Spacing Bodies: The Interplay between Focal and Subsidiary Coordinating
通过新生儿重症监护室搬迁的民族志研究，发现空间变化需要反复的身体修复来重建辅助协调，从而重新激活焦点协调，揭示了协调中身体层面的关键作用。
Research on coordination has traditionally focused on social and procedural arrangements that align collective action, yet this perspective often overlooks the embodied, pre-reflective processes that underpin effective coordinating. We draw on the distinction between focal and subsidiary coordinating to argue that focal coordinating—deliberate efforts to structure workflows and align tasks—depends on subsidiary coordinating, which consists of taken-for-granted, backgrounded embodied actions that support joint work. Through an ethnographic study of a neonatal intensive care unit relocation, we find that space change required iterative embodied repairs that targeted subsidiary coordinating, ultimately re-enabling focal coordinating. These repairs involved the reconfiguring of sensory access, inscribing new bodily habits, reallocating who-senses-what, and reorienting intercorporeal action. Our findings contribute to theories of coordinating and space by showing how spatial disruptions cannot be fully addressed through social or procedural adjustments alone, but must involve the reconstruction of embodied subsidiary coordinating.