Telfer Research Seminar Series - Samer Faraj
Lost in Space: The Interplay between Focal and Subsidiary Coordinating Following a Space Change
Deadline: April 10, 2025,
***M.Sc. Students, these seminars can count towards the six mandatory Research Seminars Series required for your program (MGT 6191/ MGT 6991 / MHS 6991) (4 seminars for MSc Project-based students).***
Samer Faraj, PhD
Research on coordination has traditionally focused on social and procedural arrangements that align collective action, yet this perspective often overlooks the embodied, pre-reflective processes that underpin effective coordinating. We draw on the distinction between focal and subsidiary coordinating, to argue that focal coordinating—deliberate efforts to structure workflows and align tasks—depends on subsidiary coordinating, which consists of taken-for-granted, backgrounded embodied actions that support joint work. Through an ethnographic study of a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) relocation, we find that space change required iterative embodied repairs that targeted subsidiary coordinating, ultimately reenabling focal coordinating. These repairs involved the reconfiguring of sensory access, inscribing new bodily habits, reallocating who-senses-what and reorienting intercorporeal action. Our findings contribute to theories of coordinating and space by showing how spatial disruptions cannot be fully addressed through social or procedural adjustments alone but must involve the reconstruction of embodied subsidiary coordinating.
About the Speaker
Samer Faraj is professor at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Innovation and Organizing, an associate member of the McGill Department of the Social Studies of Medicine, head of the research group on Complex Collaboration and has served
