Inscribing Workplaces: The Spatiality of the Production Process

ABSTRACT In this paper, the social being in the spatiality of the production process is addressed. Spatiality, following Soja (1989), means the ceaseless and recursive dialectical interplay amongst time, space, and the social being. The production process, as a specific set of social relations, comprises both the tasks associated with productive labor and the regulations that organize the extraction of surplus value. The social being as worker is located within the various sets of power relations in the workplace, and workers as social beings position themselves within and amongst the numerous sets of social relations that are part of the production process. Distributions of power are negotiated through labor and mediated by other sets of social relations in specific places as well as the historical and material conditions of the lives of individual workers and their employment at a firm. This conceptual argument is demonstrated by drawing on information gathered in multiple‐depth interviews with women employed as franchise housekeepers, personal experience as a franchise housekeeper, and structured interviews with managers, owners, and head office personnel in housekeeping services franchises.