Motivation Bathroom the Best Bathroom: Doing Community Through Graffiti-Writing in a Liminal Space

This article draws attention to a seldomly studied use of organizational space and examines how bathroom graffiti-writing produces a liminal community of care and kind motivating within a Finnish university. I explore an empirical case in which graffiti-writers of a specific bathroom, the “motivation bathroom,” have become informally organized around a shared cause without ever meeting or getting to know each other. Conceptualizing bathrooms as solitary liminal spaces, I examine how various forms of communitas are embedded in the “motivation bathroom” graffiti and how this experience of togetherness enables the graffiti-writers to sustain their shared message of care and kind motivating. The study advances the research on smaller scale organizational liminal spaces and proposes that future management and organizations studies would benefit from a wider use of the concept of communitas. The article also joins the emerging stream of micro-level material studies of work and organizing.