When the Gallic Village Strikes Back: The Politics Behind ‘New Ways of Working’ Projects

In the last decade, the interest of managers and professionals for New Ways of Working (NWoW) has grown rapidly, as evidenced by multiple firms claiming to implement ‘NWoW workspaces’ in Belgium and in the Netherlands. NWoW is often used as a convenient umbrella term to designate a set of organizational adjustments that include open and ‘flexible’ workspaces, new IT tools, as well as cultural and managerial transformations believed to be ‘innovative’. While the academic literature has investigated several cases of NWoW workspaces through post-occupancy studies, there is at the present time no research available on the change process leading to these transformations. The ambition of the paper is to conceptualize NWoW as projects of organizational change subject to politics and power games. Through an empirical study of a multi-site media company implementing a NWoW project, the paper illustrates three implications of a political conception of NWoW. First, the ability of local actors to bargain and to twist the strategic intentions of the deciding authorities is highlighted. Second, the study underlines the crucial role of key intermediaries in designing NWoW projects. Third, participative approaches of change are critically discussed. The paper also provides recommendations for future research on NWoW.