Drawing on 55 interviews with professional opera singers, we consider the role that occupational myths play in helping the precariously employed make sense of their work and sustain their commitment to it. We advance our theoretical understanding in this area in two distinct ways. First, by theorizing occupational myths as a powerful social device that helps to rescript the intelligibility of precarious work, along with normative responses to it. Second, by grounding myths' utility in their capacity to counteract precarity's tendency to constrain workers' temporal horizons. In the context of research showing that precarity locks workers into the anxious present, we show how myths push time horizons back out again, ultimately in sustaining ways. Through these contributions, we add new pieces to the increasingly complex theoretical puzzle of how and why people endure precarious work.

In this article, we elaborate on the significance of suffering in processes of embodied identity construction. Drawing on interviews with 62 chefs employed in elite kitchens around the world, we make two main contributions. First, we extend our understanding of suffering as a traumatic, alienating experience by theorizing it as a distinctive form of embodied identity work. We show how suffering can function as a mechanism through which people forge an understanding of who they are. Our second contribution extends the first by elaborating on what we call the aesthetics of suffering. We show how suffering can be perversely appreciable, distinguishing and endured in culturally significant, identity-implicative ways. Via this theorization, we progress our understanding of how identities are forged through (and read from) suffering bodies, and add an additional layer of interpretation to research in which matters of embodied identity and suffering are nascent but largely neglected.

Flexwork, that is, the combination of shared offices and telework, is one of the major changes affecting the workplace these days. But how do employees react to these transformations of their work environment? In this article, we investigate employees’ resistance to the introduction of flexwork in a large Belgian organization. We show employees resisting this workspace transformation through the use of personal objects as means to physically reconnect to the place, using objects to convey their claims and objectively occupy places. Though space has become a key analytic concept in the study of organizations, research still largely neglects the concrete role played by personal objects in the capacity of workers to resist change in the occupation of workspaces. We highlight the mutual constitution of objects and space in practices of resistance to workspace change. We show specifically how the politicality of these materials – referred to here as objectal resistance – comes from the meaning that people assign to objects when they place them in order to re-establish workers’ bodily presence at work – that is, from acts of objects embodiment and emplacement. We contribute to studies of resistance in the workplace by showing that objectal resistance is a complex combination of overt and covert activities, which leads to seeing the classic opposition between recognition and post-recognition politics in a new light.

In this article we elaborate on the connection between organizational isolation and misbehaviour. Drawing on 47 interviews with elite chefs we make a twofold contribution to the misbehaviour literature. First, we conceptualize misbehaviour amongst chefs as a potentiality engrained into the geography of the kitchens they work in. Drawing on Smith (1987), we call this a geography of deviance. Through this concept we show that misbehaviour can be inscribed into a place, through structures that create feelings of invisibility, alienation and detachment. Second, we make sense of chefs' misbehaviour by using Turner's theory of normative communitas. Via this framing misbehaviour is cast as a ritualized component of an anti-structural way of being, where the kitchen is simultaneously apprehended as an instrument of social withdrawal and a symbol of deviance around which the community pivots. Through these contributions we help to crystalise the relationship between organizational isolation and misbehaviour, particularly in the context of chefs and kitchens.

This article sheds light on how a group of workers manage to create an enduring collective resistance, in an uncongenial context of neoliberal management pushing for compliant behaviours. Research on resistance has given scant attention to the concrete conditions through which collective resisting efforts can be sustained, despite adverse contexts. We highlight the process through which everyday collective resistance produces substantial effects and becomes viewed by management and workers as an integral part of an organization’s power relations. We particularly illuminate how practices that mutually constitute belongingness and insubordination continuously reinforce collective resistance to make it the very texture of workers’ lives. We therefore analyse everyday resistance as a way of life, through which workers aim to simultaneously contest managerial authority and protect their own social boundaries in a neoliberal context. Thereby, we offer a way to reconcile recognition and post-recognition politics in a dialogue envisaging the ‘efficacy’ of resistance in a new light.

This paper examines how a collective of prisoners transform their everyday lives in a high security prison. We show how these individuals both become new beings, and significantly modify certain functioning rules of the prison and the relationships they have with the prison authorities; we theorize these achievements as produced by two body-related rituals created by prisoners themselves: one related to rugby games and trainings, another related to weekly collective prayers. We show how these rituals enhance the collective energy of the group and build capacities for prisoners to learn new knowledge and skills. Our analysis rests on an ethnographic study of the inmates’ rugby team “Los Espartanos”. We specifically analyze corporeal interactions during rugby games and collective prayers as embodied social practices that are meaningful and meaning making. We use carnal sociology to analyze how the acquisition and ritualization of corporeal collective capacities hold possibilities of transformation in very constraining organizational environments.

Durkheim’s contributions to organization studies have so far been decidedly marginal, and largely concentrated on culture. In this paper, we draw upon his theory of anomie and solidarity to show how a Durkheimian view of contemporary organizations and work has special relevance today for debates about how workers, particularly middle managers, can reshuffle a capacity to resist neoliberal efforts to profoundly disrupt their working conditions, in particular their autonomy to define what is a job well done. We show how Durkheim’s insights can account for the unexpected rekindling of forms of social solidarity in highly competitive and individualistic organizational settings, through dissident efforts that convey a renewal of a certain work ethos severed by neoliberal managerial policies and practices. Recent studies on resistance confirm Durkheim’s view that forms of collective activity, resembling supposedly ‘old’ mechanisms of former days, continue to exist and develop in contemporary societies and organizations, in response to pressure to put people in situations of inter-individual competition that disrupts social relationships.

In this chapter, the authors show what has been possible when undertaking ethnographic work within certain restrictions. But they take their reflections further in considering the possible futures of organizational ethnography to embrace those studies with more fundamental challenges to convention. Before considering the futures of organizational ethnography, the authors offer some initial reflections that are born of the period of the pandemic and describe how the lead author developed and modified her research to respond to the specific challenges of that context. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 necessitated that ethnographic researchers globally assess the efficacy of traditional approaches towards ethnography in a world in which the nature of work and the places within which work occurs is becoming increasingly fragmented and dispersed. The authors focus on some of the methodological, ethical and practical considerations in re-designing the original, traditional ethnography into a more digital form, in real time and in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Recent studies on identity regulation emphasize the significance of the body in mediating individuals’ responses to cultural control within organizations. However, little is known about how such responses are concretely enacted by individuals through their bodies. Based on an ethnography of an activist organization, this study discusses the culture of self-sacrifice through which activists’ identity is regulated. It reveals the everyday tensions between passionate commitment and vulnerable bodies, exploring how body breakdowns lead activists to separate their passion for a cause from the organizational culture and ultimately make their exit. We thus aim to contribute to research on identity regulation by highlighting the precariousness of this process and demonstrating the political potential of bodies to resist controlling regimes. We interpret breakdowns as political events emerging at the interface between the docile enactment of a bodily norm and its concrete physical violence.

© 2020 Collective. Citation: M@n@gement 2020: 23(3): 100–121 https://doi.org/10.37725/mgmt.v23i3.5380 Published by the AIMS with the support of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. UNPLUGGED Doing Ethnography: Walking, Talking, and Writing

Secrecy and ethics are often seen as opposing forces within organizations. Secret work is viewed as unethical, as it excludes others from knowing and is associated with self-interested behavior. We contend that this view does not account for the dynamic inherent to secrecy and to the fact that ethics is embedded in social relations. This paper suggests an alternative view. We consider secrecy as a social process which allows employees to maintain their ethics when faced with managerial policies that affect the quality of their work. Building on an in-depth case study of a team of journalists who worked in secret after their managers decided to prioritize the interests of shareholders and advertising firms, we show how these journalists managed to maintain collective ethics through secrecy and to do their work according to their own moral principles. This paper offers two primary contributions. First, we show a mutually beneficial relationship between ethics and secrecy in organizations, wherein secrecy helps maintaining ethics in everyday work. Second, the paper shows how secrecy can lead to ethical resistance, via a transformation of the power relationship with managers.

This paper draws from Durkheim’s analysis of rituals to examine how a collective of prisoners transform their everyday lives in a high security prison. We show how these individuals both transform themselves into new beings, and significantly modify certain functioning rules of the prison and the relationships they have with the prison authorities; we theorize these achievements as produced by a collective entrepreneuring process. Our analysis rests on an ethnographic study of the inmates’ rugby team “Los Espartanos”. We specifically analyze the influence of corporeal interactions during rugby games and collective prayers on their collective capacity to change some rules of the prison. We use Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence to analyze entrepreneuring as the ritualization of everyday encounters permitting the production of novel individual and collective ethics. We highlight the usefulness of a sociology of entrepreneuring, seen as the expression of inter-corporeal experiences shared by a group in a constraining context.

This article aims to shed light on how ‘powerless’ people can organize to survive in situations of mass oppression. Research on powerlessness often explains compliance and political inaction by a culture of silence, generated from the sedimentation of numerous experiences of defeat. We question this assertion by drawing from an illustration of certain inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto, who managed to create a micro-society and reclaim the social relations the Nazis sought to destroy. Building on the work of Schaffer, we explain these collective ethics of resistance as the view that people should actively participate in the creation and maintenance of their own social relations. Through this lens, we argue that ethics and resistance are intertwined.

Most studies on the links between secrecy and creativity have focused on individual sources of creativity and the impact of organizational management on creative initiatives. However, because of their very focus on individual practices of concealment and personal creative capacities, they have paid scant attention to collective interactions occurring around secrets. In this paper, we illuminate some mechanisms through which the creative work achieved in secret by scientists is enhanced by the exceptional character of their situation within the company. Coping with these exceptional circumstances leads the group to increase commitment, cohesion and efficiency. We theorize creativity as a result of the multiplication of social interactions among individuals and the social consequences of working and cooperating in secret. We show that secrecy can help rather than be detrimental to organizations when it is analysed as a social fabric of interactions around work and common feelings triggered by the risks of working in secret.

This chapter emphasizes the centrality of power to management and organization. Management is a practice of power, framing management as a form of government whereby the conduct of individuals can be influenced and people can create arrangements permitting the distribution of work and responsibilities. It is also a capacity to construct infrastructures of power within which people can accomplish their tasks. Moreover, it is a practice of debate and deliberation around the means, ends and meanings of the workplace. On this basis, the chapter strives to highlight and illustrate the interrelations between management as power and some historical infrastructures within which power is concretely exercised. More specifically, it addresses the fundamental tension between centres and peripheries, suggesting that managing power is mostly about regulating the balance between the autonomy of local actors and the necessities of respecting central rules of operation.

In recent decades, organizational research on resistance has been largely characterized by a strict divide between hidden and public forms of resistance. We contend that this division impedes a full understanding of how resistance can be efficacious. We suggest that hidden and public forms of resistance are in fact interrelated and mutually reinforced along processes of struggle. In order to study this relationship, we analyze the four-and-a-half-year struggle of a group of dismissed employees against their former employer. This study aims to contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we show that the development of public resistance is nourished by discrete individualistic and non-confrontational expressions of dissent. Second, we demonstrate how the efficacy of resistance is influenced by the meaningfulness of the resisting space constituted by the blog, because of the intricacies between private lives and public roles. Finally, we show that the outcome of resistance is also influenced by the politics of the resisters themselves. We analyze resistance as a dynamic and ambivalent process during which the resisting group can disagree on strategy, thus triggering diverging initiatives that can develop into radicalization.

Journal of Management StudiesVolume 53, Issue 6 p. 1094-1100 EssaysFree Access Looking Away? Civilized Indifference and the Carnal Relationships of the Contemporary Workplace David Courpasson, Corresponding Author David Courpasson EMLYON Business School and Cardiff UniversityAddress for reprints: David Courpasson, EMLYON Business School, France ([email protected]).Search for more papers by this author David Courpasson, Corresponding Author David Courpasson EMLYON Business School and Cardiff UniversityAddress for reprints: David Courpasson, EMLYON Business School, France ([email protected]).Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 January 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12175Citations: 9 For your comments about this discussion, please visit http://www.socadms.org.uk/looking-away-civilized-indifference/. AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL I The idea that I put forward in this essay is not, in its immediate content, a happy one. The three-year old Aylan Kurdi, lying face down in the sand, on a Turkish beach; the immobile figure of a police officer beside him, like a powerless sentinel. This small body washed up on a beach. Other pictures emerged of the boy with his five-year old brother Galip [also dead], laughing and holding a teddy bear in a pink dress; another with Galip's arm around his brother. These pictures gripped the whole world in early September 2015, for several days. They were 'extraordinarily powerful images' (The Independent, 3 September 2015). It appeared like a revelation to each of us that millions of people were trying to escape from their camps, villages, dead places where no future could be invented any more. The image of the boy's body was an emotional shock. Why him? Why now? Surprisingly, these pictures created carnal connections, as if we knew the boys and their family because they acted like any boy: laughing, playing with teddy bears, and… with sand on a beach. But did we really care? Were we feeling true and durable pain and suffering, as if we all were his parents, brothers or friends? Or some ersatz substitute displayed on-line while we continue our studied indifference to the people around us? I think that this unfortunately mundane experience of virtual solidarity can help us to interrogate (again) the genuineness of contemporary emotions and of the gaze we have on each other's destiny: civilized indifference and voyeurism? Genuine solidarity is rare; it is hardly achieved by emotional excitement or empathic attunement, especially on-line, because we are not in others' skin. At the time of the internet, people often remain hidden behind their screens to express feelings and opinions. They click out and forget what they have done and said with the smell of lunch. They are socially disengaged while spending and/or wasting hours watching videos, sending pictures, answering or asking pointless questions in their 'social' networks. Sometimes, they are actually emotionally grasped by an event occurring in a remote place where they will never go, by faces of people they will never meet. Focused on the very image of Aylan, we forgot that hundreds of thousands of children have been dying under the bombs of diverse oppressors for some years in numerous different regions of the world… We tend to physically disappear behind our screens while expressing these emotions in our curious isolation; we are contained and confined by our screens, in the secluded bedrooms or offices where we spend most of our time. The corporeality of Aylan's tragedy contrasts with our curious inclination to prefer, or at least enjoy, virtual relationships. This decorporealization of social relationships has been documented many times, for we are in a social media society where links are strange hybrids between invisible technological connections and deep physical feelings. At the same time, we live in a 'body-driven' society, where the peer and societal/media driven pressure to have fit and healthy bodies (you have got to look good!) is greater than ever; moreover, the importance of physical encounters, of corporeal connections remains crucial to any form of social life and media: what grips people is indeed the cadaver of the Syrian boy, the imploring face of another starving child, or the bleeding fighting bull not standing a chance in front of the colourful acclaimed toreador: these are corporeal images. But these are 'just' images. Whether we are that gripped by the dying beggar at the corner of our own street is another kettle of fish. Other 'true' people may have no true place in the current obsessional struggle to prove oneself, to improve oneself, to measure oneself. In organizations, the story of bodies is pretty much the same; nothing has really changed since Taylor: the Google factory may be more outwardly smiling, more connected, and its offices more colourful too, but it is still designed to constrain bodies to be at work all the time, by mixing up leisure and work, by tying people physically to their workplace. This nicely oppressive factory reproduces a view of the adequate worker as being physically resilient for supporting the long hours that s/he spends at work, which is the exact spitting image of the corporeal Taylorian discipline. Among other consequences, in many corporations, the 'practice of suicide' as a personal bodily sacrifice in response to the duress of work and management, as well as the addiction to drugs that modify the physical presence and availability of workers are seldom studied but constitute major social facts. In France, an increase of 25 per cent over the last ten years in the number of employees taking drugs before coming to work, to forget one's fears and always be 'up to it', hit the news before being forgotten (Le Monde, 13 April 2012). In Japan, the number of karoshi, literally translated as 'death from overwork', mainly from heart attacks or stroke due to stress, is increasing steadily. In China, where the phenomenon is called guolaosi, it was estimated in 2010 that 600,000 people had died this way (Japan Times, 7 January 2013). Suffering bodies at work seem to be part of the contemporary social landscape of work and we organization scholars seem to be quite indifferent to this phenomenon. Indeed, despite these harsh realities of the condition of bodies in the workplace, despite the power of images of dead bodies, organization studies have largely neglected corporeal elements, to the advantage of more subjective and identity-driven accounts of organizational life. They have preferred to focus on the subjective rather than on the physical dimensions of people's experience at work, despite recent efforts to think about the 'socio-materiality' of organizations. We scholars also enjoy debating for hours about the emotional power of social media in catalysing movements and political protest. However, many interesting accounts of specific forms of work and occupations contribute to highlight the salience of the corporeal dimension in the accomplishment of work, especially in the tainted and dirty jobs of the factory, as well as in settings such as call centres: contemporary organizations are developing 'cool factories' where the work being done is still largely characterized by dirtiness, stigma and/or lack of substantial interest, notwithstanding the above mentioned bodily consequences due to the demands of productivism. In a similar vein, collective action on the internet creates a buzz much more than strikes, blockades or street demonstrations, less crunchy and more traditional practices of protest. However, research also largely demonstrates that the tweet without the street amounts to almost nothing (Gerbaudo, 2012), and that collective protest is all the more powerful as bodies are central in the mobilization (Juris, 2008) and concrete places are occupied. Be they dying, suffering, acting, occupying, shouting and fighting, bodies are decidedly central to many aspects of social and organizational life. So why are we more stimulated by a picture than by the close-by pain of our colleagues to which we are indeed indifferent? II This thought came to my mind as I was walking down a busy commercial street in a lively North-American city. Luxurious displays, attractive cafés and pictures of perfect bodies were contrasting with the dirty and unlikely bodies of many people that were either sleeping close to the entrance doors of cheap hotels, silently sitting at the corner of a street, or wandering like sleepwalkers looking for nothing, and talking to nobody but themselves. The contrast was shocking: Brandy Melville little dolls, perfectly waxed and made up in their perfectly fitting blue jeans, and homeless bodies, indifferent to their own dirtiness, stuffed with alcohol and weed. In the midst of all that, a sort of invisible social connection made of civilized indifference, I spotted a young guy in his twenties (I reckon, although he looked older) begging for food. On a sign he had written: 'help me stay alive, I left my body behind me'. I did not dare ask what he meant. But that brutally reminded me that many workers had been doing exactly the same for decades in the name of work, and many migrants as well, in the name of a promised land: leaving their bodies behind. This is simultaneously a terrifying and mundane statement; and again, quite surprisingly (or not?), we are not that interested in the fate of bodies in organization studies, except to understand their relationship to identities and discipline or erotic dimension [surely because of the influence of Foucault]. This is very annoying: are we actually living in the cities and factories, to see these estranged people from the other side of the society, to listen to the duress of the corporeal life at work, or are we living in a disconnected world; do we have a physical proximity with these people? At times, a fair amount of pity mixes up with something darker, a mental turning away that is justified by the liberal idea of responsibility: these suffering people must have done something wrong to be like that, after all. Or it is simply our lack of time that prevents us from paying attention to the everyday tragedies occurring at work (as well as in the streets and in the sea). But it remains that, as the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik put it: 'the sun is shining, the acacia is blooming and the slaughterer is slaughtering' (in Geras, 1998, p. 8). Lamennais points to the gloomy future of societies in which indifference is the most widespread sentiment: 'The age that is most ailing is not that which is violent on behalf of error, but the age which neglects, which disdains the truth. There is still power, and consequently hope, whenever violent commotions are felt: but when all motion is extinguished, when the pulse has ceased to beat, when a cold chill has reached the heart, what next is to be expected but an approaching and unavoidable dissolution' (Lamennais, 1895, p. xv). III This statement suggests that the problem of indifference is as much corporeal as social: motion and pulse are the key factors of social life. I do think that there is a close relationship between the phenomenon of civilized indifference that I evoke above, and the lack of attention given to bodies [in organization studies], whereas bodies are everywhere in the social media, be they perfect or rotting. Indifference lies at the tension between the sufferings of some people and the blank inaction of others in response. Indifference is fundamentally based on lack or absence of true membership to a group or a community: this absence makes people un-moved by the emergencies of others; we are not Syrians or beggars after all. This is why bodies come to play, because membership is not just about a disembodied collective conscience: it comes to life in members' bodies (Eliasoph, 2005, p. 160). And it is also why social media are so successful: they allow people to live social relationships behind a veil, a screen of abstraction which separates them from the actual bodies of people they know and do not know. Aylan became 'our child' because of the image of his dead body. An exciting and protective image for our conscience but we nevertheless rapidly look away. That cannot be the model of our world. Take the example of a fitness room. Bodies at work, the fleshly companionship that can arise in the course of years of frequent training and suffering side by side under the bars. That simple activity generates bonds that help caring about others, simply helping them to lift a heavier bar and share their contentment! Or think about a workshop in a chemical factory: working by night, this team of seven workers controlling the always uncertain functioning of a machine and of dangerous products flowing in the conduits, trusting the colleague for her ability to fix the problem when the flow is blocked: they need to be two together in their special suits to open the tub and see how it goes… These experiences are conducive to developing carnal connections (Wacquant, 2005). I am not talking about an exalted view of interpersonal fusion in teams, but of a connection that prevents those which experience it from the civilized indifference, a connection that pushes people to not look away because they are incorporating the social structure and see any person as worth the detour. In the closed contexts where we spend most of our lives (offices, bedrooms, shops, cars… fitness rooms) what matters most is people's actions and 'how they relate to one another in recurrent interpersonal encounters' (Wacquant, 2005, p. 455). The homeless writing that he left his body behind explains that he is not incorporating the social structure anymore: he is left behind by the social structure, by us. He is not part of any small-scale civilizing machine in the sense of Elias, imposing rules, taboos and strict adherence to forms of control and obedience to authority. He is alone. If he got his body back, he could be with us. So we need to reinvestigate the carnal connections existing in the confined spaces where we spend our time, including workspaces. Carnal connection means feeling physically what the other is feeling; it prevents the current contract of mutual indifference (Geras, 1998) that characterizes life at work and elsewhere. In another context, Geras reminds us of a story happening during the period of the great deportation from the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1942: 'Adina Szwajger, a woman who worked in the children's hospital there, recalls a scene: "They kept going past and it was a sweltering day….On the balcony of a house on Zelasna Street-there, on the other side [of the ghetto wall]-a woman in a flowered housecoat was watering plants in window boxes. She must have seen the procession below, but she carried on watering her flowers"' (Szwajger, 1990, pp. 48–9, cited in Geras, 1998, p. 3). Carnal connections are decisive because they mean that if I cut my finger, it does hurt someone else, not only me. Is the world of work so different from that crude account of social relationships? The most dangerous enemy is not necessarily the most vicious dictator but the silence of good people (Geras, 1998, p. 20). Reinstalling effective carnal connections in organizations might help in preventing so many workers leaving their bodies behind and thereby reduce the magnitude of the social and physical calamity that is affecting the world of work. This is what Michel told me in his own terms when narrating the experience of collective dismissals in his bank in 1997: 'we were all waiting for the names; you know the names of those who would lose their job. The HR department was in charge of making the list, for several weeks the atmosphere was just unbearable, and when I knew that I wasn't in the list, Oh My God, I remember that I felt more than a sense of relief, a real happiness and at the same time, absolute indifference to the fate of the four colleagues in our branch who had to leave the place. Simply happy to be alive in a sense. When I learned that one of them had committed suicide two weeks later, I was sad but sadness could not exceed the threshold of my personal satisfaction to keep on working'. IV What could organization studies do to understand why so many people do not come to the aid of others in dire need or great distress? Do we organization scholars have anything to do with this implicit contract of civilized indifference? We live a life largely concerned with private ends and the ends of very closely related others in the shadow of widespread human catastrophe. And we keep on focusing on issues such as identity, subjectivity, performativity, CSR, strategy, and so on, individualistic issues for an egoistic research agenda that does not pay any attention to that catastrophe. Is that inappropriate to the issues considered central in organization studies? Is this statement so naïve that it is of no use to tell again and again about the barbarity of current corporate practices, the lack of consideration for topics of public value, without being accused of aristocratic critique? Everyone alone at work: that would be the deal. Organization would be a space where no mutually assisting behaviours would be developed. Also because there would be in fact nothing effective that can be done by most people to oppose duress or oppression. Or because the arbitrariness of management would be after all acceptable, in a post-political world where people would prefer exiting and looking away to engaging and struggling. A moral universe of apathy and indifference, for people looking for exalting moments elsewhere. V Readers can make of this what they want. Some perhaps will consider useless another reflection on indifference. Others may think that the parallel drawn between indifference to the tragedy of the Jews or migrants, to homelessness, and corporeal suffering at work is exaggerated or simply irrelevant. Others may find an intellectual and emotional sympathy, even empathy, by thinking about the bystander who looks away because she is indeed indifferent or because she cannot bear to look; or by thinking about what the wide tolerance of unjust and unbearable practices can produce. The duty of organization scholars is simply to take the pain of thinking about these things, if not feeling obliged to act against them. But it is not the most relevant element in the context of this essay: it is not a matter of calling the scholar to attend to the needs of the social world beyond the theory that s/he is working on. It rather should speak to the internal coherence of the theory itself: there is some inner inadequacy to most organizational theory to not even mention suffering bodies and the civilized indifference that characterizes contemporary experiences of work; because it does not contain this element, our theory runs the risk of being useless to people before the oppressive nature of organizations. Theories of organizations and work are insufficient when they do not encompass the requirement of a pervasive idea of mandatory care. To be sure, organization studies' rendition of human reality is far too disembodied and even decontextualized; we talk about micro-interactions and agency, discourses and language, without often realizing that observing and analysing people at work implies that they can get mad at our accounts of their experiences because they are irrelevant to their lives. The sign of the homeless boy was not supposed to be published. All those puzzles in writing an embodied organization theory obviously increase the difficult combination between the thing we call theory and the experiential knowledge that we draw from our observations. But our theories cannot happen and be developed behind people's backs. Here organization scholars might turn to Durkheim, a strangely ignored giant in our courtyard so prompt in importing social theorists. He contends that society needs the sacred energies of the physical experience of group life to revitalize the energy that is 'worn away with the passage of time' (Durkheim, 1995, p. 217). Progressively and surreptitiously avoiding this experience because of the alienating presence of social media, we remain indifferent to the deaths and risks that threaten us too, like the poor characters that appear constantly on our screens, be they TV or computers or smartphones. Disembodied, society 'would be proclaiming that it does not hold its rightful place in their hearts. Indeed it would defy itself' (Durkheim, 1995, p. 403). The carnal experience of being social, of not looking away, is unlikely to happen on the internet. It happens in the street, in the workshop, in the office at the corner of the corridor. References Durkheim, E. (1912/1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. by K. E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Eliasoph, N. (2005). 'Theorizing from the neck down: Why social research must understand bodies acting in real space and time (and why it's so hard to spell out what we learn from this)'. Qualitative Sociology, 28, 159– 69. Geras, N. (1998). The Contract of Mutual Indifference. Political Philosophy after the Holocaust. London: Verso. Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the Streets. Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto. Juris, J. S. (2008). Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lamennais, F. R. (1895). Essays on Indifference in Matters of Religion. London: John McQueen. Szwajger, A. B. (1990). I Remember Nothing More. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wacquant, L. (2005). 'Carnal connections: On embodiment, apprenticeship, and membership'. Qualitative Sociology, 28, 445– 74. Citing Literature Volume53, Issue6September 2016Pages 1094-1100 ReferencesRelatedInformation

The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this article, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions. We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistance.