Organizational Atmospheres: Foam, Affect and Architecture

Organizational Atmospheres
Christian Borch
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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