Merrifield, 2000). In terms of production of space, they could be seen as subversions of the capitalist divisions inherent in articulations of the conceived space through the collective performance of a carnival. In a broad sense, this could result in the transformation of subjects of capitalism (peasants, workers) from products to producers of sociality and space (Grindon, 2013).

Research emerging from these reflections should examine the power relations inherent in the dialectics between the spatial appropriations of architects, administrative planners and capitalists on the one hand (conceived space) and the symbolizations that users attach to space through sensemaking and signified meaning (perceived and lived space) on the other hand. Overall, however, the main focus would not be on space as an abstraction from the society by which it is surrounded but on the way in which it results from and is a product of historical conditions and reflects societal dynamics. The tension to be observed is whether lived space can challenge and subvert the flattening powers of abstract representational space. To illustrate this approach to space, the next section presents a case study of the Lunch Beat movement, which has the potential to challenge the capitalist, normative production of workspace reality.

Lunch Beat Movement in Scandinavia

Lunch discos emerged as a movement fuelled by media hype in the early 2010s. Originating in Sweden under the title ‘Lunch Beat’, the purpose was to momentarily disrupt the normal workplace discipline in terms of both time and space. Basically, it is a lunch break that is spent dancing in a disco-like environment (Lunch Beat, 2011).

Lunch disco is an attempt to reclaim the time spent in the office from abstract conceptualizations of managerial administration. Dull office routines are replaced, even if for just one hour, by dancing and connecting to the bodily knowledge ‘that will make you create magic during the rest of your day too’ (Lunch Beat, 2011). It was claimed to be a parallel to the spontaneous street parties or occupations that affirm urban space for festive activities and free-flowing celebration of the communal carnival. It is designed to blur the lines between work and leisure, order and disorder, discipline and creative embodiment. In Lefebvre’s work, it is analogous to the festival, where roles and duties become reversed; work time anarchistically shifts into dance time.

The lunch disco phenomenon in Scandinavia relates to the official societal role of the lunch break. In Finland, the modern conception of workplace lunch originated in military canteens. Feeding soldiers as well as workers in national war production factories required efficient techniques and facilities. Later, in peacetime, civilian companies, hospitals and schools adapted the canteen concept (Vicky, 2014), and the workplace lunch tradition was established by former members of a women’s defence organization (Lotta Svärd) that had operated military canteens during the war (Fazer Group, n.d.).

The canteen could be analysed in terms of the triadic model, but the narrative presented above links the officiated lunch break to its societal and political context and thus is more complete. Analysis of the work canteen would be incomplete if it were not connected to the Finnish system of school lunch breaks, including a full hot meal. This reading underlines the societal and political conditions the canteen springs from—its social production.

The development of the workplace canteen in the UK in the 1920s reflected the growing interest in efficiency, rationalization and discipline in relation to the managerial discourses of the time (Barley and Kunda, 1992; Vicky, 2014). Lunch spaces were designed to foster efficient flow of employees through the various stages of the eating process. Also, since they limit harmful employee behaviours such as alcohol consumption, canteens could be seen as having a disciplinary function (Foucault, 1977). While aspects of well-being related to human relations ideology were introduced later, originally the canteen format followed the principles of scientific management and disciplinary institutional orders (Vicky, 2014). These types of canteens can be observed in Finland, where school, office and workplace canteens are now outsourced to private companies.

Although modern office cafeterias and canteens are aesthetically diverse, they still tend to operate similar to an assembly line from which the users collect their portions. Queuing, assembling one’s lunch and taking a seat in a familiar group are relatively programmed actions, representing the military’s commanding power over soldiers (Dale and Burrell, 2008). Lunch is a quick accomplishment that involves minimal amounts of spontaneous interaction or movement. In a canteen, bodies move along pre-scripted paths, reproducing the dominant rules and subject-positions prevailing elsewhere in a rationalized organizational regime. This is a spatial workplace practice of disciplined movements within an efficient context of programmed actions. The dominance of order and control reflect Lefebvre’s concept of conceived space. The dominance of this over lived experience is evident in how little room is left for the characteristics of festival—spontaneity, chaos and disorder. The canteen is business as usual.

Canteens are rarely objects of rich or subversive symbolism as the lived space of lunch experience leans towards bureaucratic or disciplinary images. In literature and film, lunch breaks are absent, even from works of fiction that depict subversive aspects of working life or business. Intense drama or high-level intrigue is typically located in corridors, cabinets or restaurants. For example, the acclaimed TV series House of Cards depicts the workplace cafeteria in the US Capitol predominantly as a zone dedicated to efficient eating, reserving political scheming and interpersonal dynamics for offices, corridors and bars. Canteens are not interpreted as sites for transgression or subconscious dreams.

Against this constellation of the spatial triad, the Lunch Beat movement could be viewed as an attempt to interrupt the relational emergence of the canteen as a site for disciplined and normalized space. It is seemingly outside the abstract space of work organizations and yet is intimately integrated within the bureaucratic order of the office in the capitalist relations of production. The Lunch Beat movement, echoing the subversive features of the early disco phenomenon (Mcleod, 2006), could be seen as an attempt to carnivalize a culture with a collective embodied experience of rhythmic swing and a hint of fantasy and non-conformism (Echols, 2010). This type of intervention broadly corresponds to Lefebvre’s notion of the festival as a dis-alienating performative event involved in the production of space (Grindon, 2013). A brief study of actual interpretations, symbolizations and practices related to lunch disco events sheds light on the ways in which the movement unfolded and the extent to which it managed to challenge the dominant triad associated with the spatiality of workplace lunch breaks.

Method

The empirical study presented in this the paper is intended to serve as an illustrative analysis of a movement aiming to subvert the prevailing production of organizational space. The main function of the analysis is to examine the perceived and lived spaces related to the lunch disco phenomenon. The analysis relies on publicly available sources obtained from the Internet: 1) the manifesto of the Lunch Beat movement, 2) media articles about Lunch Beat (26 in total), including interviews with and comments by organizers and participants, and the responses of online readers, 3) videos of Lunch Beat events (12) as well as 4) a sample of related news stories about dancing in the workplace (12). Newspaper articles were used to study information about the spatial practices of participants of lunch discos and about the lived experiences and symbolic representations of space. The Lunch Beat manifesto provides information about the initial motives and cultural inspirations of the movement. The videos were viewed to assist in making sense of the spatial practices.

The main function of the analysis is to explore the lived experiences and symbolizations of the lunch disco event. As suggested by Peltonen (2012), this aspect of the production of space was studied with an interpretative approach focusing on metaphors (Morgan, 2006), symbols (Morgan, Frost, and Pondy, 1983) and phantasms (Gabriel, 1995) in the newspaper articles and user comments on the media articles and videos. Spatial practice was another part of the triad analysed in this paper. This dimension of analysis concentrated on the actual routines and movements that participants of the disco events were enacting. Here, the method involved more direct observation of people’s bodily actions and interactions (Pavis, 2003). The main source for this dimension of the analysis was videos depicting live scenes at Lunch Beat gatherings.

Lunch Beat, the Lived and the Perceived Space

Lived Experiences and Symbolizations

The founders of the Lunch Beat movement have explained in media interviews that they were inspired by Fight Club, a 1999 film directed by David Fincher (Olson, 2012). The film tells a narrative about an underground circle of men who meet to fist-fight in an attempt to reclaim some of the masculinity they have lost as subjects of late modern society. As it turns out, the fight club phenomenon and its champion, Tyler Durden, are just mental projections of the narrator, a blue-collar everyman suffering from consumptionist emptiness.

In videos available on YouTube, the originators of Lunch Beat re-imagined dance events as clandestine gatherings of a secret order, like Fight Club. However, the film’s social critique of capitalism (Ta, 2006; Lizardo, 2007) is not present in the fantasies informing the lunch discos; the founders of the movement primarily concentrated on the idea of a secret underground cult. The selective actualization of Fight Club implies a particular spatial imagery: lunch discos are associated with abandoned or eccentric spaces, such as garages, car parks or cellars. This way, lunch disco spaces are set in direct opposition to sanctioned, formal workplaces and thus (politically and ideologically) oppose managerial control.

Lunch Beat is as much about fun as it is about the release of fatigue and frustration through extreme bodily interactions. There is also a rationalized use of time and space as the movement’s manifesto guides all participants to use the lunch disco break exclusively for dancing: ‘if you are getting too tired to actually dance at Lunch Beat, please have your lunch at some other place’ (“Lunch Beat,” 2011). In this sense, the founders of the Lunch Beat movement present the worktime disco experience as a normatively regulated dance performance that is spatially separated from organized places such as work or the canteen. This opposition, however, also ties the two spaces together as one (disco) is defined as the antithesis of the other (workplace). As a consequence, the disco place becomes defined in Lefebvrian terms as a conceived, abstract space instead of offering more festival-related or anarchist motives for participation. Interrelating disco and the workplace may counter the original aims of disco’s emancipation.

Fight Club portrayed the underground cult as a way for Generation X men to reclaim their lost agency through physical fighting and the associated embodied experience of pain (Ta, 2006). A central theme is the alienation of the service worker class in late modern capitalism and the commodification and diminishment of political subjectivity associated with this phenomenon (Lizardo, 2007). The clandestine fight club is a fantasy of the protagonist—an imagined place where he can revolt against the consumptionist hegemony and reclaim, with the group, a sense of class consciousness. The social production of the ‘club’ is intimately tied to the extreme bodily practice of fighting. In Lefebvre’s terms, the social production of a new space, of the fight club, demonstrates the potential for producing an alternative space for work and consumption. Yet in the Lunch Beat movement, this social production of space and the original Marxist and psychological themes of the film are somewhat sidelined. There seems to be little awareness of the societal context of consumptionist capitalism that informs the Fight Club narrative and of the imagined, fantasy-like nature of the clandestine cult, which is vital for portrayal of the club’s events. In particular, the Lunch Beat movement is lacking juxtaposition of the role of the workplace canteen in the maintenance of capitalist discipline and subversion of the production of organizational space through lunch disco events.

Turning to the interpretations and symbolizations of actual participants, some of the aims of the original organizers are successful. Firstly, there is a focus on the affirmative aspects of the physicality of the dance act. As an organizer in New York notes, the purpose of the event is to ‘get off the couch, get away from your computer and go have experiences’ (Marikar, 2013). Another article noted that one participant ‘usually spends her lunch hour in front of her computer, munching on a baguette, surfing the internet. But on Thursday lunchtime, she wasn’t browsing—she was boogieing’ (Manzoor, 2012). Dancing over lunch is seen as a gateway that allows participants to return to the real, embodied experience of being and move away from the inert or artificial experience of working in digital reality.

In addition, using the lunch break for disco can be justified as an act promoting wellness (cf. Cedeström and Spicer, 2015). Disco dancing is likened here to a workout, ‘gym with fun’ or an escape. But without the typical features of a disco nightclub, such as alcohol service, the one-hour Lunch Beat was interpreted as an oxymoron. According to several commentators, this was, however, the charm of the event. ‘It’s been surreal’, said one participant of the London event, ‘I’m dancing but, at the back of my mind I know it’s daytime and I know that I have to go back to work’ (Manzoor, 2012).

Related to the idea of escape, the event was also described as ‘de-embodying’, not heightening one’s physicality. One of the initiators said, ‘you can allow yourself to be absorbed completely by the present and not worry about work or your next meeting’ (Manzoor, 2012). A similar feeling of escape is reported by Biehl-Missal (2016) and Ropo and Sauer (2008) in regard to the embodied experience of dancing, particularly disco, rave and techno. The disco dance experience of Lunch Beat was associated with meditation and mindfulness exercises that help to create a sense of distance from office life. That is, Lunch Beat was imagined as a form of spiritual sanctuary or retreat rather than an opportunity for physical exercise. This perspective relates to Cohen and Taylor’s (1992) notion of ‘escape attempts’, where resistance allows a respite from the conditions of labour but does not fundamentally challenge them.

Although our analysis focuses on the European and Scandinavian experience, we acknowledge a difference in reactions to the lunch disco phenomenon across the Atlantic. Whereas in Finland newspaper articles and Twitter reactions were positive, commentators on newspaper web sites in the US voiced concerns about the morality of spending part of the workday dancing. It was argued that the lunch break is embedded into the workday and thus should be used responsibly in service of the employer. The very idea of a lunch disco was considered impossible given the high demands for employees: ‘people can party after work, on the weekends, on their days off. If someone’s job is that bad that they have to party at lunch, I would submit they’re in the wrong line of work’ (Marikar, 2013). In this comment, there is an underlying assumption that the lunch break is part of the formal hours spent under employer control and that the spatial boundary between work and life is determined primarily by temporal markers. Locating the Lunch Beat event outside the office space is considered a threat to the unity of the spatial context of work.

However, proponents of lunchtime dancing argued that time spent at the disco is not time wasted; the following tweet was associated with the Twitter hashtag devoted to lunch disco, #lounasdisko: ‘Lunch disco [is] the new best practice from the Finnish Tax Administration’ (Pajunen, 2017). It is argued that dance events help to energize employees, consequently raising productivity and creativity beyond any costs incurred. In Scandinavian commentaries, Lunch Beat events were associated with goal-oriented wellness practices such as walking, exercising or engaging in community building. The analogy to well-being and motivation programs therefore makes the time spent at Lunch Beat valid.

Spatial Practice

What about spatial practices, perceptions, performances and practices enacted in relation to the Lunch Beat phenomenon? In keeping with the image of Lunch Beat as a secret cult, the locations of events are in closed, remote locations. In Sweden, participants had to go through a series of corridors to enter the basement or to queue in order to be admitted into a conference hall that was adequately isolated and dimmed for the gathering. In a video depicting the first Lunch Beat event in 2010, the cameraman illustrates the spatial practice of entering the space of the dance event by shooting the complex journey from the street to the underground garage. He shows the heaviness of the door and the steep ascent of the ramp leading to the actual location, which serve as stages to pass as one transitions from the outer world to the internal reality of the club (Karlsson, 2010).

The transition from the outside world of work, order and consumption is also marked by practices such as changing clothes for dancing and refusing to talk about job-related matters. In the dance venue, participants seem to behave as instructed in the movement’s manifesto (www.lunchbeat.org). There are no groups of static spectators; all try to join the collective ‘groove’. Unlike the early gatherings, at which dance acts were more individualistic and personalized, footage from more recent lunch discos shows a scene that is more reminiscent of a standard nightclub, with anonymous mass swaying to the tempo of music (Karlsson, 2010)

In general, the spatial practice of Lunch Beat tends to sustain a well-defined boundary between the workplace and the experience of dancing. The setup of the Lunch Beat venue typically resembles a hideout in line with the image of a clandestine fight club or a conventional nightclub with a darkened hall and disco lights. The hidden, secretive nature of the event underlines the specificity of the space and the context: the event primarily acts as a site-specific performance (Biehl-Missal, 2016). Thus, this place is distinct from the formal working spaces of organizations emphasizing orderliness, division of labour and hierarchy. At the same time, the otherness of a lunch disco venue may be limiting: like a corporate luncheon, the Lunch Beat event is time-bound, effective and wholesome.

Recently, there have been individual cases in Finland in which the disco is arranged within the workplace, in the midst of the everyday routines of the office. Although these events strengthen the value of spatial practices (perceived space) compared to planning (conceived space), their shorter duration (15 minutes) and smaller audio equipment make the event feel like a short break aimed to improve employees’ well-being rather than a movement emerging from outside corporate structures. Lunch disco may be different, but it is not dangerous.

Discussion

What is the value of the Lunch Beat events in light of Lefebvre’s analysis of the contested production of space? The lunch disco has been described as an isolated location offering either affirmation of an individual’s authentic existence via an experience of physical embodiment or escape from the office atmosphere in the form of a mindful bodily exercise. It is possible to applying Lefebvre’s triad to analyse the physical space in which Lunch Beat takes place, but we suggest that there are two aspects to such an analysis. On the one hand, organizational spaces can be analysed in isolation in terms of their physical materiality; the experience of dancing can be detached from its societal context. As Pallasmaa (201e), a renowned architect, confirms, architecture and planning tend to focus on physical and visual structures, which can lead to neglect of the lived experience and the mood and atmosphere of the space. This exemplifies the above-mentioned tension between the conceived and lived space—in the capitalist production of space, abstract, planned structures are typically prioritised over users’ lived and perceived experience (cf. Connellan, 2013). On the other hand, the analysis can include the phenomenon’s political, philosophical, psychological and societal context. These two options are not contradictory, but complementary. Here, we want to discuss the Lunch Beat from the combined perspective that, in addition to space-internal analysis, includes sociological and political aspects.

The link between dance and space has been analysed by Biehl-Missal (2016). In her study of techno dance movement, she connects dance and space with its context, including the particular time, cultural space and physical place in which dancing occurs. The techno events in the old turbine hall, Berghain, in Berlin are clearly not ruled by corporate structures, neither in terms of time nor space (it operates from midnight until dawn in a dimly lit old industrial space, allowing sexual and drug-related behaviour). In contrast, to account for the emergence and effects of Lunch Beat, one must understand it in the context of officiated lunch breaks and the spread of the news by mainstream media. Following from this, one can argue that Lunch Beat is less about analysing the space in itself through the triad and more about a phenomenon that we can interpret using the Lefebvrean political economy of space.

The spatial practice of the lunch disco seems to reinforce the interpretation of the disco as an egalitarian space in which one’s only duty is to dance, emphasizing the non-hierarchical nature of the event. Workplaces are increasingly crossing the boundaries between work and private life in the form of remote work and 24/7 access to workers. It can be argued that this invasion of privacy invokes a counter-movement that shifts away from the domestication of workplace (Dale and Burrell, 2008) to spaces where one can escape top-down manipulation during the workday. Based on the above comments, Lunch Beat shares features of such an escapist space.

The boundary between workspaces and spaces for dancing and embodied expression is regulated insofar as the lunch disco is temporally tied to the one-hour lunch break. There is also a lack of the more subversive elements of nightlife, such as alcohol. Lunch Beat reminds us of and remains within the regimes of workplace discipline in its rules, which direct the participants to use the available time solely for dance. Also, some ‘power arrangements’ (Dale and Burrell, 2008: 171) are prioritised over other options. Descriptions of the event focus on the duality of working spaces, which have a dulling, normalizing effect on workers, and the lunch disco space, which allows for physical invigoration or mindful concentration. In this respect, Lunch Beat can be interpreted as a reaction against the normalization of work practices (Dale and Burrell, 2008). Thus, Lunch Beat appears to be more concerned with helping employees endure the alienating spatiality of the office than with reclaiming the organizational space through creative movement and underground phantasms. As depicted in a TV documentary on Lunch Beat in Sweden, participants are mindful about the temporariness of the disco and their need to return to work: ‘I feel sweaty. I feel filled with energy. I feel happy. Actually I’m longing to go back to my office as well. This fills me with a lot of energy and lot of ideas’ (DW English, 2012).

Similar to Shortt’s (2015) study of liminal spaces in hairdressing and Biehl-Missal’s (2016) work on embodied space in techno dancing, our analysis emphasizes the need to study the embodied aspects of work and organization. The understanding of space, Lefebvre (1991a) notes, is initially an embodied experience.

Conclusions: Lunch Disco ‘Fails’

While all of the elements in the triad are involved in the production of space, this paper argues that the tension between the conceived space of institutional logic and the everyday enactment of the perceived and lived space is central to the political nature of the social space. In hegemonic closures of space, the logics and structures of the dominant dimension—the conceived space—are reproduced through the performance of distinct spatial practices and symbolic representations of space.

A critical approach to space becomes relevant especially when analysing the actual transformative consequences of cultural interventions that aim to destabilize the dominant forms of social space. As Lunch Beat demonstrates, the impact of a seemingly liberating practice of embodied expression (disco dance) in the middle of the working day depends on the subsequent practices and symbolizations surrounding the intervention.

In line with what Lefebvre calls a ‘festive’ occasion (Grindon, 2013), celebrating lunch with collective dancing might have a transgressive potential to break the capitalist divisions between the actor and the spectator with its primordial sensual energy. While Lunch Beat could be considered a countermovement to industrialized society’s regressive, even manipulative tendencies, there is not much evidence that the event affects domains outside of the disco space; rather, lunch disco seems to re-affirm the division between work and dance. The actual production of a larger social space around lunch disco falls short of the type of collective carnival Lefebvre was seeking by emphasizing the role of collective artistic events in transcending the existing capitalist order. In a nutshell, according to our reading of the Lunch Beat movement in terms of Lefebvre’s politically expanded triadic model, the movement had the potential for a larger emancipatory effect but did not fulfil it. We conclude that this failure is due to the fact that the lunch disco remains within the realm of the social production of capitalist space: even its escapist and emancipatory element is ultimately directed towards more productivity and experienced within the context of well-being at work. It socially re-produces capitalist modes of consumption and joins the dominant discourse in which escape from work is, paradoxically, acted out during the institutionalized setting of lunch break within the framework of work.

The lunch disco movement’s failure to challenge the discipline of the ‘canteen’ in the workspace mirrors the fate of the original disco movement. As, for example, McLeod (2006) has noted, disco first developed in the early 1970s as an underground movement comprised of marginalized groups of African Americans, gays and Latinos. It offered an embodied experience of collective aesthetic empowerment that the mainstream expressive culture was suppressing or limiting at the time. Disco culture allowed for an aesthetic and sensual extravaganza where racial and class distinctions melted away through rhythmic trance and the loosening of bourgeoisie moralities (Echols, 2010).

Yet, as the movement became commercialized, the transgressive properties of the disco event started to wane. In Saturday Night Fever (1977), the male protagonist and his nightlife is pictured as a series of escapist experiences that do little to alter his working-class identity beyond the closed world of the club (Steven, 1980). Disco, originally a revolutionary underground movement, was represented as a site for affirming rather than challenging the divisions and distinctions of capitalist formations.

In a similar vein, Lunch Beat’s promise to offer an underground experience that transgresses the spatial boundaries and hegemonic logics of the modern office was not properly realized due to the tempered nature of the seemingly transformative imageries and practices. Lunch Beat was symbolically interpreted as a place for an escape or clandestine gathering instead of as a site for enacting subversive phantasms in the midst of the workplace. Ultimately, it could not challenge the established spatial triad that performed and reproduced the disciplined space of work lunch as a regulated and functional ‘canteen’.

However, Lunch Beat’s failure to challenge established workplace, organizational and societal norms may not be wholly negative. Rather, its assumed revolutionary nature might be a function of the lenses we used for looking at the phenomenon (of Lefebvre’s triadic model), not necessarily something Lunch Beat was attempting to achieve. The event’s apparently hidden (Marxist) aims may arise only when applying the triad, with its complex political, social and philosophical underpinnings. This is not a demerit of the model, but a reminder of how our methods and their origins may influence our interpretations. On the other hand, the tension between conceived and lived space points to implicit and inherent societal power relations that, from a critical perspective, are too easily taken for granted. Lefebvre’s philosophical background led him to not dismiss these underlying tendencies for capitalist and managerial normative control that characterize our everyday experiences, even today.