Organizational Atmospheres: Foam, Affect and Architecture

Organization 

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Organizational Atmospheres: Foam, Affect and Architecture 

Christian Borch 

Organization 2010 17: 223 originally published online 2 September 2009 

DOI: 10.1177/1350508409337168 

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Organizational Atmospheres: 

Foam, Affect and Architecture 


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Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business 

School, Frederiksberg, Denmark 

Abstract. This article discusses the contribution of Peter Sloterdijk’s 

theory of spheres to organization theory. Specifically, I apply Sloterdijk’s 

sphereological notion of foam to obtain a new perspective on organizations. 

It is argued that a foam-theoretical approach provides a simultaneous 

focus on organizational dynamics of affective imitation, on the spatial and 

architectural dimensions of organizations and, finally, on the politics of 

organizational atmospheres. The article opens with a brief introduction 

to Sloterdijk’s sphere theory and then proceeds by applying his notion 

of foam to organizations. This includes a comparison between the foamtheoretical 

angle and existing perspectives in organization theory. Next I 

discuss Sloterdijk’s analyses of the spatiality of foam. In the final part of 

the article, I argue for taking seriously the politics and management of 

organizational atmospheres. Key words. affect; architecture; atmosphere; 

foam; Gabriel Tarde; imitation; organizations; Peter Sloterdijk 

In the past decade a growing interest has emerged in the spatial and 

architectural dimensions of organizational life. Seminal work in this field 

has pointed to intimate links between generative building and organizing 

(Kornberger and Clegg, 2004); to how the design of workspaces is used to 

attract valuable workers (Duffy, 1997); as well as to the general interrelations 

between material space and organization (Dale and Burrell, 2008). 

These examples represent only a tiny fraction of the important work that 

has recently been conducted on the spatial and architectural aspects of 

DOI: 10.1177/1350508409337168 http://org.sagepub.com 



Organization 17(2) 

Articles 

organizations (further discussions include Dale, 2005; Weick, 2003). The 

aim of this article is not to review or discuss this literature but rather to add a 

supplementary layer to it. I do so by applying the German philosopher 

Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres in organization studies. 1 The basic 

claim of the article is that Sloterdijk’s work offers a valuable contribution to 

organization theory by pointing to the need for analysing the ‘politics of 

atmospheres’ in organizations. This means that we should not merely 

look at how organizations are structured spatially and architecturally; we 

should also examine how affective atmospheres are created and how the 

affective states are transmitted in the organization. 

According to Sloterdijk, humans live in spheres which give them meaning 

and provide them with a protective membrane. Sloterdijk analyses three 

key spheres that he names bubbles, globes and foams. Common to the the- 

oretical observations of these spheres is the focus on air conditions or 

atmospheres broadly understood, i.e. the external and spatial conditions for 

our being-together. This article pays primary attention to the sphere of foam. 

Specifically, I show how organizations may be analysed as social foam 

structures. The main argument of the article is that such a perspective is 

pertinent to organization theory in that it unites an investigation of: (1) 

organizational dynamics of affective imitation; (2) the spatial and architectural 

dimensions of organizations and (3) the politics of organizational 

atmospheres. 

The article has four parts. It begins with a brief presentation of Sloterdijk’s 

theory of spheres. The second part of the article outlines five general implications 

of analysing organizations as social foam. This part also compares 

the foam perspective to established positions within organization theory 

(e.g. DiMaggio and Powell and Luhmann). In the third part, I examine the 

spatial and architectural aspects of foam, as Sloterdijk describes them. 

Finally, the fourth part demonstrates how the focus on space and architecture 

can be linked to foam theory’s focus on affective imitation. This 

results in the call for taking seriously the politics of organizational atmospheres, 

including the management of these atmospheres. As this outline 

indicates, the article pursues a theoretical research agenda; it is beyond 

the scope of this article to offer a specific analysis of organizational foam. 

Sloterdijk’s Theory of Spheres 

Peter Sloterdijk (born 1947) is one of the leading contemporary German 

philosophers. His major breakthrough was the Critique of Cynical Reason 

(1988) which became a bestseller in Germany in the mid-1980s. This book 

is one of his few works that has been translated into English. The fact 

that a great part of Sloterdijk’s more than 30 books remains unavailable 

in English has curbed the international recognition of his work. However, 

in recent years his trilogy on spheres, Sphären I–III (1998–2004), has 

attracted significant international attention and has been translated into 

French and Spanish. One of the scholars who rates Sloterdijk’s work very 

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highly is Bruno Latour who celebrates the sphere project for its attentiveness 

to ‘air conditions’ and atmospheres (to be explained below). 

The aim of Sloterdijk’s sphereological project is to provide a new vocab- 

ulary of our being-together which takes into account the spatial embeddedness 

of the social. This spatial dimension is one indication of how 

Sloterdijk’s anthropology and phenomenology of spheres differs from 

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world, for in Sloterdijk being is always 

being-in-a-sphere, i.e. being in some spatial setting. Latour has summarized 

Sloterdijk’s fundamental inquiry in the following way: ‘what does it mean to 

be “in” some place? It always means being inside some sphere, (some atmo- 

sphere)’ (Latour, 2006: 106). Sloterdijk defines his key concept of spheres 

as ‘the inside-like, accessed, shared circle [Runde] that humans inhabit 

to the extent that they succeed in becoming human beings’ (1998: 28). 

These spheres take various forms which Sloterdijk analyses in his trilogy, 

Sphären I–III. I do not wish to engage in an extensive discussion of these 

volumes here but will limit myself to a few general remarks. 

The three volumes are organized along temporal lines and according 

to scale. Thus, the first volume is concerned with micro-spheres, named 

bubbles (Sloterdijk, 1998). A bubble is a so-called ‘dyadic space of resonance 

between people as we find it in symbiotic relations—mother and child, 

Philemon and Baucis, psychoanalyst and analysed, mystics and God, etc.’ 

(Sloterdijk in Funcke, 2005). While this first volume operates on the level 

of the co-subjectivity of the couple or pair, the second volume jumps to 

the level of macro-spheres in that it focuses on globes (Sloterdijk, 1999). It 

is not only the scale that changes, so does the temporal horizon. Whereas 

the theory of bubbles presents a primordial or ‘arch-history’ (Sloterdijk, 

2005: 224), the second volume embarks on a history of globalization, in the 

specific sense that it investigates how, from the ancient Greeks onward, 

the ball, the sphaira, constituted the main image in the cosmologicaltheological 

world-view. More concretely, this part of the sphere project 

examines how social reality was long conceived as one sphere, namely, 

as a theological and cosmological order which provided meaning to and 

protection of life. Yet the history of the mono-spherical globe also studies 

the demise of this order which followed as a result of the death of God. 

Despite the fact that much attention is currently devoted to globalization, 

Sloterdijk therefore argues that the underlying mono-spherical idea behind 

this notion is no longer useful. Quite the opposite, the mono-spherical 

image has entered a state of crisis; it is not possible any more to designate 

one single sphere which unites and protects us. 

The implosion of the mono-spherical globe leads to a new spherical 

reality: the emergence of a plurality of spheres which Sloterdijk captures 

with the notion of foam, and which he analyses in the third volume of his 

trilogy. Since, for Sloterdijk, foam describes our present historical situ- 

ation, this is also the part of his sphere theory that I devote most attention 

to in this article. Foam is defined by Sloterdijk as ‘co-isolated associations’ 

or, following the American architectural group Morphosis, as ‘connected 

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isolations’ (2004a: 302, 255). These definitions are better understood if 

the physical substance of foam is considered since this constitutes the 

intuitional base of Sloterdijk’s analysis. ‘From a physical perspective, 

[foam] describes multichamber systems consisting of spaces formed by 

gas pressure and surface tensions, which restrict and deform one another 

according to fairly strict geometric laws’ (Sloterdijk in Funcke, 2005). It 

is this multichamber organization that is referred to with the notion of 

co-isolated associations: each chamber or cell makes up its own microspherical 

world; it is separated from other chambers, but since adjacent 

cells share the same wall or boundary, they are characterized by cofragility, 

as the dissolution of one cell will affect its neighbouring cells. 2 

The reference to co-fragility is an indication of the importance Sloterdijk 

attributes to immunity production. The wall of the cell offers protection 

against the outside world, and its maintenance is therefore of vital import 

to the preservation of the cell. This leads to an appreciation of the spatial 

conditions of existence; in the words of Sloterdijk, it obliges us to take 

seriously and make explicit the ‘air conditions’ of foam (2004a). 

Since foam designates the association of co-isolated cells, a conceptual 

framework is needed to describe this relatedness. According to Sloterdijk, 

‘[i]n social foam there is no “communication” … but instead only interautistic 

and mimetic relations’ (Sloterdijk in Funcke, 2005). This move 

from communication theory to imitation theory is instigated by Sloterdijk’s 

interest in Gabriel Tarde’s sociology. Tarde developed a grand sociological 

theory based on the assertion that ‘[s]ociety is imitation and imitation is a 

kind of somnambulism’ (Tarde, 1962: 87; italics in original). Specifically, 

Tarde described how ideas, gestures, fashions, etc. transfer through imitative 

rays, and how these imitations take the form of hypnotic relations 

where the one who imitates may think that he or she acts spontaneously, 

but actually only reacts to hypnotic suggestions. This understanding of 

somnambulistic imitation resonates well with Sloterdijk’s notion of the 

co-subjectivity of micro-spherical bubbles, but as said, it also constitutes 

the key relational dynamic between foam cells: the cells do not affect one 

another through direct exchange, but rather through ‘mimetic infiltration’ and 

‘contagion’ (2004a: 61, 259). I will return to the imitative aspect below. 

Sloterdijk argues that the notion of social foam should replace that of 

society. The latter category is unsatisfactory, he believes, as it connotes too 

strongly that the social is a ‘mono-spherical container’ (2004a: 59). Contrary 

to that image, the notion of foam points to 

an aggregate of micro-spheres (couples, households, companies, associations) 

of different formats that are adjacent to one another like individual bubbles 

in a mound of foam and are structured one layer over/under the other, without 

really being accessible to or separable from one another. (2004a: 59) 

I am aware that this brief outline of Sloterdijk’s sphere project may leave 

the reader with the impression that this is all just speculative philosophy. 

Sloterdijk does admit that some parts of the trilogy are ‘written in a strange 

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language’ (2005: 224). But this is intended since he believes that a new 

vocabulary is needed to account for social life. In the following parts of 

the article I seek to explore how organization theory may profit from this 

new language. I do so by analysing organizations as foam. 

Organizational Foam 

How and with what implications may the sphere theory be applied to 

organizations? As the above quote indicates, Sloterdijk seems to conceive 

of organizations as micro-spherical bubbles that are part of the overall social 

foam. In my opinion, reducing organizations to singular bubbles underestimates 

their complexity. I will argue instead that each organization 

itself composes a foam structure with many bubbles or cells. This is not to 

suggest a fractal logic where each part mimes the whole (meaning in our 

case that each bubble is a foam of bubbles). Rather, the aim is to take seriously 

the complex nature of organizations and this requires that they are 

seen as foam composites. 

What do we get to see if we observe organizations as foam? I claim that 

a foam-theoretical view on organizations entails a unique combination of 

five dimensions. It is crucial to stress that, while each of the five dimensions 

may be found in various branches of existing organization theory, 

the significance of Sloterdijk’s work lies precisely in providing a theoretical 

vocabulary that integrates these dimensions and relates them to 

one another. What, then, are these dimensions? First, foam theory implies 

that we see organizations as complex composites that have no real centre. 

In foam, whether as physical substance or social entity, there is no core 

from which other bubbles emerge or to which they need relate. Rather, 

since no bubble is per definition more important than others, new bubbles 

may emerge from any part of the foam structure. Consequently, a foamtheoretical 

approach does not observe organizations from the view point of 

hierarchies, in terms of principal-agent relations or the like, but focuses, 

on the contrary, on how organizational sociality creates a foam structure 

of co-isolated bubbles where no cell has primacy. These cells or bubbles 

emerge as soon as a membrane has been created that provides meaning and 

immunity to those who are surrounded by it. For example, individual offices 

or the various divisions of an organization may count as such bubbles. 

Second, since foam is at the centre of attention, the individual subjects 

and their capacities, interests and motives are not the analytical starting 

point. Third, it follows from the foam-theoretical perspective that the cells 

do not pursue some overall and common organizational goal. Rather, they 

are concerned with their own immunity strategies, i.e. strategies for preserving 

the fragile membrane of the cell. An example of such immunity 

strategies could be the ways in which employees use ‘hot nesting’ (Warren, 

2006) to create minor bubbles in the organization that imitate the domestic 

sphere and its safety and comfort (see also Dale and Burrell, 2008: 119). 

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Fourth, the foam theory does not say much about the internal workings of 

the cells. They generate small worlds of their own and operate according to 

internal logics, but other than this, the inner organization is not really explored 

in foam theory. Instead it focuses on the relations between cells and 

these relations are, as mentioned above, described in terms of imitation 

and contagion. This also means that in foam theory, organizations are not 

analysed as entities that are based on specific operations, as for example 

Luhmann (2000) claims in his analysis of organizational decisions. The 

organizational connectedness is created instead via the imitations. Finally, 

as a fifth contribution to organization theory, the foam theory explicitly 

addresses spatiality and architecture. This includes, as I shall discuss in 

the following sections of the article, an attentiveness to organizational 

atmospheres and their management. 

As mentioned above, these five dimensions may seem to resemble what 

is already observed by existing perspectives in organization theory. This 

includes, for example, the emphasis on imitation which is shared by the 

institutionalism of DiMaggio and Powell. Yet the foam-theoretical per- 

spective nevertheless has a different accent on these dimensions, as I will 

now show by discussing in more detail how and to what extent the five 

dimensions differ from established ideas in organization theory. First, the 

a-centric view on organizations that foam theory offers can also be found 

in network analyses. In spite of theoretical similarities regarding the critique 

of hierarchies, Sloterdijk is at great pains to stress the conceptual dif- 

ference between the notions of foam and network. This difference touches 

upon the spatial dimension that is central to the sphere theory and which 

is integrated in the image of foam (e.g. soap bubbles in the bathtub). The 

spatial connotations of the foam concept are, Sloterdijk believes, a significant 

advantage of foam theory as compared to network theory, including 

its organizational variants. According to Sloterdijk, the network concept 

expresses an 

excessively reductive geometry: Instead of emphasizing the intrinsic spatial 

properties of the communicating actors to be related to one another, the 

image of the network intimates the notion of expanded points that are connected 

qua interfaces for lines—a universe for data trawlers and anorectics. 

(2004a: 257) 

Contrary to this anorectic and a-spatial image, the foam metaphor points 

explicitly to the spatial extension of the individual cells (Sloterdijk, 

2004b: 21). 

One may argue that combining an a-centric view on organizations with 

a spatial awareness brings Sloterdijk close to organization theories that 

draw on a Deleuzian perspective (e.g. Sørensen, 2005). Indeed, Sloterdijk 

applauds Deleuze and Guattari for attributing great importance to space 

in their Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Sloterdijk in 

Funcke, 2005). Other similarities between Deleuze and Sloterdijk regard 

the joint vitalist impulse and their common inspiration from Tarde (in 

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Deleuze’s case, see Alliez, 2004). However, Sloterdijk’s foam theory has a 

much greater emphasis on Tardean imitation dynamics than Deleuze who 

is more interested in Tarde’s focus on beliefs and desires (Deleuze and 

Guattari, 1987: 219). Although imitation and beliefs and desires are closely 

interrelated in Tarde, this inspirational difference has implications for the 

interpretation of organizational behaviour. Thus Deleuze-inspired work is 

likely to emphasize desire (Sørensen, 2005), whereas a foam-theoretical 

view on organizations has as a major concern the role of imitation. 3 

The emphasis on spatiality (and thereby the fifth dimension listed above) 

is also one of the points where the foam theory differs from, in particular, 

Niklas Luhmann’s work. According to Luhmann, social systems, including 

organizations, have communicative boundaries rather than spatial bound- 

aries (Luhmann, 1997: 76). It is this a-spatial conception of organizations 

that Sloterdijk’s foam theory avoids (not least by emphasizing the significance 

of atmospheres, thereby attributing greater importance to the environment 

than Luhmann does in his systems theory). 

Before investigating the spatial aspects of foam, however, I wish to look 

closer at the second dimension listed above, the deliberate disregard of the 

individual subjects in the organization. This disregard is far from unique to 

foam theory. Indeed, it is shared by many post-structualist accounts. This 

applies, for instance, to Luhmann’s (2000) systemic sociology of organizations 

as well as to Foucauldian studies (e.g. Karlsen and Villadsen, 2008; 

Munro and Randall, 2007). The main difference between these approaches 

and foam theory does not regard the overall ambition of going beyond indi- 

vidualistic analyses, but lies rather in how this is done. Whereas both 

Luhmann’s systems theory and Foucualdian studies are part of the linguistic 

turn in social theory, which has emphasized communication and discourse 

rather than subjectivity, Sloterdijk’s foam theory does not attribute primary 

importance to communication but to imitation. As mentioned above, this 

move from communication to imitation relates to Sloterdijk’s inspiration 

from Tarde. Tarde analyses imitation as a kind of somnambulistic suggestion 

and thereby points to its hypnotic and contagious-affective foundation. 

It is this notion of suggestion, or imitation-suggestion, which, I claim, 

is key to understanding foam sociality, and hence organizations. 4 One of 

the major implications of suggestion is that it undermines the notion of 

individuality. The individual and his or her desires, inclinations, gestures, 

etc., are seen as hypnotically transmitted and therefore not specific or characteristic 

to the individual in question. Indeed, in Tarde’s sociology, the 

individual is nothing but the ‘container’ or agglomeration of various rays of 

imitations, some of which may be in conflict with one another. Ruth Leys 

has put it this way: 

By dissolving the boundaries between self and other, the theory of imitationsuggestion 

embodied a highly plastic notion of the human subject that radically 

called into question the unity and identity of the self. Put another way, it made 

the notion of individuality itself problematic. (Leys, 1993: 281) 

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The suspension of and attack on individuality, which is implied by the 

notion of imitation-suggestion, is shared by Sloterdijk. He conceives of the 

sphereology as a critique of the primacy often attributed to singular 

individuals and sees himself as ‘an intransigent critic of individualism’ 

(2005: 236). 

The emphasis on imitation is also central to the fourth dimension mentioned 

above. Again, the reference to imitation dynamics is not new to 

organization theory, so how does Sloterdijk’s Tardean conception differ 

from, say, DiMaggio and Powell’s notion of mimetic isomorphism 

(DiMaggio, 1983; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991)? DiMaggio and Powell 

distinguish between three types of institutional isomorphism, namely, 

coercive, mimetic and normative. Imitation or mimetic isomorphism is said 

to be a response to uncertainty, for example, ‘when goals are ambiguous, or 

when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty’ (1991: 69). According 

to this perspective, imitation only constitutes one part of organizational 

behaviour, and one which is ‘employed in order to make difficult decisions’ 

(DiMaggio, 1983: 158). Contrary to this understanding, Tarde does not 

reduce imitation to being merely one of several forms of social or organizational 

behaviour; rather, he claims that imitation is constitutive of the 

social. All organizational behaviour can be analysed in terms of imitation. 

Furthermore, imitation is not a response to something in or outside the 

organization, but carries its own impetus (see Sahlin-Andersson and 

Sevón, 2003: 253). Hence, as Barbara Czarniawska has explained in a dis- 

cussion of Tarde’s contribution to organization theory, where she compares 

his work to that of DiMaggio and Powell, ‘[i]imitation is not a residual 

category, but a pivotal explanatory concept for those who try to understand 

the phenomena of contemporary world of organizations’ (2004: 121). Inter- 

preting organizations as foam thus implies that imitation is not one 

mechanism of isomorphism among others, but the very mechanism of 

organizational behaviour. 

I leaped over the third dimension, that foam cells do not pursue an overall 

organizational goal. This observation is also to be found in much organ- 

ization theory. For example, Luhmann’s classic study of Funktionen und 

Folgen formaler Organisation takes as one of its main starting points the 

observation that organizations are not constituted by common goals 

(Luhmann, 1964). In Sloterdijk’s foam theory the pursuit of sub-goals is 

explained by the vitalism of the individual foam cells. It is claimed, in other 

words, that far from being a narrow pursuit of rational sub-optimizing, 

the foam bubbles are possessed by an urge to maintain their life and existence 

(for a discussion of this foam-vitalist argument, see Borch, 2008). 

This vitalism might be compared to the principle of self-organization in 

Luhmann’s systems theory (see Lash, 2005). However, the vitalist impetus 

in Sloterdijk naturally emphasizes the value of life more emphatically than 

does Luhmann with his notion of self-organization. 5 

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To end this discussion, my claim is that, while each of the five dimensions 

listed above may be identified (at least to some extent) in established 

theories of organization, foam theory presents a different interpretation of 

each dimension. Even more important, foam theory does not pay attention 

merely to one or two of these dimensions, but offers a way to conceptualize 

all these dimensions simultaneously. Observing organizations as foam 

therefore means taking into account at once their a-centric nature, their 

immunity strategies, their imitations and their spatiality. To give but a brief 

illustration of how a specific organizational foam analysis could proceed, 

one could take as the starting point the immunity strategies of new-hires. 

In the novel The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker suggests that new-hires have 

a higher bathroom frequency than people who have been in the organ- 

ization for a longer period (Baker, 1998). The reason is, speculates Baker, 

that ‘the corporate bathroom is the one place in the whole office where 

you understand completely what is expected of you’ (1998: 71, n. 1). Paying 

attention to the behaviour in corporate bathrooms clearly follows an 

a-centric view on the organization, but it also opens up for an analysis 

of how the spatial atmosphere of such corporate bathrooms provide immunity 

and afford specific behaviours, and how the atmospheres may be 

transmitted imitatively to other parts of the organization, thereby affecting 

behaviours outside the bathrooms (which is all beautifully described in 

Baker’s novel). 

The Spatiality of Foam 

I have claimed that in particular the spatial-architectural dimension is important 

to the theory of foam, and in the following I want to demonstrate 

in more detail how space and architecture are analysed by Sloterdijk. 

Since I have already pointed to the spatial connotations of the notion of 

foam, I will now discuss three additional ways in which foam theory 

addresses space and architecture. To begin with, Sloterdijk is concerned 

specifically with the architectural embeddedness of foam. In his book on 

foam, he provides fascinating analyses of a number of architectures, including 

dwellings, stadiums and convention centres. Particularly the latter 

are interesting in the present context, as they are most directly related to the 

organizational realm. Convention centres are of many different kinds, 

covering everything from huge buildings containing fairs that last for 

several days to small conference rooms intended for brief meetings. 6 

Sloterdijk finds such convention centres interesting because they signify a 

distinctively modern solution to the problem of how to convene or assemble 

in physical isolation (2004a: 646). Indeed, he believes, these buildings 

have a characteristically contemporary character, because they offer an 

architectural reflection of a society devoted to meetings (2004a: 648). 

Sloterdijk here presents a diagnostic interpretation of architecture, 

pointing to how it supports and makes possible temporary gatherings and 

discussions among people who only assemble because of a shared topic, 

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not because they share a common identity. In a similar vein, he analyses 

modern apartments as a contemporary reflection of a society in which indi- 

vidualism is emphasized. 

The next spatial dimension of foam that I want to stress here relates to 

immunity. As argued above, since foam bubbles are fragile and protected 

by frail membranes, immunity maintenance is a crucial concern. This has 

a clear spatial and architectural dimension, as architecture is one way of 

producing immunity vis-à-vis the outside world. It is from this perspective 

that Sloterdijk asserts that a residence constitutes a ‘spatial immune system’ 

(2004a: 535). And it is for similar reasons that he is preoccupied with the 

American designer, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s mobile architecture, 

for the mobility it represents allows for flexible and adaptable immunity 

strategies. As indicated with the corporate bathroom example, such spatial 

immunity may also be provided by specific organizational rooms or 

spaces, for example, by the shielding produced by the walls of individual 

offices. 

The most important spatial dimension, however, relates to the observation 

that, for Sloterdijk, all human being-together, and hence also foam 

sociality, is embedded in specific ‘air conditions’ or atmospheres. The significance 

of these socio-physical surroundings of foam are demonstrated 

by Sloterdijk in several original analyses. One of these traces the history of 

glass houses and arcades which became popular in the 19th century and 

which were thoroughly scrutinized by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades 

Project (1999). According to Sloterdijk, however, 20th and 21st century 

developments cannot by accounted for by Benjamin’s analysis; these 

more recent architectural inventions of interiorized exteriors, climate 

control systems, etc., would require an independent Air Conditions Project 

(Sloterdijk, 2004a: 182). Another line of analysis, which traces the import 

of air conditions, takes as its starting point Jakob von Uexküll’s invention 

of the notion of the ‘environment’ in 1909 (2004a: 193). This notion 

paved the way for a serious consideration of the environmental conditions 

of existence of any system and hence of any life form and organization. 

Sloterdijk shows that this consideration has now been generalized and 

made into a common experience: humans depend on the presence of spe- 

cific air conditions. This is not merely a reference to the fact that humans 

need air to live (although this is also implied by air conditions). It refers as 

well to the experience that a manipulation of the environment affects the 

system in question and therefore also the immunity it seeks to provide—and 

this is the case whether the manipulation is physical or social-psychological 

(Sloterdijk analyses both chemical warfare via gas poising and political 

warfare through media propaganda, see 2004a: 89 ff., 182 ff.; see also Latour, 

2006). This means among other things that the foam sociality of organ- 

izations is affected by how the architectural design allows for specific 

light, odours, climate control, etc. It is this rather than the diagnostic inter- 

pretation that I wish to pursue in the following section where I link imitation 

and air conditions/atmospheres. 

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Architectural Atmospheres: Foam and Affect 

It was mentioned above that Sloterdijk argues that the relation between the 

co-isolated foam cells is characterized by imitation dynamics and mimetic 

infiltration. I will now discuss this relation in more detail and associate it 

with the discussion of the spatiality and architecture of organizational foam. 

The starting point of this discussion is Sloterdijk’s own major source of 

inspiration, namely, Gabriel Tarde. As demonstrated previously, Tarde 

conceives of imitation as a kind of somnambulistic suggestion. Suggestion 

has two important implications in Tarde. First, it undermines the notion of 

individuality (this was shown above). Second, suggestion emphasizes affect 

rather than deliberation and conscious choices. Since the social individual, 

for Tarde, is akin to a sleepwalker, his or her behaviour is not a result of 

purposive action, but rather of ‘semiconscious suggestion’ (Borch, 2007; 

Williams, 1982). This means that when Sloterdijk argues that the relation 

between foam cells is characterized by imitation, he in fact stresses how crucial 

affect is to understanding foam sociality: the semiconscious imitationsuggestion 

addresses rather directly the import of affect, emotions, etc. and 

how these and related qualities are transmitted from one cell to others. But 

how does this transmission take place more specifically? To answer that 

question, Teresa Brennan’s brilliant book on The Transmission of Affect 

(2004) proves helpful. Indeed, I will argue, Brennan offers an important 

way of understanding the link between foam theory’s focus on imitation 

and the sphereological interest in atmospheres. 

Brennan opens the book by relating architecture and affect, asking ‘[i]s there 

anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’ 

(2004: 1). What she claims is that this atmosphere is constituted, 

in part at least, by affects. To be more specific, the atmosphere is comprised 

by the affective state of those present, and this state can be transmitted to 

people who enter the room. This is what happens when you feel the atmosphere. 

Crucially, Brennan continues: 

The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or 

psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodily 

changes; some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room’s atmosphere, some 

longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, 

alters the biochemistry and neurology or the subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or the 

environment literally gets into the individual. (Brennan, 2004: 1) 

It is important to stress that no biological reductionism is at play here. Quite 

the contrary, the argument is that social and psychological factors generate 

specific biological reactions, not the other way around. 7 Further, it is interesting 

to note that Brennan’s discussion is aimed in part as a critique of 

the notion of self-contained individuality. According to Brennan, it is too 

often taken for granted that emotions can go ‘no farther than the skin’ of 

the individual person (2004: 2). But, she demonstrates, this assumption 

is undermined by a plentitude of studies and, indeed, by the argument 

on the transmission of affect. This critical perspective on self-contained 

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individuality places Brennan’s argument on a par with the aim of both Tarde 

and Sloterdijk. Similar to Tarde, Brennan discusses hypnosis and argues 

that this phenomenon illustrates crucial aspects of the transmission of 

affect (2004: 76, 184, n. 9). And akin to Sloterdijk, she comes close to a 

notion of co-subjectivity through affective transmission. 

In analysing more specifically how an atmosphere is felt and transmitted, 

Brennan puts great emphasis on smell, more precisely, she focuses on 

‘unconscious olfaction’ (2004: 9). She draws here on neurological studies 

of ‘entrainment’. These studies focus on so-called ‘pheromones’, which are 

substances that are secreted from the body and which may then affect 

others. To quote a recent definition that Brennan herself cites, ‘pheromones 

are “pollenlike chemicals that when emitted by one creature have some 

effect on other members of the same species”’ (2004: 69). These pheromones 

can be sensed in different ways, e.g. by touch, visually or by smell. As indi- 

cated, for Brennan, it is not least through smell that pheromones are 

detected. 8 ‘To smell pheromones is also in a sense to consume them. But 

the point here is that no direct physical contact is necessary for a transmission 

to take place. Pheromones are literally in the air’ (2004: 69). This 

is worth emphasizing: the focus on entrainment points to how one’s state 

of affect produces a substance that is emitted and which may then, through 

social interaction, be absorbed by others whereby the former’s affect is 

transmitted to the latter. And this can occur unconsciously; I need not 

recognize that I smell the pheromones, but the fact that I do smell them 

generates the transmission—or, in Tardean terms, the imitation—of affect. 

This all explains, Brennan says, that the ‘affect in the room is a profoundly 

social thing’ (2004: 68; italics in original). It is social interaction which 

stimulates the entrainment. 

I realize that the discussion of the transmission of affect may seem like 

a detour from the overall theme of this article. Yet, I believe, this discussion 

has been important to establish one of the key contributions of foam 

theory to organization theory: the ‘explicitation’, as Sloterdijk calls it, of 

the politics of organizational atmospheres. And as I have tried to show, 

Brennan’s work is in fact explicitly concerned with issues relating to 

Tarde’s interest in affective imitation—suggestion and Sloterdijk’s idea of 

the imitative infiltration of foam cells. Indeed, the observation of how affect 

can be transmitted through unconscious olfaction addresses Sloterdijk’s 

observation of the importance of spherical air conditions, or atmospheres. 

In short, Brennan’s work demonstrates how the affective being-in-a-sphere 

produces an emission-of-pheromones-in-that-sphere and that the smell of 

these is an important atmospheric condition of affective imitation. I will 

now discuss this point in more detail, and relate it to the discussion of organ- 

izational architecture, by examining some of the German philosopher, 

Gernot Böhme’s reflections on architectural atmospheres. 9 

In several of his works, Böhme has devoted serious attention to the import 

of atmospheres. Atmospheres, for Böhme, are ‘tuned spaces’ [gestimmte 

Räume] or ‘spatially discharged, quasi-objective feelings’ (2006: 16). This 

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quasi-objective part is an interesting supplement to Brennan’s argument. 

While she is concerned with how affect is transmitted via human interaction 

in, say, a room or office, Böhme stresses that the room itself produces a 

particular affective state, which need not be directly inter-personally transmitted. 

So from this perspective, the atmosphere of a room is not merely a 

product of the affective states of the people who are present; the very 

physical staging of the room itself generates affects. Precisely the staging is 

crucial to Böhme, as it points to the fact that affects do not simply emerge 

from nothing; rather they can be more or less deliberately produced and 

formed. Architecture and architects play an active role here: 

Exactly architecture produces atmospheres in everything it creates. Of 

course, it also solves specific problems and fabricates objects and buildings 

of all sorts. But architecture is aesthetic work in the sense that it always 

also generates spaces with a special mood quality, i.e. atmospheres. … The 

visitor, the user, the customer, the patient are met with or seized by these 

atmospheres. The architect, however, creates them, more or less consciously. 

(Böhme, 1995: 97) 

Given the focus on feelings and how they are perceived, Böhme attributes 

great importance to how odours, lights, sounds, colours, etc. produce specific 

atmospheres. Akin to Brennan, he emphasizes in particular the import 

of smell. In a discussion of the atmosphere of cities, for example, he notes 

that ‘[t]he smells are a crucial element of a city’s atmosphere, perhaps 

even the most crucial one, for smells are atmospheric to a greater degree 

than other sensual phenomena’ (2006: 128). In a similar vein, the Swiss 

architect Peter Zumthor (whom Böhme refers to) seeks to capture the atmosphere 

of architecture through notions such as ‘the sound of space’ and ‘the 

temperature of space’ (Zumthor, 2006: 29, 33). And the Finnish architect 

Juhani Pallasmaa argues in a parallel manner when stressing the need for 

a multi-sensual conception of architecture, stating, for example, that ‘[t]he 

most persistent memory of any space is often its smell’ (2005: 54). As in 

Brennan’s case, this addresses the sphereological theme of air conditions/ 

atmospheres and how these are integral to the question of affect. 

The reference to how atmospheres can be created architecturally suggests 

that power and management are pertinent to the foam discussion. 

Böhme talks of ‘aesthetic manipulation’ (1995: 48), pointing to the cap- 

acity of aesthetic, i.e. atmospheric, production to generate specific affective 

states. This manipulative capacity can be observed in both the economic 

and political realms. In his work on aesthetic economy, Böhme not only 

analyses architectural atmospheres, but also calls attention to the atmospheres 

of objects and things. A great part of this focuses on how, in con- 

temporary capitalism, goods are increasingly endowed with positive 

atmospheric qualities. For example, products are made to feel nice, smell 

good and look attractive. Böhme is, of course, not alone in observing this 

trend. Scholars such as Nigel Thrift have made similar observations. In a 

recent discussion Thrift states that, ‘[f]or some time now, there have been 

attempts to extend the signature of the commodity, both by enlarging its 

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footprint in time and by reinforcing its content, most especially by loading 

it with more affective features’ (2007: 38). In line with this, one may study 

how the organizational interiors, say, desks and chairs, are designed to 

create such affective attributes. 10 

The manipulative capacity is, as said, also identifiable in politics. Böhme 

analyses how NS architecture was used as a specific ‘communication 

design’, aiming at creating particular affects and ecstasies in the masses 

(2006: 152, 162–72). Sloterdijk has made similar analyses of how, in the 

aftermath to the French Revolution in 1789, architecture was used politically 

and affectively to form collectivities, and how this preconfigured subsequent 

fascist attempts to fabricate comparable results (Sloterdijk, 2008). 

In sum, Böhme’s focus on the atmospheric qualities of architecture and 

objects urges us to study, on an organizational level, both ‘the personal productivity 

of atmospheres, which can induce moods more or less against a 

person’s will, and the targeted generability of atmospheres, based on the 

knowledge of the scenic functions of social goods’, as Löw has put it in a 

recent discussion (2008: 44–5). 

The work of Tarde, Brennan and Böhme points to the significance 

of architectural atmospheres or air conditions of organizational foam. 

Böhme shows that architecture (and objects) creates particular affective 

states and Brennan emphasizes how these affects can be transmitted to 

other persons, thereby creating an affective co-subjectivity. According to 

Sloterdijk’s Tardean conception of social foam, organizational architecture 

is therefore partly a crucial air condition and partly what stimulates mimetic 

infiltration between cells. Interestingly, the foam theory is also compatible 

with Böhme’s observation that architectural atmospheres may be an object 

for manipulation and management. Thus, Sloterdijk examines how air 

designs of shopping malls, clinics, convention centres, etc.—in general: 

organizations—aim to create affective attachments. These air designs, he 

says, analogously to Brennan, may not least be produced by the management 

of smells (Sloterdijk, 2004a: 178–80). In other words, the manipulation 

of the atmospheres through air design aims to regulate the social foam and, 

by implication, the relations between foam cells. 

When applied to the field of organization theory this suggests a research 

program devoted to making explicit the politics of organizational atmospheres. 

This politics has two major concerns. One is to shape the material 

spaces of the organization so that specific affects are encouraged and 

transmitted throughout the organization. This kind of politics may focus 

on architecture, aesthetic design, temperatures, smells, lights and other 

mechanisms to stimulate the desired impressions. But it may also focus 

on how atmospheres are created by more psycho-social means, say, by 

attempts to evoke a particular team spirit. 

The other key objective of the politics of organizational atmospheres 

has a more general scope. It is related to the fragile character of foam and 

concerns the maintenance of the organization as foam. Since we no longer 

live in a mono-spherical world, constant efforts are needed to preserve the 

236 





fundamentally unstable structures of organizational foam. This touches 

upon the flip side of the notion of foam (in German, Schaum). As René ten 

Bos has stressed, ‘[i]n the German language, the word Schaum is closely 

related to Abschaum which means “scum”’ (2009: 85; italics in original). 

This implies that if the politics of regulating the organizational atmospheres 

in a way that preserves the organization turns out unsuccessfully, the 

organization faces a threatening subversion. 

This two-sidedness of the politics of organizational atmospheres indicates 

how the interpretation of organizations as foam points beyond most 

existing discussions on the spatial and architectural dimensions of organizations. 

In Sloterdijk’s project, space and architecture are instrumental 

means to achieve specific effects, but they are also categories that play a 

crucial existential and psychological role in any foam structure, including 

organizations. This latter point addresses the immunity dimension which, 

too, is related to the discussion of the politics of organizational atmospheres. 

Organizational foam bubbles emerge as immunity structures, i.e. 

as entities that provide meaning and security to those who gather under 

the membrane (e.g. the ‘hot nesting’ employee who personalizes his or her 

workspace). Since this membrane cannot be taken for granted but must be 

continuously protected, the management of organizational atmospheres 

(e.g. organizational aims to make workspaces uniform) may undermine 

the existence of such bubbles, thereby potentially transforming foam 

into scum. However, the management of organizational atmospheres may 

also have opposite effects. It may be due to the creation of specific organizational 

atmospheres that people are creative and feel well at work, and 

that, say, the feeling of organizational well-being is transmitted imitatively 

throughout the organization (for an analysis of the impact of architectural 

atmospheres on creativity, see McCoy and Evans, 2002). Sloterdijk’s theory 

therefore suggests a research agenda which places the study of how the 

politics of organizational atmospheres affect immunity strategies and the 

imitation of affects in organizations centrally. 

Conclusion 

This article has discussed Sloterdijk’s sphereological analyses and utilized 

his work for observing organizations as a particular sphere, namely, foam. 

As foam organizations are seen as associations of co-isolated bubbles or 

cells. I have emphasized in particular two implications of conceiving organizations 

as foam. One concerns the relations between foam cells which are 

analysed by Sloterdijk, following Tarde, as imitative infiltrations. The other 

regards the spatiality and architectural embeddings of foam. In both cases 

I have gone somewhat beyond Sloterdijk’s own writings and combined his 

original theory with the work that has been conducted by Brennan and 

Böhme. As I have argued, this theoretical combination is consistent with 

the objectives of foam theory and simply makes more explicit what can be 

examined from a foam-theoretical point of view. Specifically, I have called 

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Articles 

attention to how architecture produces atmospheres or air conditions and 

how the affects generated by the atmospheres can be transmitted imitatively 

in the organizational foam. Further, I have demonstrated that some of the 

emphases of a foam-theoretical angle resemble points that are made by 

existing branches of organization theory, but I have also argued that foam 

theory is unique in how it combines the perspectives on organizations 

and in offering a language of thinking these dimensions in relation to one 

another. 

The article has pursued a mainly theoretical agenda, which has placed 

Sloterdijk’s work in an organizational context, but it has been beyond the 

scope of this article to more than merely hint at how to conduct an organiza- 

tional foam analysis in practice. Such practical applications of foam 

theory should be welcomed since they are likely to shed new light on 

organizational life. In particular, I am convinced that such work would con- 

tribute significantly to the ongoing discussions on the spatial and architectural 

dimensions of organizations by demonstrating how the specific 

atmospheres of organizational foam are generated architecturally, how 

they relate to immunity strategies and how the imitative relations between 

organizational foam cells are affected by the staging, the politics, of organizational 

architecture. 

I am grateful to Thomas Basbøll, Uffe Lind and the anonymous reviewers for 

helpful comments. 

1 This is not the first time that Sloterdijk’s work has been utilized for organization 

theory. See Fleming and Spicer (2003) for a previous discussion in 

which Sloterdijk’s earlier study of cynical reason plays an important role. For 

a more recent discussion of Sloterdijk, which also contains links to organizing, 

see ten Bos (2009). 

2 To put it in the vocabulary of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, every cell is 

operationally closed, but structurally coupled to its adjacent chambers (see 

Borch, 2008). It is important to stress that adjacent cells need not be adjacent in 

a physical sense. The notion of neighbours, for Sloterdijk, ‘refers to the users of 

analogous immunization strategies, of identical patterns of creativity, of related 

arts of survival; meaning that most “neighbors” live far apart’ (2004a: 259). It 

is also crucial to emphasize that the ‘fairly strict geometric laws’ regulating 

physical foam have no equivalent in social foam. 

3 For an additional comparison between Sloterdijk and Deleuze, which focuses on 

the first two volumes of the former’s sphere trilogy, see ten Bos and Kaulingfreks 

(2002). 

4 For other recent discussions and applications of the notion of imitation— 

suggestion, see Blackman (2007, 2008) and Borch (2007). 

5 Recently, Steven D. Brown has argued for a vitalist perspective on organizing, 

following Bergson’s work (Brown, 2006). One may see the present interpretation 

of organizations as foam as a similar call for vitalism in organization theory. 

6 Sloterdijk (2004a: 649, 651) supplements his analysis with illustrations of Renzo 

Piano’s conference room on top of the Fiat headquarters in Turin. 

238 





7 As she puts it a little later: ‘The origin of transmitted affects is social in that 

these affects do not only arise within a particular person but also come from 

without. They come via an interaction with other people and an environment. 

But they have a physiological impact’ (2004: 3). 

8 She writes, for example, that, ‘I suggest smell (in this case unconscious olfaction) 

is critical in how we “feel the atmosphere’’ ’ (2004: 9). 

9 Although Böhme’s work on atmospheres plays no crucial role for Sloterdijk, who 

only mentions it briefly in a footnote in Sphären II. Globen (1999: 146, n. 58), 

I believe that it offers an important way of conceptualizing the politics of atmospheres 

that Sloterdijk is interested in. 

10 Such inquiry could link up with resources from actor-network theory. For 

example, de Laet and Mol (2000) have analysed how specific colours may make 

an item more attractive and hence more likely to become part of the social. 

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Christian Borch is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and 

Philosophy and at the Center for Management Studies of the Building Process, 

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is also partner at imitio: social and 

spatial analysis. His research interests include architecture, urban theory, organ- 

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of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, 

Porcelaenshaven 18A, DK–2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. [email: cbo.lpf@cbs.dk] 

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