Recalibrating Worth: Categorisation, Resistance, and Compromise in University Spaces during a Global Pandemic

New Public Management (NPM) and New Managerialism (NM) have intensified efficiency pressures in universities (Du and Lapsley, 2019), with spatial audits scrutinising space utilisation (SMG, 2006a). The individual academic office exemplifies this tension: framed as outdated and inefficient amid open-plan layouts and hybrid working (Parker, 2020b), yet it persists and continues being constructed. Why?
This ethnographic study examines this paradox through a UK university building's spatial redesign before, during, and after COVID-19. It investigates how competing spatial values are negotiated: academics view individual offices as symbols of identity, autonomy, and progression; management sees them as costly inefficiencies. How are such divergent values reconciled?
The research frames these negotiations as valuation processes (Kjellberg et al., 2013), where competing orders of worth (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) are contested through spatial design. Three key compromise mechanisms emerged:
• Shadow Categorisation: A discrete process enabling decision-makers to allocate resources differently without articulating evaluative criteria. Operating beneath formal procedures, it maintains public fairness claims while supporting managerial priorities and implicit hierarchies.
• Strategic Ambiguity: Ambiguity functions as a deliberate tactic obscuring calculative practices, allowing management to impose efficiency measures without overtly invoking quantitative metrics, thus facilitating contentious compromises without open conflict.
• Boundary Testing Pause: Physical structures like individual offices become strategic resistance tools. Academics leverage these spaces to enact calculated delays and avoid written commitments, creating pauses to observe managerial intentions while maintaining perceived collaboration without full compliance.
The findings demonstrate that university spatial configurations function as valuation compromise sites, where actors deploy these three mechanisms to align conflicting values without resolving underlying tensions. This contributes to debates on how physical spaces mediate organisational change, showing compromises embedded in physical forms themselves.