Dataset BUREU Project - Marco Ninno

Europe at Work: Office Spaces and the Making of the European Commission

This dissertation reconstructs the institutional history of the European Commission through the lens of its office spaces, arguing that the material environments in which European civil servants lived and worked were not mere backdrops to integration but active participants in its making. Moving from a historiography that has long focused on the Commission's legislative role or its external architectural presence, this research proposes a bottom-up, 'horizontal' approach to Europeanisation, one attentive to the vecue, the lived experience, of the institution's everyday bureaucratic life. Informed by Material Engagement Theory, the study treats office spaces as constitutive of organisational identity, shaping routines, hierarchies and institutional self-understanding. The dissertation conceptualises the Commission's organisational culture as a dynamic system evolving through periodic 'upgrades', institutional events such as relocations, mergers and enlargements, while exhibiting strong path-dependence that constrained spatial and administrative change alike. By describing what it meant to work in ‘Europe’, this dissertation offers a new material history of Europeanisation, one in which bureaucratic spaces are revealed as constitutive of the very 'European-ness' they were meant to embody.

Throughout, Institutional documentation is complemented by discourse and visual analysis of floor plans and photographs, and by the Courrier du personnel, the Commission's internal staff magazine, which provides a rare bottom-up perspective on how civil servants perceived and contested their spatial environment and their role in the broader European project. Oral history testimonies from the HAEU collections further illuminate practices absent from the official record.

《欧洲职场：办公空间与欧洲委员会的形塑》

本论文以欧洲委员会（European Commission）的办公空间为视角，重构其制度史。研究提出，欧洲公务员工作与生活的物质环境并非欧洲一体化进程的单纯背景板，而是深度参与了一体化的形塑过程。相较于过往长期聚焦于欧洲委员会立法职能与外在建筑风貌的史学研究，本研究提出一条自下而上的“横向”欧洲化研究路径，关注该机构日常官僚生活中的亲历体验。本研究依托物质参与理论（Material Engagement Theory），将办公空间视为组织身份的构成性要素，其形塑着组织的日常惯例、层级结构与制度自我认知。本论文将欧洲委员会的组织文化概念化为一个动态系统：该系统通过定期“升级”、搬迁、合并与扩容等制度性事件不断演进，同时展现出极强的路径依赖特征，对空间与行政变革均形成约束。本论文通过阐释“在欧洲机构中工作”的意涵，为欧洲一体化研究提供了全新的物质史视角，揭示出官僚办公空间恰恰是其本应承载的“欧洲属性”的构成性要素。

本研究全程以官方档案为基础，辅以对建筑平面图与照片的话语分析与视觉分析，同时借助欧洲委员会内部员工杂志《员工通报（Courrier du personnel）》——该刊物罕见地提供了自下而上的视角，展现公务员如何感知、审视自身所处的空间环境，以及他们在更宏大的欧洲一体化事业中所扮演的角色。欧洲联盟历史档案馆（Historical Archives of the European Union, HAEU）馆藏的口述历史证词，进一步揭示了官方档案未记载的实践活动。