Strategies and contradictions: Knowledge workers and the built environment

Knowledge workers represent a growing sector of workers who apply their specialised skills and knowledge in individual and collaborative settings so as to solve complex problems. These workers are highly valuable because of the capabilities they possess that can aid an organisation to sustain a competitive advantage but, in some respects, they are seen as employees who ‘own the organisation’s means of production’ (Blacker 1995:1026). In light of the value and potential of such workers, management has begun to view the built environment as more than purely accommodation for staff and now attempts to use it as a medium that can enhance productivity. This view is founded upon deterministic strategies that are based on attempts to map out ‘cause and effect’ relationships between staff and their built environments. Typically, these strategies have focused on improving communication, knowledge sharing and overall efficiency. However, such limited views greatly underestimate the diversity of employees’ ways of engaging, responding and interpreting their work spaces. As a result, this thesis examines the relationship between knowledge workers and the built environments in which they work. Exploratory case studies analyse three companies (AuditCo, SuperCo and BankCo) with three different corporate strategies towards the built environment in the Australian finance industry. It incorporates semi-structured interviews and the analysis of documents, archival records and physical artefacts to illustrate the disparity between management strategies and the lived experiences of knowledge workers within their work environments. Overall, this thesis has found that, across the cases, management was concerned with the twin goals of implementing strategies to enhance staff productivity, whilst simultaneously seeking ways to reduce costs. At times, these goals conflicted and contradicted each other, producing diverse outcomes that were often far from productive or efficient because they did not fully account for the negative features of the spatial strategies they adopted