"Splitting" or "Reorganization": A Case Study on Non-Teaching Time Usage of University Teaching Space

The use of teaching space is an important content of university management, but it faces new challenges in the digital age, such as "it is difficult to find suitable space to carry out activities independently after class" and "the approval process of online space application is cumbersome". Based on spatial sociology perspective, this study regards teaching space as both material space and social space, aiming to investigate the current use of teaching space in non-teaching time and its influencing factors, provide reference suggestions for optimizing the management of university teaching space, and provide a new perspective for understanding the specific manifestations of university administrative ethics. It is found that students are the main users of teaching space in non-teaching time, but the process of using is dominated by administrative staff. Students and administrators variously position the teaching space with different symbols and layouts, and then use the surface principle of "flexible reorganization" and the deep principle of "mechanical cutting" to allocate the teaching space. This phenomenon reflects the characteristic of institutional context and social interactions related to space use, namely a fair system under the power structure and a negotiation dilemma in the rule system.