The importance of drawing boundaries in the construction of organizational space is well-known within organization studies. However, aspects of space have primarily been treated as background for the identified strategies to defend, negotiate or construct professional boundaries in extant boundary work research. Therefore, the spatial nature of boundary work remains underexplored. Inspired by Lefebrve’s conceptualization of perceived, lived and conceived space, this study foregrounds organizational space in an analysis of boundary work. The analysis draws on a practice-based case study of a team of nurses, healthcare assistants and healthcare helpers providing care to home-based adults in the context of the Danish municipal healthcare sector. The study captures the spatial dynamics of boundary work through examining the professionals’ everyday movement paths in and through differently bounded spaces, and their efforts to organize, orchestrate and envision spaces. It shows how spaces interact such as when the physical layout of a communal room challenges effective team meetings, leading the professionals to create spaces for coordination and documentation in their cars and to envision spaces for being exclusively the team. The study contributes to existing literature by empirically showing the multiple ways boundary work is spatial and by emphasizing the interconnectedness of spaces in shaping the social order in an organization. The main implication of the findings is that studying a single space is insufficient to understand boundary work and its organizing effects.
