Chapter Five: Pressure, Performativity and Precarity: The City as an Organising Place

The findings show that geography does matter to how the City is perceived and experienced; its rhythms construct it as a rarefied place, with a particular sociocultural heritage which is sustained and reinforced by its particular and distinct materiality. Furthermore, the research has brought to the fore issues around belonging in this space, by revealing how the relationship between the social and the material creates a place perceived as performative and requiring that conditions of membership be met. The theoretical premise, derived from Lefebvre’s (1991) theorisation of space as socially produced, was initially developed in response to questions about how organisational place can be experienced as a distinct and distilled form of space. More particularly, the aim was to explore and understand the experience of working in such an organisational setting as the City of London, and what this can tell us about how it is perceived as an organisation in itself. As a particular place, that is, named, perceived and experienced as such, this global marketplace espouses opportunity and meritocracy, concepts often confirmed by interview participants, yet it is perceived and experienced as gendered – essentially masculine and bound by strict rules as to who can succeed. Exploring what this means for the people who work there, how they perceive themselves and others to be in or out of place here, and what the performativities of the place reveal about the experience of working here, was the basis of the empirical research.