Microcultural geographies: navigating awkwardness in the postpandemic workplace

The concept of culture is central to geographical inquiry, yet it remains a vexed concern for geographers, in so far as the expansiveness of what counts as culture has raised questions regarding what culture is and whether culture still has analytical relevance within geography. Conceptually, nonrepresentational theories and process ontologies in particular have taken it to be a “whole way of life,” often addressed only tangentially or implicitly. One domain of everyday life where culture has become an emic object of address is the workplace. Here culture is a central object of concern typically understood as established norms and values. What such representational understandings can obscure, however, are the nonrepresentational corporeal and habitual dimensions of culture that wax and wane beneath such high-level codes of conduct. Bringing these dimensions into view, our article does three things. First, it explores and evaluates the changing workplace cultures diagnosed by research participants who work for companies transitioning to hybrid working arrangements in Australia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, it introduces and develops the concept of microcultures for geography. This concept advocates for a narrowing of the analytical aperture away from “whole way of life” and attends to the specific nonrepresentational dimension of workplace culture flagged by our participants. Third, it stages this discussion of microculture in relation to the concept of awkwardness that performs a diagnostic role regarding how our participants evaluated the modulation of microcultures. Attending to these three avenues, we develop the concept of microculture for cultural geography.