‘Leader, you first’: The everyday production of hierarchical space in a Chinese bureaucracy
基于对中国某大型政府办公室十个月的民族志研究，发现等级空间通过员工主动寻找等级标志、编造空间叙事以及表演等级关系这三个相互交织的过程被日常生产出来，并强化了权力等级。
Recent studies highlight how organizational power relations are materialized in space. However, relatively little is known about how these spatialized power relations are reproduced on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on a ten-month ethnographic study of a large government office in China, we find that hierarchical space is produced through three intertwined processes. It proliferates as employees actively seek out signs of hierarchy in the organization’s space; it becomes familiarized as employees fabricate and circulate fanciful narratives about their spatial environs; and it is ritualized by employees acting out hierarchical relations across the organization’s space. These processes resulted in a hardening of the hierarchical relations of power. The study extends the existing literature by showing how hierarchical organizational space is not just something that is imposed on employees; it is also imposed by the employees themselves.