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Flexwork, that is, the combination of shared offices and telework, is one of the major changes affecting the workplace these days. But how do employees react to these transformations of their work environment? In this article, we investigate employees' resistance to the introduction of flexwork in a large Belgian organization. We show employees resisting this workspace transformation through the use of personal objects as means to physically reconnect to the place, using objects to convey their claims and objectively occupy places. Though space has become a key analytic concept in the study of organizations, research still largely neglects the concrete role played by personal objects in the capacity of workers to resist change in the occupation of workspaces. We highlight the mutual constitution of objects and space in practices of resistance to workspace change. We show specifically how the politicality of these materials – referred to here as objectal resistance – comes from the meaning that people assign to objects when they place them in order to re-establish workers' bodily presence at work – that is, from acts of objects embodiment and emplacement. We contribute to studies of resistance in the workplace by showing that objectal resistance is a complex combination of overt and covert activities, which leads to seeing the classic opposition between recognition and post-recognition politics in a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the twentieth century the Belgian wood firm De Coene, established in the late-nineteenth century, underwent a thorough modernisation. The company started off as a family business that specialised in art deco interiors and the importation of wood from the Belgian colony of the Congo, but quickly developed into an industrialised producer of cutting-edge modern furniture and building materials. This article explores the context for the Flemish company's various innovations and products in the decades after the Second World War, in particular De Coene's new headquarters, built on the factory grounds in Kortrijk in 1964. It approaches the building and its furnishings as valuable objects of study to increase our understanding of the changing perceptions of wood in the context of the post-war industrialisation in Belgium, the gradually liberalising European market, and the country's changing relationship to the Congo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]