Remembering the Body: Surfacing Critical Insights Into the Body’s Role in Organizations

Although the body is the mediator of all experiences in organizations our scholarship often renders invisible the body’s involvement in organizing. This is puzzling since the body is a constant across organizational phenomena. Making the body’s involvement in organizing more visible may help management scholars address today’s grand challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, broad social and political unrest related to race, gender, and class dynamics in our countries, as well as resulting economic upheavals that span international boundaries. “Creating a Better World” may be more feasible if we first acknowledge that the body is an essential aspect of experiencing our world in positive, life-giving ways, and that our theories about organizing could be better leveraged in such pursuits if they allowed for a different stance towards human bodies. In our interactive symposium, we convene a panel of junior and senior scholars to share and build on each other’s ideas regarding what we lose sight of in organizations when the body is obscured, and what we can do about it as scholars. We will invite audience members to build on our panelists’ insights on how the situated or embedded nature of bodies might better explain challenging organizational experiences; how work or professional practices impinge upon the body; and how our theories could better account for how bodies adapt in response to changing organizational environments. Organizational Body Work Presenter: Thomas B. Lawrence; Oxford U., Saïd Business School Presenter: Emily Dunham Heaphy; U. of Massachusetts, Amherst Presenter: Rohini Jalan; U. of Oxford Presenter: Eva Katharina Schlindwein; U. of Oxford Out of Body Experiences: Embodied othering and systematically obscured bodies at work Presenter: Njoke Thomas; Boston College Presenter: Estelle Archibold; Case Western Reserve U. Striving For Perfect Ballet Bodies: Perfectionism As An Embodied Experience Presenter: Joel Gardner; Boston College Presenter: Lyndon Earl Garrett; Boston College Presenter: Ali Block; The Institute for Integrative Psychiatry The Emergence of New Bodies: An Ontological Perspective Presenter: Alexandra Michel; U. of Pennsylvania Bodies that stand together: The ethical and political imperative of assembly Presenter: Alison Pullen; Macquarie Business School, Macquarie U.