Abstract
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. However, participants’ sensemaking also revealed how they wrestled with ambiguities of meaning to arrive at their conclusions. We illustrate the power of workplace imagery for communicating normative values about work, workers, and organizations.
Workplaces are strategically aestheticized. In recent years, companies have spent large sums of money on eye-catching workspaces such as the $4 billion Amazon spent on its Seattle headquarters, including plant-filled glass spheres (Green, 2018), or the $5 billion Apple spent to build its ring-shaped headquarters in California (Potuck, 2017). Organizations give careful attention to (and invest significant capital in) the design of new spaces, not only to achieve organizational goals such as productivity and collaboration, but also to communicate about their values, mission, and position within an industry or community. For many organizations, the two largest expenses incurred are paying employee salaries and the costs of designing and maintaining their spaces (Apgar, 2009).
Coinciding with the growth of mass visual culture (Hand, 2012)—and the circulation of workplace images disseminated through platforms such as design industry publications, online business press, and corporate recruitment efforts (Christensen & Cheney, 2000)—exposure to aestheticized workspaces is pervasive. Workers increasingly experience not only actual aestheticized workspaces, but also imagery of these workspaces through social media, news media, and job recruiting websites. For example, a recent trend is tech workers taking to TikTok to show the glamorous, aspirational, and aestheticized aspects of work (Kelley, 2023). Another example can be found among large tech companies such as Adobe and Microsoft that use social media platforms such as Instagram as sense-giving strategies to shape narratives of how they are perceived. Workplace imagery is used to promote culture, values, and other aspects of work-life. To be perceived as a credible organization, desired employer, or valuable brand, the way an organization strives to be is equally as important as how it appears. For example, “creative” and “collaborative” are ubiquitous words in organizational communication rhetoric that organizations use as attributes to describe themselves (Andrews, 2017; Bilton, 2012). Such attributes come to life when aesthetically expressed through workplace design. The use of visual media to disseminate images of “creative” or “collaborative” organizational spaces can help an organization appear creative or collaborative to stakeholders (Bacevice & Spreitzer, 2021; Huang et al., 2013). Visuals help reveal hidden normative values that convey organizational identity and shape corporate identity narratives.
We argue that such exposure to aestheticized imagery of people and space communicates normative views of organizational life, resulting in latent understanding of values such as “ideal worker” norms that emphasize collaboration, creativity, flexibility, and commitment to work (Dale & Burrell, 2010). We sought to interrogate our assumption about how images are perceived and how organizational life is interpreted through the subject of aestheticized workplaces. We wanted to understand whether respondents recognized such normative views in these images and whether or not they accepted or rejected them. In doing so, our study aims to contribute new insights about the degrees of equivocality and certainty in users’ sensemaking of portrayals of organizational life presented through professional imagery of aestheticized organizational space.
Although there is extensive research exploring aesthetics in organizations (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018; Meyer et al., 2013; Strati, 1996), there has not been research that considers how workers read aestheticized workplace images commonly used to showcase organizational life in online business media. As these images become increasingly prevalent, it is important to understand the roles they play, both in terms of what kinds of messages they communicate about organizations and how they communicate about work and organizations more broadly. Organizations regularly use visual imagery of workplace aesthetics and layout to shape corporate identity narratives and other strategic messages (Foroudi et al., 2021). Organizations ultimately do this to build commitment among their stakeholders, especially current and prospective employees (Melewar, 2003). Workplace imagery allows people to place themselves in organizationally-depicted scenes and consider if they can commit to helping enact an organizational reality that authentically aligns with their individual professional identity. If these people succeed in aligning with the organizational culture, they should expect to experience higher levels of thriving and well-being (Kira et al., 2012). Thus, organizations have much at stake in effectively portraying themselves as they seek to cultivate a committed and thriving workforce; it is thus essential for them to understand how their visual messages are being received.
To understand how workers read aestheticized workplace imagery, we conducted a qualitative visual study in which office workers responded to images of three strategically designed offices. Advances in visual survey tools and other visual research methods afford us novel ways of collecting data from people exposed to workplace imagery. Likewise, existing theories of material affordances (Gibson, 1979) and organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995) equip us with analytical tools for interpreting their responses. We found that most participants arrived at generally favorable conclusions about the organizations portrayed which reflected preferred interpretations. However, the images also triggered sensemaking strategies that elicited more varied and equivocal pathways to interpretation. Some participants read the images in more cynical or critical ways, demonstrating that positive associations with workplace imagery are high, but not universal. Our study demonstrates the power of images for demonstrating normative values about work, workers, and organizations. This paper contributes to literature on the aestheticization of work and visual organizational communication by exploring how workplace imagery is read and understood by office workers.
Literature Review
The Aestheticization of the Physical Environment of Work
We begin by exploring the aestheticization of workplaces (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018) and the potential for the physical environment of organizations to communicate about norms, values, goals, and hierarchies. Aesthetics embody and express the nature of something in a visual and sensory form (Buie, 1996). As we review this literature, we note that there has often been a convergence around organizational aesthetic norms, suggesting that there may also be a normative way that organizations communicate through the aesthetics of physical organizational space.
Since the early 20th century, the physical environment of work has been used by organizations as a nonverbal mechanism for communicating organizational values and aspirations (Pratt & Rafaeli, 2001). The physical environment of work is an assemblage of spatial, material, and aesthetic choices giving what Strati (1996, p. 210) describes as “complex features [that] give a distinctive identity to a particular organization.” The physical environment of work has played a role in the institutionalization and reproduction of social and organizational structures (Gieryn, 2002), cultural norms (Berg & Kreiner, 1990), business processes (Gruber et al., 2015), and the ways in which people do their work (Maslow & Mintz, 1956). Major historical examples include the assembly lines and factory floors for mass production throughout the 20th century and the hierarchical designs of professional white-collar office settings of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Duffy, 2008; Mozingo, 2011).
The role of workplace architecture in shaping corporate identity narratives (Foroudi et al., 2021; Meyer et al., 2013; Vilnai-Yavetz, Rafaeli & Yaacov, 2005Vilnai-Yavetz et al., 2005) and institutionalizing them (de Vaujany & Vaast, 2014; Meyer et al., 2013) owes much to the growth and dissemination of visual media. As early as the 1920s, industrial organizations such as General Motors used corporate architecture to promote organizational values such as institutional strength, benevolence, and trustworthiness (Abrahamson, 2018; Baer et al., 2018; Marchand, 1998). In the 1930’s, the work of Margaret Bourke-White helped stylize American industrial sites in the earliest pages of Fortune Magazine, itself an innovation of its time as a platform for the dissemination of business news aimed at corporate executives (Rosa, 1998; Wilson, 2016).
By the mid-twentieth century, the professionalization of architectural photography created an interdependence among large institutional architects whose aesthetic products reflected the organizational values of their corporate patrons while relying on professional photographers skilled at crafting a stylized window into these settings (Adams, 2019; Rappaport & Stoller, 2012). More recently, the internet and social media have allowed organizations to distribute this imagery to wider audiences, communicating a particular perspective on work to an audience that is accustomed to visual communication (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018).
This historical perspective illustrates the institutionalizing process of establishing what amounts to a “photographic way of seeing” (Sontag, 1977) organizational and industrial norms—not from the perspective of any one photographer, but rather from the perspective of institutionalized corporate values that aim to reduce the equivocality of possible interpretations of organizational life. Beyes and Steyaert (2011) refer to the concept of “spacing,” which is the instrumentality of aesthetic space (the physical environment of work) not solely as background, but used organizationally as an active communicative mechanism. This concept also demonstrates the affective dimensions of space and how space can communicate through affective and embodied dimensions—one can feel an organization through its spaces (Ewenstein & Whyte, 2007).
In addition to its use as a visual symbol of the corporate organization’s place in society, workplace imagery can symbolize the relationship between the organization and workers and power relations among organizational actors (Clair, 1998). Aestheticized space and its portrayal can be a seductive means of conveying norms and values or gaining compliance (De Molli et al., 2020). For example, as organizations flattened their hierarchies and downsized their corporate workforces in the 1980s and 1990s, many used the physical environment of work as a symbol of corporate reorganization, the restructuring of work, greater role agility, and global competitiveness (Berg & Kreiner, 1990; Leslie, 2011). Office redesigns and frequent changes to seating assignments can symbolize organizational change (Van Marrewijk, 2009) while reinforcing the ephemerality of jobs and individual status within organizations. The aestheticization of workplace buildings extends into the postmodern era via such buildings as the J.R. Thompson Center in Chicago which was designed to send the message of the importance of government transparency through glass front office and reversed, transposed structural elements with beams and girders showing (see Clair, 2013). These examples demonstrate how the evolving aestheticization of the physical environment of work has been used to communicate various messages about organizational norms and values and that the rise of visual and social media have also made these images more accessible to a larger audience.
Interpreting the Physical Environment of Work
While these previous examples demonstrate the long-standing use of the physical environment of work and images of it to construct meaning and shape corporate identity, less is understood about how these messages are perceived. Everyday users exposed to physical spaces come to understand how to act and interact within them by way of material and social cues. Affordance theory (Gibson, 1979) provides a lens for understanding the messages embedded in the material and physical attributes of a space’s layout and aesthetics. Workplace design contains cues, or “affordances” that suggest how to “properly” use the space in the context of everyday organizational life. Affordances have a cognitive dimension in that spaces and materials encode information about how we should identify with or engage others in our use of something (Majchrzak et al., 2013; Poletti & Rak, 2014In Poletti & Rak, 2014; Spreitzer et al., 2020). For example, the placement of a sofa materially suggests casual sitting with other people, but how we engage with one another on a sofa depends on the context in which it is placed. A sofa in a home, coffee shop, or office lobby each suggest different social uses. Physical affordances are present in images of settings, but how they are interpreted is distinct from experiencing a setting in person (Wilhoit, 2017a).
Contemplating the social-organizational context in which one encounters a material affordance is an example of sensemaking. Users engage in “sensemaking” (Weick, 1995) to interpret the salient cues in the environment while layering their own retrospective experiences on to their interpretations. People have past experiences with workplaces that influence how they make sense of a new work environment. When confronted with a new or ambiguous work environment, users may recall narrative (Kostera, 2012) or aesthetic archetypes (Spivack, 1969) to help them make sense of what’s going on. Narrative archetypes are the stories that shape our retrospective understanding of the organization. Here is where the user may interpret an organization through rhetorical adjectives such as “creative,” “entrepreneurial” or “disruptive.” Aesthetic archetypes are bundles of multiple affordances in the layout and design of organizational space that allow a user to interpret whether or not the setting conforms to their understanding of what should happen there and what may have already happened there. The user makes full use of their senses to construct meaning and enact order from the visual and social cues and decide whether or not that meaning conforms or conflicts with their own version of reality.
Workplaces are embedded with codes that signal different things about the organization (Berg & Kreiner, 1990; Yanow, 2006). The analysis of workplace design imagery and its growing online proliferation helps overcome the portability problem with architecture as a symbol of organizational identity (Pratt & Rafaeli, 2001) because the online medium amplifies architecture and enables it (especially interior architecture and aesthetics) to reach a broader audience and serve as a means for shaping an organizational narrative (Powell et al., 2016). Through the use of workplace imagery, organizations engage in sense-giving to influence and control the pre-cognitive, embodied, and sensory stages of interpretation (Gagliardi, 1990). It is therefore important to understand how people interpret organizational imagery such as architectural photos.
The Visual Dimension of Organizational Communication
Organizational communication has offered possibilities for interpreting the visual dimension of organizations by considering visuals as organizational rhetoric. Visual organizational communication research reflects the growing understanding that although organizations can seem to function through primarily verbal means, organizational communication is multimodal and, in particular, organizational communication often takes place through visuals (Kjeldsen, 2018).
However, existing literature considering visual elements as part of organizational rhetoric is very small and there is even less literature that considers the rhetorical aspects of the physical environment of work. Gill and Wells (2014) studied how a U.S.-based nonprofit organization constructed legitimacy by examining the organization’s website and other documents such as newsletters. Part of their analysis considered the visual elements of these texts, considering how photos present a fixed and limited view of reality, shaped by those who create the documents. Gill and Wells (2014) demonstrated how these images were used to create a view of the organization that resonated with donor values and identities.
Similarly, Clair and Anderson (2013) examined the promotional materials for another nonprofit organization to see how the organization framed and portrayed the “poor” people the organization serves. They found that the imagery of “poor” people was grounded in a hopeful present and future that erased the past of poverty and painted an idyllic image of enterprising poverty. Clair and Anderson (2013) gave detailed consideration to the imagery in the organization’s publications and considered the ironies and tensions between text and image. These two studies demonstrate how organizations can communicate through photographs. In particular, they show that images can often convey subtle messages that may not be explicitly stated in written texts, creating identification or persuasion.
Finally, and most relevant for the present work, Ewalt (2018, 2019) has looked at the rhetoric of organizational space. In his study of the Salt Lake City Public Library, Ewalt (2019) demonstrated how the library took on meanings of order and visibility. In return, these meanings were enacted through the physical space, enabling practices of surveillance and policing. Ewalt read the space as a neoliberal rhetoric, examining how material space can mandate particular behaviors that align with neoliberal values. Ewalt (2018) considered placemaking as organizational rhetoric, examining how the material arrangements of organizations can serve as persuasion, particularly through identification. These studies demonstrate the rhetorical potential of organizational spaces to both suggest particular messages and encourage specific behaviors.
However, the literature on the visual and material dimension of organizational rhetoric is limited. Existing studies have demonstrated that subtle organizational messages are often communicated through visual and material dimensions of organizations. However, these studies—along with the studies mentioned previously on the affordances and meanings embedded in organizational space—have focused on how critics or scholars interpret the meanings of these spaces and images. How users interpret imagery is the gap we aim to fill. Thus, we ask the following research question: What meaning do office workers find in professional images of aestheticized workplaces, and what sensemaking strategies do they employ to derive meaning?
Methodology
In order to understand how office workers find meaning in and make sense of aestheticized workplace images, we conducted a visual survey, which draws from the empirical strategies associated with organizational aesthetics and consumer-oriented messaging (Ganassali & Matysiewicz, 2018). Our use of a visual research method answers the call for increased use of photo and video methods in organizational communication, particularly to study both meaning and materiality (Wilhoit, 2017b). Our methodology employed a hybrid of the archeological, dialogic, and strategic visual strategies as outlined by Meyer et al. (2013), responding to their call for the use of such bridging strategies. In the archeological sense, the images we employed in our survey had “pre-existing” institutionalized framings—supplemented with verbal rhetoric—which we interpreted through the first step of our analysis. In the strategic sense, the images triggered our perceptions and the perceptions of the study participants. In the dialogic sense, the images invited participants’ active voice and encouraged them to make sense of the images; this generated data for the second step of our analysis.
Our methodology is similar to Shortt and Warren’s (2019) “grounded visual pattern analysis” (GVPA), which also builds from the hybrid stance of Meyer et al. (2013). Our study relies on the “sedimented social meaning” (Shortt & Warren, 2019, p. 543) of images, extracts meaning from a grouped montage of images, and engages participants’ voice. We depart from Shortt and Warren in that our study is not “grounded” in the context where the images were produced. Rather than use images produced by respondents, we ask them to make sense of aestheticized workplaces as background phenomenon that is omnipresent across popular, business, and trade-oriented media platforms to understand if they ascribe the kind institutionalized meaning to it as the producers of those images intended.
Participants were recruited through an online access panel (Göritz, 2009) in order to ensure a targeted response rate without compromising response quality (Singer & Ye, 2013). The panel provider filtered and disqualified respondents who did not meet our response criteria of individuals who currently or previously worked in a professional white collar office environment. The survey reached 477 possible respondents. Initially, 248 respondents were disqualified for failing to meet the filtering criteria, for failing to finish the survey, for satisficing their responses (scoring every question the same), or for completing the survey in an unrealistically short time frame. After reviewing all the qualitative comments from our initially filtered sample, we further disqualified another 15 completed surveys because respondents left gibberish, offensive language, or other nonsensical comments. By using these filtering strategies, we eliminated invalid responses from our sample (Brühlmann et al., 2020; Gadiraju et al., 2015) yielding a final sample size of 214 participants. In our final sample, respondent age ranged from 22 to 70 (mean = 40, median = 43). One hundred and one respondents identified as male; 110 identified as female; and three did not respond or identified as “other gender identity.”
The images respondents were shown in this survey were selected by both authors from publicly accessible design industry websites. For our sample image set, we selected public domain images that were representative of contemporary open-plan office environments in different industries, which were completed within the last five years within the United States. We sought images that were professionally photographed; similarly staged and framed, showing office areas, meeting rooms, and common areas; featured people who exhibited gender and racial diversity; did not reveal the name of the organizations (i.e., no logos or obvious branding); were not indicative of geographic location; and were used in marketing and other publicly accessible online content throughout popular, business, and trade-oriented media platforms. In other words, we chose images we believed represented an institutionalized corporate workplace aesthetic that is ubiquitous across online platforms consumed by a broad demographic of office workers. In looking for similarly-staged images, we sought settings that represented common, normative, organizational values such as collaboration, creativity, and flexibility. Many of the images we considered showed variations of spaces with open seating, different kinds of meeting spaces, whiteboards, and display monitors. We searched for potential images on Architizer.com and OfficeSnapshots.com, sorting through hundreds of possible image sets to include in our visual survey. We also investigated potential images directly from the websites and other online materials associated with those firms. Once we narrowed down potential organization image sets on these platforms, we used Google image search to find these images cross-listed on other websites, including websites affiliated with the organizations themselves and with the architecture firms that designed the spaces. One of our selection criteria was to find other websites where these images were being used in strategic messaging about the organization so that we could understand the organization’s voice and how the images were being used to communicate it.
We settled on images from three organizations, and we included three images from each organization. These nine images formed the basis of our visual survey. Organization 1 in our survey is the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania office of a professional services company. Organization 2 is the Detroit, Michigan office of a major tech company. Organization 3 in our survey is the Reston, Virginia office of a nonprofit advisory firm.
For each of the three organizations, we chose three representative images that portrayed employee work areas, meeting spaces, and common areas (Figures 1–3). Each image was displayed individually to participants, and participants were prompted to answer the following question: “What does this workplace photo suggest about the organization where it was taken?” Participants could then click on points in the image. For each point, they were prompted to choose whether they liked or disliked that feature and then leave a text comment about it (Figure 4). After viewing each image individually, the survey displayed all three images from a given organization, and respondents were asked to write words that they would use to describe the organization. The same set of questions was asked for each of the three organizations. One of the three images of organization one.
The survey generated two types of data. First were individual comments participants made when they tagged specific aspects of the organizational photos. Second were the overall assessments participants made for each organization. For each set of photos, we analyzed both individual comments and global assessments. We created a spreadsheet with one row per participant response. A response was either a specific positive or negative tag on a photo with comments or an overall evaluation of a set of images from one organization (see Clair, 1996; Clair et al., 2018 for other examples of methods starting analysis with a negative/positive valence). When taking the survey, respondents could click on each of the nine images as many times as they wanted and leave a comment along with a “like” or “dislike” tag. With this method, we collected a total 4152 clicks. These clicks yielded 3602 comments, as not every click generated a comment. We analyzed the responses through three rounds of coding, leading to thematic saturation.
We began our data analysis by jointly developing a codebook based on our initial observations of the data. Our initial codes were focused on three main categories: space, people, and organizations. Within each of these categories, we had several second-level codes including: affordances, features and functions, layout, and site context (space), work mode, demographics, interactions with others (people), and type, values and culture, nature of the business, and industry classification (organizations). We independently coded the data using NVivo. As we coded, both authors identified additional emergent codes that fit within the three categories of space, people, and organization (Tracy, 2013). Following our first round of coding, we compared findings and found that our additional emergent codes generally converged. Examples of codes that were added were aesthetics, personal space, and diversity.
As we discussed the themes and patterns from our initial round of coding, we discovered that our analysis was primarily descriptive—identifying what participants focused on in the images, rather than looking at how they read or interpreted the images. We therefore did a second set of coding that looked less at the content of what participants wrote, but more at what interpretive functions their comments achieved. For example, codes in this category included, “judgment or assessment of the organization,” “assessment based on personal experience,” and “comparison with other spaces.” These codes helped us better understand how participants made sense of these images beyond a basic description. Following coding, we were able to identify themes present in the data which we used to develop our findings (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
How Workers Read Aestheticized Spaces
In the results, we consider the ways that participants made sense of the sample organizations by interpreting the images of their spaces. Our analysis focuses on our second set of coding which considered the functions of participant comments, rather than their content. Our focus on how participants interpreted and made sense of these images is especially important because it can lead to understanding about whether people read images in the ways that organizations are hoping people will interpret them.
Workplace Aesthetics and Positive Impression
The results of the quantitative scoring indicate a generally favorable view of the organizations portrayed in the images. Collectively, 214 respondents left a total of 3507 clicks across all nine individual images. Of those, 2647 (or 75%) were clicks that indicated “like,” while the remaining 860 (or 25%) indicated “dislike.” After the respondents were shown each of the three individual images for each organization, they were subsequently shown the three images as a set and asked the following question, “based on the workplace images shown above, what impression do they give you about working at this organization?” Respondents were asked to provide a value on a scale of zero to ten, with zero indicating “negative” and ten indicating “positive.” Organization 1 received a score of 7.99; Organization 2 a score of 7.13; and Organization 3 a score of 7.43. One of the three images of organization two.
Given that the respondents had no other information about the three organizations beyond these images, and the variability in industries represented by each of the three organizations, it seems that participants had generally favorable views of the organizations based on these professionally staged images. Additionally, we suggest that these generally positive impressions reflect the way that contemporary offices are often framed in popular culture—as cool, playful, and cutting edge (see Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018), suggesting that the general circulation of contemporary workplace imagery effectively communicates organizational narratives in positive ways. Moreover, as a sense-giving strategy, professional photography can minimize the ambiguity and equivocality in a respondents’ own sensemaking. The salient cues in the imagery guided most respondents toward a favorable impression.
While the quantitative scores offer a conclusion of the respondents’ sensemaking, the comments reveal a wider range of ambiguity with which they wrestled. The positive scores coupled with the mix valence in the comments point to a broader understanding of how images provoke sensemaking. Indeed, our study’s findings align with Eisenberg’s (2006, p. 1695) comments about “choppy humanness of action, and in the ways in which belief and action are consistently out of alignment.” In the subsequent sections, we describe the other ways respondents made sense of the images and grappled with positive and negative interpretations.
Inference about Uses
The most prevalent way that participants read the images was inferring how they might be used. Although this type of reading could be seen as identifying affordances (Gibson, 1979), participants generally did not identify the specific physical features that would lead to certain behaviors. Instead, many participants inferred what behaviors and ways of working the space would allow without identifying the material aspects that would afford those behaviors and ways of working. Participants who made inferences about the uses of a given space were reading the possibilities for action of a space; this is a very pragmatic interpretation of the spaces.
Many of these comments inferred that spaces were good for collaboration. For example, participants wrote, “Kitsch collaboration space hopefully stimulating creative thought by putting people in non-traditional space,” “opportunity away from the center of the office to meet or collaborate with some privacy,” and “casual setting to relax and discuss ideas. Great concept in a collaborative world.” Comments like these often went with tags on features like formal meeting areas, whiteboards, and informal group seating. In these cases, participants inferred how spaces might be collaborative based on physical features and likely also their own experiences with similar workspaces. One of the three images of organization three.
Participants made similar comments about other perceived uses. For example, many spaces were seen to afford relaxation and participants made comments like, “casual seating to relax and discuss ideas,” “a relaxing area to talk about ideas, work and socialize,” and “common space for relaxing with lots of natural light.” Similarly, participants also talked about how certain spaces seemed to support client meetings, focused work, privacy, and creativity.
In addition to inferring specific modes of work that certain spaces might support, participants also made inferences about what purpose specific spaces had. For instance, one image showed a room with many TVs. Many participants inferred (differently) what this space could be used for. Some guessed it was a “TV area to relax and recharge,” while others wrote, “nice TV setup to catch up on the news,” and another view was, “multiple TVs allow for video conferencing with multiple locations at the same time.” These participants and many others stated the use they interpreted this space to have, though they collectively gave a variety of responses. From a sensemaking lens, we argue that participants were applying their own retrospective experience with workplaces to interpret the salient cues about how a room with many TVs might function. These varying interpretations also demonstrate that although possibilities for action or how a space might be used can be read from workplace imagery, those interpretations may not always match how organizational members actually use that space. The heatmap of disliked elements in one of the images from organization two. Participants could click on points on each image and indicate whether they liked or disliked what they had clicked on and elaborate on their sentiment. A heat map of where participants clicked was then generated. Red areas received the most clicks.
This theme shows that many participants read the spaces by looking at the material features of a space and inferring what these spaces might be used for. This is not a true affordance reading—participants did not actually interact with material features to determine what behaviors they allow; however, they were able to interpret possible uses for such spaces, likely based on both their own experiences in workspaces and cultural meanings associated with such spaces.
Assessment of Organization
Another way participants read the images was by seeing them as messages about the organization and inferring what industry the organization might be a part of or organizational values. In doing so, we argue that respondents relied on narrative archetypes about how certain organizations should look. These assumptions were often specifically connected to aesthetic aspects of the physical environment. For example, design features often signaled a specific industry to participants: “Exposed ceiling makes me think of a more creative/less corporate organization instantly” and “Separate areas for quiet discussions again leads me to believe that people discuss financial opportunities. Maybe having clients come in and discuss market options.”
Participants also interpreted organizational values from features of the images. For instance, participants wrote, “Employees can pick their station. Stand or sit. Company must care about health and fitness of their employees” and “Access to fresh coffee and probably food – sign that organization is investing in its people and their happiness at work.” In general, these comments were positive, picking up on feature of the organization that seemed to indicate that the organization valued its employees and their wellbeing. It is notable that participants tended to read these features in positive ways, viewing the organization as the benevolent bestower of such a good work environment. Although features like food, coffee, and flexibility can certainly be signs of organizational leaders who care for their workers and their wellbeing, from a critical perspective, they can also be read as ways to extract more labor from workers and to encourage them to work longer hours. However, participants lauded organizations for these features, reading them in the positive ways organizations intend through such workplace imagery.
However, some participants read other aspects of the images more critically or cynically. These readings were often critical of cool aesthetics at the cost of functionality. For example: “Likely underutilized in real life, again the company invested in beauty rather than strategies to really bring people together,” “not sure about these cute chairs - makes me think they are not a practical company,” “Ugly building components exposed - maybe too cheap to fix? Makes the office feel temporary or disposable,” “This workspace makes no sense. It looks like they’re trying to show they care about design with statement pieces here and there, like the splash of blue over here and the lamp, but the space doesn’t seem very functional,” and “Low-rise cubicles suggest cost-cutting. I bet they think they’re getting more productivity out of people, but the noise likely means they’re getting a fraction of what they could.” These quotes indicate that some participants read aspects of organizational design in ways that are contrary to the organizations’ preferred readings of these spaces.
Beyond design features or that make organizations seem benevolent, participants also read the space as indicating something more broadly about the organization. For instance: Generally speaking, they’re cutting costs. The amount they spent on interior build must have been quite low. They only sprung for some real design pieces in the social space. They’re targeting younger folks most likely, but aren’t likely to impress with the working spaces.
Another participant wrote, “This company is ambitious – they have a huge, fully furnished office and not yet enough workers to fill it.” Quotes like these show that participants interpreted something about the organization’s health and goals based on physical features of the workspace.
For participants who assessed the organization through these images, their reading of the images was focused on the assumption that because the organization had designed and built this space, it was reflective of the values and culture of the organization. In doing so, they likely drew on existing schemata about organizational values, culture, and goals to create these readings of space, both positive and negative.
Placing Themselves in the Scene
Another way participants used the imagery to make sense of the organizations portrayed was to insert themselves in the scene as if they worked there and apply their own retrospective experience, identity, and preferences to construct a new narrative. Many of these comments were negative, based on individual preferences. Comments like this include: “I do not like how open it is—I like privacy while I work so I find this to be a very disruptive work environment,” “I don’t really know. I worked in an office that was similar and it was the worst experiences I have ever had,” and “It is very bland and uninviting, no photos or plants, it is sterile. I would not want to work there.” Comments like these show participants evaluating the spaces based on their preferences and past experiences. In some ways, this mode of interpretation is a variation on those who understood the spaces by looking for perceived uses and affordances; in this case, though, participants have a sense of potential uses and affordances based on their previous experiences.
In addition to negative perceptions of spaces based on past experiences, other participants tempered their evaluation by recognizing that while a given space would not be a good workspace for them personally it still had merits. For example: You’ll never get above a 5 with me with open-plan workspaces, but otherwise this place is definitely more concerned with making its space visually appealing and interesting than the last place, which shows some concern for the worker experience. Their use of materials and colors is particularly great.
Comments like these recognize the difference between personal preferences and what might be effective for other organizations and workers.
Finally, some participants used their personal experience and preferences to evaluate the space positively. Comments in this category include, “I do like the openness of the office, windows, and natural lighting. This will benefit the employees greatly. As someone who has worked in an office setting, not having natural light or windows is rough,” “Love it, I would love to work there,” and “I love the design. It’s such a fun, energizing space, I would want to bring all clients here to share the space, it would be good internally and externally.” These comments interpret the images through the lens of personal preferences that align with what is seen in the image and often draw on workers’ past experiences to think about how they might use the space.
Judgment of Workers
As further evidence that images conjure narratives of what organizational life should be like, some respondents appeared to make sense of scenes that violated preconceived norms by judging the workers in them. These comments were especially interesting because in many of the images, the photos had been taken with a long exposure and the workers were blurry, drawing more attention to the physical space and away from the workers. In many cases, participants seemed to read worker behavior as an indication of how the space and organizational culture did or did not facilitate effective work. These comments were often negative. For instance, participants wrote, “looks like no one is working,” “too relaxed with feet up on the couch. Not professional,” and, “don’t like that employee isn’t paying attention.” These comments suggest that what workers are doing in these images is interpreted as reflective of the organization’s culture and way of doing work. Participants generalized about worker behaviors in the images to see them as indicative of the organization as a whole.
A few participants had positive readings on employees pictured in the images such as “I like how comfortable the worker looks with her feet up,” “these folks look like they are really making headway,” and “all look engaged.” Interestingly, participants made divergent readings on the same images. For instance, one participant quoted above read an image of an employee with her feet up as too relaxed and unprofessional while another saw it as positive that she was so comfortable. It seems possible that participants come to these images with varying ideas about what the ideal worker or organization is and therefore assess the images differently based on these schemata.
A final way that participants evaluated the organization based on workers was by interpreting the demographics of the workers shown in the images as indicating organizations that lack diversity. Comments like this included, “Not very diverse – only Caucasians working here,” “I do not see a person under 30, are they practicing age discrimination?” and “Communities look like all shapes, sizes, and colors. Everyone pictured is white.” All of these comments demonstrate that even though the workers in workplace imagery may seem incidental, some people interpreted these workers in order to get a sense of how people work or the demographics of the organization.
Metaphors
Metaphorically comparing the scenes in the images to other spaces was another sensemaking strategy used by the respondents. Sometimes these comparisons were positive. For example, “Very open space similar to a Starbucks. Increases interactions between employees plus provides areas for private conversations,” and “large living room appearance. Provides openness, interaction in a relaxed area.” However, most of the comparisons with other spaces were negative. For instance, “Looks like a school classroom. How old are these employees anyway?” “Looks like a cruise ship, without the pool,” “Seems or looks like an airport lounge” and “It is not welcoming at all and I would feel like I am on a spaceship.” Participants who made these comparisons seemed to draw on similar physical features between these organizations and other spaces as a point of comparison. In many cases, if the compared space was not professional (e.g., school, cruise ship), that comparison resulted in a negative assessment of the space. Interestingly though, respondents kept their metaphors to the same genre (other spaces) (see Clair, 1986). Metaphors are deeply embedded in the study of organizations as a cognitive mechanism (Hill & Levenhagen, 1995), respondents in our study appeared to use metaphors to help them verbalize and make sense of an ambiguous image of an organization about which they had no assumed knowledge.
Discussion
In this paper, we described how people strategically interpret aestheticized workplace images disseminated online. We found that office workers reach generally favorable conclusions about the organizations portrayed in the images while engaging in sensemaking strategies that reflect varied attitudes. As organizations increasingly use visual and material strategies to communicate about their goals, values, and cultures, (Dale & Burrell, 2010), it is important to understand how people read and make sense of such imagery, particularly whether they interpret these images in organizationally-preferred ways or if they push back on the ideals presented in these images. To conclude, we discuss the implications of our findings in three areas: the aestheticization of work, interpreting the visual and material dimension of organizations, and visual organizational rhetoric.
Positive Interpretations through Aesthetics
Existing research on the increasing aestheticization of workplaces (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018) has demonstrated that organizations have used the physical environment of work to create identity (Strati, 1996) and communicate about values, culture, and ideals (De Molli et al., 2020). Organizations employ these strategies to construct positive narratives that credibly appeal to inside and outside stakeholders. Our findings contribute to this research by foregrounding users’ interpretations rather than interpretations of researchers (e.g., Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018) or what organizations hope to communicate through such images (e.g., de Vaujany & Vaast, 2014). We have shown that office workers use workplace design imagery to make sense of organizational life in ways consistent with preferred interpretations by organizations. Respondents used far more “like” tags than “dislikes,” and they borrowed common business rhetoric through their use of words like “collaborative” and “creative” to express their sentiments.
Participants seemed conditioned to read these images in certain ways. We suggest that most respondents recognized the common organizational messages (e.g., playfulness, health and wellness, ideal worker norms) often communicated through workplace imagery. Although participants sometimes challenged the ideals presented in these images by commenting on lack of diversity of employees, perceived lack of productivity, or their personal preference for more closed workspaces, the overwhelming sentiment was positive; even the participants who pushed back against these values recognized the messages in the images. Participants also often made more global interpretations about the organizations themselves, saying that the organizations must care about their people to offer such amenities. Additionally, participant comments tended to pick up on some of the features organizations would want them to notice like affordances for creativity and collaboration, cutting-edge design, flexibility, and natural light. These findings contribute to extant literature by demonstrating that, for the most part, organizations are achieving their goals of communicating positive messages through workplace imagery.
This finding is important because it suggests that organizations may be able to use design and aesthetics as a shorthand for communicating about what kind of organization they want to be without actually performing the behaviors needed to be perceived in this way. In other words, an aestheticized workspace can give an organization an automatic valence of goodness and care for workers.
Additionally, our findings continue to reinforce the centrality of aesthetics as a part of organizational life. Respondent comments show evidence of engaging their senses to establish aesthetic knowledge about the organizations represented in the images. The organizations encoded normative values through the designs and stylized images seen in the images, which participants seemed to be able to interpret. The consistency with which values were encoded suggests an institutional aesthetic (Creed et al., 2020), and the relative consistency in responses suggests an aesthetic path to making sense of and understanding those values.
Interpreting the Visual and Material Dimension of Organizations
Second, we contribute to existing literature by demonstrating how workers interpret, or read, messages that are communicated about organizations through these idealized images. Although there is research demonstrating that messages are communicated through the material environment of work and imagery of those settings (e.g., Christensen & Cheney, 2000; Pratt & Rafaeli, 2001), there has been very little research looking at how these images are read or interpreted. In this research, we demonstrated some of the modes of interpretation that workers used to find meaning in these images. These modes of interpretation fit are especially relevant to two areas of organizational communication scholarship: sensemaking and affordances.
Workplace images disseminated through the media are a sense-giving mechanism to help users reach a preferred reading of organizational life. In our study, we decontextualized the images from the platforms on which they appeared (news articles, company website, design websites, etc.) and imported them to our survey. Our methodology selected images that avoided giveaway cues such as company logos and branding; this led our respondents to search for other cues in the images from which they would make meaning. In short, respondents were given an ambiguous and equivocal visual rendering of organizational life from which to make sense. From the open-ended responses, our survey reveals sensemaking strategies that relied on cues from material and aesthetic affordances and that compelled respondents to insert themselves in the settings portrayed or recall retrospective experiences from similar settings. Although the images were decoupled from the platforms from which they were derived, our study reveals the effectiveness of architectural photographs of strategically aestheticized workplaces to elicit sensemaking that nudges users toward an organization’s more preferred interpretation of organizational life.
Affordances as Visual Interpretive Strategy
As participants made meaning from these images, one key mode of interpretation was recognizing the various possibilities for (inter)action within the environment (Gibson, 1979). Visual imagery of the physical environment of work captures an assemblage of affordances that collectively constitute an interpretation of an organizational narrative. The survey respondents were not experiencing an actual work environment, but they experienced a representation of it. The comments we collected in our dataset suggest that respondents sought to interpret how a space is used in everyday life, what the space suggests about the people using it and how they relate to one another in doing so, and what the space suggests about the organization in which it is embedded. Visual imagery is a communicative mechanism that can be intentionally deployed to shape that external perception of identity.
When we started our coding process, we identified “affordances” as an initial first-order code suggesting possibilities for actual use (i.e., a chair can be sat on, and it can be stacked with other chairs for easy storage). As we went through multiple rounds of coding, it became clearer to us that the visual representations of the physical environment of work (unlike experiencing the actual physical environment of work) invited some speculation from respondents about what might be possible, but with some degree of uncertainty. This mode of interpretation seems key as participants read possibilities for use and action into these images, particularly as the organizations we studied often had stated goals such as increased collaboration and creativity for these new spaces. Through speculating on affordances, participants were able to interpret these preferred meanings from the images. This finding is in contrast to Wilhoit (2017a) who argued that visual affordances were less effective at communicating than material affordances. The present study demonstrates that people can imagine themselves in material settings and therefore read certain affordances through an image, rather than direct interaction.
Visual Interpretation as Sensemaking
In addition to learning what messages the respondents interpreted from these images, our study provides clues about how they respond to messages. Respondents appeared to engage in some form of sensemaking in ways consistent with Weick’s (1995) theory of sensemaking. The prevalence of comments about the space—its materiality, spatiality, and aesthetics—represents a response to the most visible and salient cues about the organizations represented in each image. Some respondents did not read beyond the space, while others attempted to read the social context of the people in the images to construct seemingly plausible narratives. Others tapped their personal retrospective knowledge of past work environments and revealed something about their own identities and values by passing judgment on the people and organizations represented in each image.
Sensemaking is also evident in how different participants responded to the same images in divergent ways. What one participant might see as relaxing, another participant might see as unprofessional. These different interpretations of space reflect varying understandings of what makes a good worker or a professional organization that respondents then brought to their readings of these images. However, the fact that most of the responses to these images were positive suggests that participants have already been conditioned to understand such spaces and organizations as ideal, positively commenting on spaces that enabled collaboration, creativity, and comfort.
By taking affordances and sensemaking as prevalent frameworks for how workers interpret this kind of imagery, our data also show that participants often inserted themselves into the images, reading the affordances of the spaces as if they were there, interacting in an embodied way as well as reading their past and current organizational experiences into the images. These findings are important for understanding how workers interpret these images, particularly that a given workers’ past experiences might affect how they read aestheticized workplace imagery.
The Visual Dimension of Organizational Communication
Finally, we contribute to the existing literature on visual organizational communication and rhetoric. The current body of literature on this topic is small, but has demonstrated that visuals can be an effective means of conveying subtle organizational messages (Clair & Anderson, 2013; Ewalt, 2018; Gill & Wells, 2014). We expand on this body of research by showing how workers read these kinds of rhetorical messages—sometimes reading the messages that organizations would want them to read, sometimes reading a more cynical or critical message. This research is also significant as it considers how the visual and material work together. Ewalt’s (2018; 2019) research has used rhetorical field methods to understand the material and built environment of organizations while Gill and Wells (2014) and Clair and Anderson (2013) looked at images in persuasive documents. Here, we consider the photographic representation of material space. These images contain two levels of rhetoric: the space itself as well as how that space has been captured through photography. These images are therefore significant rhetorical texts, although they often circulate independently of context. Our analysis cannot easily show what parts of the interpretation are due to the actual physical space and which are because of the photographic framing, but it does point to a new aspect of visual rhetoric that merits further research.
Practical Implications
Practically, this research suggests that for many organizations, the investment in aesthetic workspaces and professional photography of those spaces is likely to reflect positively with the general public. However, that does not mean that these design choices are necessarily best for an organization’s employees. Organizations need to consider the simultaneous goals of effectively communicating to the public through physical spaces while also creating workspaces that will help employees to work most effectively to achieve the organization’s goals. Additionally, organizations are trying to reach several groups through aestheticized workplace imagery and potential employees is one of these. If an organization has cool or aesthetic spaces that do not accurately reflect the culture of an organization, these images may do the opposite of giving potential employees a realistic job preview; this can result in less satisfied employees and lower retention (Popovich & Wanous, 1982). Organizations may want to consider how images like those studied here could backfire if they portray the organization in an over-idealized light.
Conclusion
Our study finds that aestheticized images of office work environments are generally effective means of communicating normative messages about organizational values. Aestheticized workplaces that are staged, photographed, and disseminated online through business media reinforce ideal worker norms and invite interpretations of how those norms manifest within individual organizations. They also provide individuals with cues about how a space should be used and how they may (or may not) see themselves in alignment with assumed normative values and behaviors. Not all respondents bought into the values represented by the images. Some respondents flatly rejected the norms and values they perceived, while others offered alternative explanations. Most participants read normative messages about collaboration, creativity, and commitment to work from these images. They interpreted images of open offices, collaboration spaces, natural light, and attractive aesthetics as positive spaces and organizations.
Organizations strategically design workplaces, and they disseminate carefully aestheticized and staged images of them as a sense-giving mechanism to ensure that users construct preferred meanings about those organizations. Our method of using a visual survey to extract quantitative scores and qualitative comments about the organizations portrayed in the images offers a unique contribution to the study of organizational aesthetics and strategic communication. On the surface, the generally positive quantitative scores suggest that organizations are succeeding at eliciting favorable impressions about who they are. The diversity of qualitative comments that are a mix of both positive and negative sentiment suggests a deeper effort at making sense of the ambiguities inherent in the scenes. It suggests that the images impact the respondents in multiple ways. A positive numerical score may suggest latent conditioning to generally accept what organizations are portraying through visual media, while the mix of sentiments across the comments suggest that respondents are wrestling with the visual messages beyond face value. They are looking for salient cues among the affordances, and they are drawing from their own experiences to arrive at a plausible understanding of what is portrayed.
We began our study and collected our data prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but we conclude our efforts after the pandemic radically reordered the relationship between people and organizations. The home is competing with the office as an ideal place to work, and virtual work has become a more legitimate way of engaging as a member of an organization. Yet coming together in a shared setting like an office still matters, and organizations continue to invest in the design of their workspaces to encourage people to use them. Now more than ever, the messages embedded in workplace layout and design signal important prosocial values such as well-being, inclusion, and thriving that help organizations meet the needs of people in today’s changing society. Authentic portrayals of the workplace through visual media can be a powerful means of communicating positive organizational narratives.
Through our efforts, we contribute to the growing body of research and scholarship on the visual and aesthetic dimensions of organizational life. Using multi-media survey tools, we contribute to the ongoing advancement of methodologies that allow researchers to use imagery for understanding organizational life from a participant’s perspective. Finally, we offer methodological strategies and interpretive frameworks for advancing the discourse in management communications research around the use of online media and visual messaging.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
Bronczek Funds for Excellence, School of Communication and Journalism, Auburn University.
