Fashionable Interventions: The Pop-up Store as Differential Space
Organizational Aesthetics Cover Issue Vol. 6(1)
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Keywords

Pop-up store
spacing
Lefebvre
differential space
everyday user

How to Cite

OverdiekA. (2017). Fashionable Interventions: The Pop-up Store as Differential Space. Organizational Aesthetics, 6(1), 116-134. Retrieved from https://oa.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/oa/article/view/85

Abstract

What is a pop-up store and how can it be used for organisational counterspacing? The pop-up can be interpreted as a fashionable and hypermodern platform focusing on the needs of a younger generation of consumers that searches for new experiences and is prone to ad hoc decision-making. From this perspective, the pop-up is a typical expression of the experience economy. But it is more. The ephemeral pop-up store, usually lasting from one day to six months, is also a spatial practice on the boundary between place as something stable/univocal and space as something transitory/polyphonic. Organizational theory has criticized the idea of a stable place and proposed the concept of spacing with a focus on the becoming of space. In this article, the pop-up store is introduced as a fashionable intervention into organizational spacing. It suggests a complementary perspective to non-representational theory and frames the pop-up as co-actor engaging everyday users in appropriating space. Drawing on Lefebvre's notions of differential space, festival and evental moment, theory is revisited and then operationalized in two pop-up store experiments. Apart from contributing to the ongoing theoretical exploration of the spacing concept, this article aims to inspire differential pop-up practices in organisations.

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