New Ways of Working in Academia: Maneuvering in and with Ambiguity in Workspace Design Processes

As a result of growing financial pressures and changing space demands, universities are increasingly looking to modernize and rationalize their workspaces through projects of New Ways of Working (NWoW). So far, extant research has mostly investigated the managerial construct of NWoW and its outcomes on organizational members, leaving the design process leading NWoW to be implemented in local contexts understudied. By contrast, the present study sets out to redefine NWoW as open-ended projects of organizational change that are unavoidably ambiguous and conflictual, hence seeking to overcome the tendency to conceal tensions arising at early stages of the change process under the abstract black-box of ‘resistance to change’. It is shown that ambiguity, simultaneously understood as an organizational problem causing tensions and as a rhetorical resource enabling collective action, plays a major role in the design process of such equivocal projects. This paper further advances our understanding of ambiguity as a multifaceted concept to bridge between individual rationalities and collective decision-making in the course of complex design processes.