364 ANALYZING DATA
blind spot: Bodies, and built spaces, were to be controlled, not engaged, and social science, in
order to render objective, detached, external observation, would perforce have to focus elsewhere.
The language I have used here may seem, at times, either to suggest that buildings speak for
themselves or to attribute to them the meanings intended by their “authors” (founders, executives,
architects) alone. I have written, for example, “buildings convey,” when what I mean is, “the
buildings comprise elements that their designers intended to use to convey” or “users and pass-
ersby interpret these spatial elements to mean... .” I have shorthanded my language to avoid a
certain cumbersomeness, but I do not intend to suggest that meaning resides in the artifact. Mean-
ings are what we read in design elements, whether “we” are architects, critics, researchers with a
more schooled awareness of such processes, or research-relevant publics with more tacitly known
understanding. Settings address a wider audience than that immediately present to observe the acts
therein contained, as Edelman (1964, 100) pointed out, and spatial meanings are communicated
differently to those who pass through and engage the artifacts and to those who only look upon
them. In the end, the interpretation is important not only for its own sake, but, as others have also
noted (e.g., Schon and Rein 1994 and the Brandwein and Schmidt chapters in this volume), for the
fact that interpretive schemas typically lead to action in conformity with their organizing categories.
Lastly, we commonly think of interpersonal interactions as the occasions in, and through, which
social realities and their meanings are created. Yet, at times, spaces and their appurtenances stand in
for at least one party in this exchange. This is eminently visible—even to those not possessed of a
natural spatial “intelligence”—in considering prisons, where the power of the state is made manifest
in all manner of physical design elements. Pondering such “extreme” designs may help researchers
become more attuned to the role of space in communicating other sorts of meanings. It may also
sensitize them—us—to the role of space in less- or non-extreme settings.NOTES
My thanks to Anat Rafaeli and Michael Pratt for comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Four
subsequent readers kept me from getting “lost” in space. Ellen Pader and Clare Ginger kept me honest with
their close, informed readings of the draft of this chapter; and Jo Hatch and Peri Schwartz-Shea provided the
cheerleading that worked out the final knots and moved it to its present form.- Some of the exceptions attending to political and policy meanings are Edelman (1978, 1995); Goodsell
(1988, 1993); Lasswell (1979); Mosse (1975); and Pader (1988, 1993, 1994b, 1998); see also Law and
Whittaker (1988). Works focusing on archaeology and on cartography and on other forms of representation
are also space- and/or place-oriented (e.g., Abu El-Haj 2001; Casey 2002; T. Mitchell 1991; Orlove 1991;
Zerubavel 1995), albeit in different ways. In human (social) geography, urban design, semiotics, cultural
studies, and organizational studies, see, e.g., F. Becker and Steele (1995); C. Cooper (1976); Gottdiener and
Lagopoulos (1986); Hatch (1990); J.B. Jackson (1980, 1984); Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998); K. Lynch (1960,
1972); Meinig (1979); Noschis (1987); Preziosi (1979); Rapoport (1976, 1982); and Zeisel (1981); cf.
Goodman and Elgin (1988) and Casey (1993) for philosophical treatments. Other organizational studies that
discuss spatial elements include Doxtater (1990); Feldman (1989); Ingersoll and Adams (1992); Kanter
(1977a); Kunda (1992); Orr (1996); Rosen (2000); Rosen, Orlikowski, and Schmahmann (1990); Steele
(1973, 1981); and Van Maanen (1978, 1991). Anthropology has also had a long-standing interest in space
and place, some of which addresses spatial meanings in a sociopolitical context (see, e.g., Levinson 1996;
Low 2000; Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003). Goodsell (1988, chapter 1), Rapoport (1982, chapter 1), and
Lawrence and Low (1990) provide good overviews of what is an enormous field of inter- and cross-disci-
plinary research. My own work in this area has been both substantive (Yanow 1993; 1996, chapter 6; 1998)
and methodological (2000, chapter 4). - Casey appears to be making a similar argument: “Place rediscovered by means of body?... If we are
surprised at this clue, it is only because one of the main agendas of philosophical modernity is the subordi-
nation of all discrete phenomena to mind” (1997, 203; emphasis in original). Although his central concern is
the distinction between place and space, his discussion there of Descartes and others’ “subsumption of every