354 ANALYZING DATA
in-action extend analysis beyond what was intended by the initiator of the communication—in
the case of built spaces, their designers and/or the clients commissioning the design. This expanded
view of meaning making parallels the critique of earlier sender-receiver-noise models of communi-
cation as overly simplistic (see, e.g., Neuman, Just, and Crigler 1992; L. Putnam and Pacanowsky
1983). According agency to readers–audience members of intended, “authored” meanings—such
as the users of an architect-designed parliamentary building—moves them from the more passive-
reactive role in which they or their behaviors are seen only as being shaped by the space, to a more
active one, in which they, too, are perceived as acting on built spaces, modifying them, rejecting
their intended uses, and so forth.^9 In light of the inherent possibilities for multiple interpretations
(given divergent prior experience, background, education, and so on), such an approach focuses
attention on the possibility of tensions among situational members’ interpretations, including those
between designers and users, between authored meaning and constructed meaning. This potential
multiplicity of meaning needs to be explored in any interpretive analysis.
The dramatistic metaphor as invoked by Goffman (1959) is more psychological. In distin-
guishing between front and back stages in individual self-presentation, he attends to the ways in
which individuals highlight some aspects of self while relegating others to a less publicly avail-
able arena (or at least intending to do so, with varying degrees of success). The four-cell “Johari
window” of Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham (Luft 1963) provides a more nuanced elaboration of
this distinction. They point out that individuals know some things about themselves and some are
known to others; but in addition, people at times seek to hide things from others that they know
about themselves, and there are other aspects of identity that may not be known even to the
individual. In other words, individuals are aware of the “public self” that they are presenting on
the “front stage,” but observers may also see elements of which the person being observed is
unaware (the “blind self” in the Johari window). Similarly, individuals are aware of the “private
self” of elements they seek to keep “backstage.”^10
The front stage–back stage distinction is less a comment on architectural design—architects,
after all, intentionally build in spaces for storage and support activities (usually); this is typically
an explicit part of the client conversation. Rather, it is a comment on the usage of space: govern-
mental buildings that house activities intended to be kept out of sight or “below the radar” (figu-
ratively, if not literally) or areas within a built space that an organization determines are not part
of the public “face” that they want to put on their activities. At the same time, it can be a comment
on space users’ readings of intended design meanings: Users may in fact be aware, even if only
tacitly (until asked to reflect on them), of organizational executives’ intentions for spatial design
even when the latter think they are hidden from public view. The siting and extent of difference
between back and front stage spaces can be critical elements of an analysis, as can the variety of
front and back stages in any study—their types, the degrees of differentiation between them, their
relationships to each other, the “assignment” of certain types or degrees of stage to certain groups
of people, and so on.^11
What this discussion points to is the fact that the various “inhabitants” of a built space may find
themselves negotiating among disparate, if not discordantly divergent, meanings of those spaces.
Ellen Pader’s analyses (e.g., 1993, 1994b) of the conflict between culturally based norms embed-
ded in U.S. residential occupancy codes and the norms of some occupants, or Sandra Stein’s
analysis (2004) of teachers’ and children’s at times conflicting uses of school spaces—for ex-
ample, in “lining up for integration” for ESEA Title I implementation purposes—provide ex-
amples of the intricacies of the negotiation of spatial meanings.
These several categories can help a researcher think about where to look to access data in a
spatial study, and what to look for.