This thesis contributes to a narrative about the interwovenness of the sociomaterial
world. To do so, I propose a new way of thinking about the collective activities that form
a fundamental part of our lives: namely, I argue that organising is geographically
constituted. Taking issue with existing engagements in organisation studies with
geography and pointing to the lively debates about space, place, scale and territory in
human geography, I draw these together by arguing for the geographical
constitutiveness of organising as a conceptual framework at the intersection of these
two fields. This framework incorporates a processual, relational, and sociomaterial view
of the world. Further, by plugging in (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) the notion of rhizome
to assemblage, I suggest that ‘rhizomatic assemblage’ serves as a useful metaphorical
tool for thinking at this intersection. Building from this, the research question that this
thesis seeks to answer is: How can collective activities of organising be understood as
geographically constituted?
To respond to this question, a methodological argument draws on new materialism and
Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’ in favour of a diffractive ethnographic approach
(Gullion, 2018), in which ‘agential cuts’ implicate the researcher’s ethics and ways of
knowing with the phenomena that exist in the world. Diffractive considerations of my
subjectivity as researcher and my values inform whyhe focus of empirical fieldwork was
on a particular rhizomatic assemblage: the Redbricks, a housing estate in Hulme,
Manchester. Findings from the fieldwork are discussed in terms of four agential cuts to
the rhizomatic assemblage: genealogising, shaping, cultivating and geometabolising.
Each provokes a new perspective about how collective activities on the Redbricks are
geographically constituted, and how organising is a geographical accomplishment.
Throughout, collective activities on the estate are (re)considered as a rhizomatic
assemblage: as consequential unfoldings of geographically constituted collective
activities of organising also imbued with potentiality. Thus, this thesis enlivens a
narrative about the sociomaterial becomings-together that give meaning to our lives,
and suggests ways that such activities should be encouraged
