Placing a workers’ resistance movement against factory closure

To the invitation "to think spatially" raised in this special issue, we answer with a proposal to think "placially". Based on an emerging research stream linking place and organisational resistance, we want to understand, through the in-depth study of the revelatory case of the longlasting struggle of ex-Fralib workers in France, how to think placially about a workers' movement resisting a managerial decision of factory closure. Place is central in this case, as the studied resistance movement appears to be coconstructed with a renewed sense of the factory as a place of collective ownership. Our main aim, in this paper, is therefore to participate in the integration of place into the conceptual repertoire of scholars in management and organisation studies (MOS) by inductively analysing the place-based dimension of a phenomenon such as organisational resistance. The article reflects the empirical approach adopted. It first traces the theoretical foundations in our field on organisational resistance and its spatial dimension before defining the concept of place from the relational perspective adopted in this study. A methodological section then describes our textual materials (the entire blog posted online by resisting workers throughout the struggle) and our computer-assisted discourse analysis technique. Following the presentation of our findings (i.e., 6 classes of discourse), we discuss our two contributions: 1) the description of three pairs of emplaced organisational practices of resistance, namely, a) [nonreification/rebuilding], b) [singularization/securitization], and c) [staging/staying] and 2) additional insights into the main descriptive principles of place in MOS, which are uniqueness and delimitation.