Research conducted by Bacevice and Larson confirms that people “read” environments that organizations use, looking for cues about their values, mission, and similar ‘positions.” The researchers report that “Organizations strategically invest in the aesthetics of their spaces to communicate about their values, mission, and position within an industry or community. Given the growth of mass visual culture and the circulation of images online, exposure to aestheticized workspaces is pervasive. In light of this heightened awareness of workplace design, we sought to understand how workers make sense of and interpret such images. We conducted a visual study in which office workers responded to images of strategically-designed offices. We found that most participants used sensemaking strategies of interpreting affordances and other salient cues to arrive at generally favorable conclusions about the organizations portrayed; these conclusions largely reflected organizationally-preferred interpretations. . . . . We illustrate the power of workplace imagery for communicating normative values about work, workers, and organizations.”
Peter Bacevice and Elizabeth Larson. “The Strategic Aestheticization of Work: How Workers Read Normative Organizational Values in Workplace Imagery.” Management Communication Quarterly, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189231203232