Phenomenology of the Embodied Organization

The contribution of Merleau-Ponty for Organizational Studies and Practice

W. Küpers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137460554
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Drawing on contemporary debates and responding to an analytic lacuna in organization and management studies and calls from organizational practice, Phenomenology of the Embodied Organization explores the fundamental and integral role of the body and embodiment in organizational life-worlds.

1

Introduction

What would it entail to take the meaning of an organization as an ‘Incorporation’ seriously? What does it imply to interpret organizations as incorporated arrangements, that is as embodied life-worlds? Beyond seeing artefacts and buildings as the physical embodiment of an organization and its change and history (Marrewijk, 2009), specifically one might ask: what and who is incorporated in organizational processes and practices and in what way? What would it mean to take the body and embodiment as starting points or accompanying moves and realities for researching and rethinking about and living in an organization as a company? Furthermore, what would carnal organization and management studies mean and imply? What implications would approaching an organization and its management from an embodied point of view render? What different understandings and practices might be gained and developed by placing an embodied orientation centre-stage?

This book responds to these open questions. It does so by inquiring into what roles the body and embodiment play as a constitutive and integral part of the life-worlds of organizing and managing. In particular, this inquiry aims at contributing to the recognition of embodied processes and practices in order to overcome the prevailing neglect, problematic status and treatment of bodily dimensions in organizations. This acknowledgement is important because for a long time the body and embodiment have been marginalized or omitted as constitutive media for organizational and management practice and theory. As a mainstay of Western Weltanschauung and a somatophobia – that is, the fear and loathing of the body (Spelman, 1982), the demarcation between mind and body – bodily processes have been disdained or subordinated, functionalized or reified. Although all sensing, knowing, acting and living require bodies, the typical stance taken has been to see and treat them as inferior components, mere mechanisms or cumbersome, tedious, unreliable containers. Instrumentally, the body is grasped as a plain physical ‘corpus’ through which information passes and by which the rational brain or mind functions while pursuing immaterial projects or ends.

This predominant disregard or instrumentalized understanding, while considering the ‘absent presence’ of the body (Leder, 1990; Shilling, 1993) in social and organizational theory and practice, calls to re-member what seems to have been forgotten anew. This re-membering reintegrates the ‘members’ and interrelated nexus between situated body, embodiment and phenomena in organizations and their management. Such re-memberance allows connecting anew lived embodied manifold experiences and processes of organizing and managing. Accordingly, bodily and embodied phenomena can then be recognized and appreciated as constitutive and pervading parts of the fabric of everyday realities in organizational life-worlds.

Moreover, this re-gathering of embodied ‘members’ of organizing facilitates and forms a critique of the dominance of functionalities and reductionist conceptualizations that cause misled explanations and that prioritize a bias for rational-driven instrumentalizing action (Hancock, 2009). Even more, recognizing the basic status of bodies for agents and agencies contributes to a more adequate understanding, itself an embodied reflection in and on action (Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009) and materio-sociocultural qualities of a ‘re-embodied organisation’ (Styhre, 2004; 2004a). This kind of re-embodying is part of the recent turn towards the body in social and organization science (Hassard et al., 2000: 12)¹ and the constitutive nexus of body and work (Wolkowitz, 2002; 2006).²

Phenomenology, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, provides an important contribution to the exploration of ignored, undervalued, marginalized or mistreated bodily dimensions, and it thereby contributes to and advances the body-turn in organization and management research and practice. The proposition here is that his further development of phenomenology offers a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of bodily and embodied organizational phenomena. By following his approach, the following endeavour supports rearticulating a systematic and creative account of the lived body as well as processes and forms of embodiment in its intertwining with the life-world of organizing.

Moreover, phenomenology contributes to revising conventional taken-for-granted stances by facilitating a ‘turn around’ or ‘turn back’ in order to sense, see anew and enact anew ways of life (Husserl, 1970: 150), in the course of a new establishing (Neustiftungen) (Husserliana = Hua XXIX: 362–420, Text no. 32; Dodd, 2004).

Not being a unified school or orthodox or heretical movement, the signifier phenomenology is both naming a historical inheritance and designating an inquiring gesture that takes the form of a constant beginning. As such it is an open quest(ion), while it is interrupting traditional approaches in social and organizational science and practices of organizing and managing. Programmatically, phenomenology seeks to clarify and elucidate what is in the fore and in relation to bodily senses, rather than to explain it or analyse it in given categories. Oriented towards a ‘seeing-grasp’ of the ‘what-ness’ of phenomena through how they appear, it helps to detect, seize and cultivate a phenomenal awareness and imaginative capacities, including other ways of organizing. In this way, phenomenological approaches mediate creative ideas, concepts and empirical studies for understanding and learning about ‘what is going on’ and ‘how to go on’ in different ways.³

A Merleau-Pontyian perspective opens up the possibility of interpreting organizations and their practices as manifestations and processes of bodies and an embodiment. Moreover, with this philosophy, organization and management scholars and practitioners can approach and understand pre-reflective and lived realities in organizing as indeterminate, ambiguous and opaque. Furthermore, orientations and methodologies informed by Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology and ontology enable research to be seen as an embodied practice. In these corporeal practices researchers are bodily involved in embodied contexts while conducting their studies and produce ‘bodies’ of texts.

Not only can Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy present good reasons for criticizing ‘objectified disembodiments’, it also provides a base for a much-needed integral re-incorporation of corporeal dimensions into understanding, exhibiting, knowing, imagining, organizing and managing in more creative forms, scientifically and practically.

Reinstating the corporeal helps to ‘heal’ from that kind of occupational hazard of thinkers who get lost in intellectual models and abstracting constructs. They thus lose sight of the concreteness of the phenomenal world and living practices. By taking a carnal view, organizational and management study can embrace a more sensorial and ‘fleshy’ stance in relation to the working of bodies and bodies at work in organizational everyday lives. Systematically, such carnal orientation discovers and interrogates sensory, bodily and embodied phenomena, processes and structures of organizing and managing.

As a gesture of embarking on an adventurous journey, phenomenology explores what interrelated bodies of organizational members are capable of, suffering from, sharing with others and moving towards. It can disclose how bodies relate to themselves, others and the common world respectively, co-creating common sense in organizational life-worlds and beyond.

A rehabilitation of the body and embodiment in organization readdresses seemingly simple questions like those of the role of senses: What makes organizational members feel, see, touch, taste and smell in certain ways? What roles do senses and sensation play for sense-making or -giving in organizations? How are occupational bodies in organizational processes arranged, expressed and treated as they operate through the daily work of interconnected sensory practices? What would it mean not only to theorize about the body, but also to use modes of approaching from and with living bodies and embodiments?

These questions are important as it is through the enactment of sensory experiences that practices in organizations emerge or are produced and repeated; they are thus reproduced or innovatively reoriented.

A phenomenological understanding can reveal what as a consequence of traditional approaches remains unsenseable. Thus, it can help to reveal and revalue what exclusively has been unfeelable, unseeable, untouchable, untasteable and unsmellable and hence unknowable, unthinkable or unrealizable. Moreover, taking a critical stance on the political life of sensation – transformative reconfigurations of the sensible – body-politics and politics of embodiment can be approached and enacted.

A Merleau-Pontyian orientation can serve as an inspiring and reviving resource for critically reinterrogating and renewing exhausted and inadequate discourses or lifeless theories, while reworking and reintegrating embodied practices in organization and management studies and realities.

The project aspired to here resonates, but it can also be contrasted with recent research on the body and embodiment that pursues different interests, concerns and analysis, thus foregrounding some aspects while letting others fade into the background (Shilling, 2003: 203–211; 2007: 10).

In organization studies the social constructionist approaches became an influential paradigmatic discourse. This discourse is adopting structuralist, and even more poststructuralist, orientation with regard to examining how the body is structured and marked by power relations and knowledge. Correspondingly, the body is interpreted as a terrain of signs; a symbolic landscape that is read as a text. The poststructuralist, constructionist body is historically and culturally textualized, thereby achieving some significance. However, this disembodied body appears to be contextualized and constructed rather as a place-marker and artifice in quasi-linguistic systems of free-floating signifiers in a sea of cultural meaning-production that has no real terrestrial weight (Bigwood, 1991: 59). Moreover, such an approach is in danger of reinforcing anthropocentric and androcentric orientations. Instead, an advanced phenomenology releases the body from its dichotomized separation between nature and culture, and it interprets the same as an inherent part of an interrelational natural – cultural field (Bigwood, 1991)⁴ and explores a creational embodiment (O’Loughlin, 2006).

Correspondingly, this book endeavours to revive and restore the precognitive, affective and sensual experiences, conditions and implications of the body and embodiment in organizational life-worlds to their correct place, while reconfiguring their status. Revisiting and reinterpreting the significance and ‘moving standing’ of bodies and embodiment in a phenomenologically based corporeal light allows us to see the corporeal and corporealities within so-called ‘corporations’ in a post-representational and post-dualistic way. This becomes important because there is an urgent need to overcome the prevailing representationalism and dualisms as part of the Western Weltanschauung that is dominating social, organization and management studies and practices. This representational orientation and separating duality of the body from the mind as well as other dichotomized polarities has influenced and still influences how organizations and their members are understood and treated. Therefore, it is vital to show how the reproduced heritage of representational and dualistic thinking has mapped onto and is used in inscribing, prescribing and effectuating organizational concepts and realities with its unsustainable consequences.⁵

Merleau-Ponty’s indirect, relational post-dualistic ontology of ‘being-in-and-towards-the-world’ carries a tremendous potential for avoiding or overcoming dichotomous simplifications and attempts to reify embodied living phenomena, rhythms, processes as representational objects or categorical representations.⁶

Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of the modernist version of referentialist representalism and critique of reductionistic paradigms opens up fertile fields and adventures or journeys of inquiry. Grounded in appreciating constitutive, bodily presences and embodied participations in being and becoming, his pre-saging anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism as well as his advocacy of good ambiguities offer creative path-ways and ‘spirals of flight’ for re-searching, re-interpreting and enacting sense-based, sustaining meaning and more meaningful, sustainable practices in, of and through organizations and management.

The body of text in this book is organized in two parts. While the first part introduces phenomenology in general and Merleau-Ponty in particular, the second part focuses on the role of the body, embodiment and embodied practices in organization. First, basic ideas and terms of phenomenology, especially the role of intentionality, meaning, life-world and methodologies, as well as some critiques and further developments of phenomenology, are discussed. Then the phenomenology and ontology of Merleau-Ponty with his focus on the body and embodiment, senses, sensations and perceptions are presented. Correspondingly, the standpoints and perspectives beyond empiricism and intellectualism are offered.

The next section elaborates in detail the role of embodied intentionality, including its we-mode and embodied forms and responsiveness. That section is followed by a demonstration of the relevance of inter-corporeality of social bodies and embodied intersubjectivities as part of the fabric of social becoming. Related to the later works of Merleau-Ponty, the concepts of reversible and folding ‘Flesh’ as elemental carnality and formative medium are delineated. Especially, the interwoven structure of flesh as ‘chiasm’ is outlined and the post-dualistic ontology of ‘wild being’ presented. The first part ends by providing perspectives on the ‘proto-integral’ process-character of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of in-between and some critical warning against dangers of retro-romanticisim and an invitation towards an engaged ‘letting-be’ (Gelassenheit).

The second part of this book elaborates the constitutive role of bodies and forms of embodiment in and of organizations. Here, organizations are interpreted as embodied life-world and practice. The significance of embodied senses and a corresponding sense-making that is mediated through perceptions are revealed. Taking the form of experimental writing, the senses are then given a voice to express their experiences. Then a subsequent section shows the importance of senses as affective and pathic events in organizational life-worlds. Afterwards, the constitutive operations of embodied intentionality and responsiveness in relation to organizing are presented. Intentionality is interpreted as embodied moving, affective and e-motional processes in organization. Based on this extended understanding the ‘prakto-gnosia’ of the ‘I can’ and projection or symbolic functions and meaning in organizations are discussed. This includes also the role of break-downs and skilful coping as realizations of pre-reflective, operative intentions and their tensions. As a further development of classical phenomenology, affective we-mode-intentionalities and joint, plural interactions are explored in terms of their particular relevance for organizational contexts.

The ensuing section regards responsivity as an embodied modality in organizations and specifies the role of responsiveness in relation to managers, groups, customers, competitors and stakeholders. Moreover, some connections to corporate and corporeal social responsiveness and responsibilities are addressed.

A further extension is gained by considering the inter-corporeality of social bodies and embodied intersubjectivities with a focus on the role of dialogue and conversation in organizations. To prepare for the emphasis on practice, the subsequent sections discuss embodied acting, actors, agencies and ‘bodies at work’ as well as embodied performance and performativity in organizations.

Based on these acting-oriented elaborations, the multidimensional concept of what will be called embodied ‘inter-practice’ in organizations is presented. As part of its holonomics, developmental stages, lines and integral cycle are differentiated. Following a processual turn the trans-(re)lational nexus of organizational practices is expounded. Following these understandings, conditions, forms and processes of an enfleshed inter-practising and integrated pragmatism, the concept of a ‘pheno-pragma-practice’ of situated creative action is presented. Closely related to this practice, the next section explores embodied and reflexive habits and habitualization as forms of pre-reflexive knowing, along with a link between reflexivity and creativity of habits and de- and re-habitualization. As part of an integral pheno-pragma-practice, constructionism and practicalism are critiqued and possibilities of an embodied improvisation as enactment of inter-practice exemplified.

Turning to Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, forms of embodied chiasmic organizing are then outlined. In addition to relational dialectics of the working relationship, the roles of a chiasmic unfolding and learning, dilemma and paradoxes in chiasmic organization as well as viewpoints on an embodied trans-formative aesthetics and creativity are outlined.

A final section presents practical, political, methodological and theoretical implications, along with some concluding thoughts and future perspectives on incorporated embodied organizing to provide an opening end.

2

Understanding Phenomenology

Phenomenology allows itself to be practice and recognized as a manner or as a style, or that it exists as a movement, pri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Understanding Phenomenology
• 3  Advanced Phenomenology and Relational Ontology of Merleau-Ponty
• 4  Organization as an embodied life-world of practice
• 5  Embodied Intentionality, Intersubjectivities and Responsiveness in Organization
• 6  Embodied Agency and Bodies at Work in Inter-Practices of Organizations
• 7  Dilemmas and Paradoxes, Chiasmic Organizing
• 8  Implications
• Notes
• References
• Index