How can I stop workspaces from switching automatically to other workspaces when selecting different applications?

I personally find it extremely annoying, and bad UI, to have the context/rug/workspace be pulled from underneath me and I want to prevent, under any circumstance, except of my own choosing the automatic workspace re-adjustment program that Unity (and OSX, but that's another story) imposes on me. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

UPDATE

The interface solution that I'm looking for exists already in Gnome "Classic", unfortunately it is not as nice of a desktop as Unity or Gnome3, it has a simple bar at the top and an open windows bar at the bottom of the screen, and on this bottom bar there are 4 work-spaces screens on the right side, it is these that work exactly how I imagined a good work-space should work -- that is: in each work-space I can start up an application and if I switch to another one work-space I can start up the same application without being switched to my previous works-pace.

I imagine if this behavior exists already that someone with deep knowledge about the work-space or perhaps a developer that has worked on these or their updated counterpart in Unity could let me know how the appropriate settings can be manipulated in Unity to bring back the behaviour of the work-spaces similarly to gnome 'classic'.