Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

This sub-theme proposes a new approach to understanding the lived experience at work, emphasizing the roles of emotion, body, and space. While these elements are often overlooked in organizational studies, by considering the interplay between these factors, we can gain deeper insights into ethical, responsible, and sustainable practices within organizations. We aim to examine how reframing the lived experience at work creates new meanings and understanding in an organizational world characterized by disruptions and transformations, notably with the shift towards a more-than-human society.
 
Organizations increasingly rely on technoscientific innovations and artificial intelligence, raising critical concerns about ethics, responsibility, and sustainability. These issues are particularly significant as humans and non-humans interact in novel ways, shaped by socio-materiality and constitutive entanglement, where both exert agency (Cunliffe, 2024).
 
The tension between the enhancing and the dehumanizing potential of new technologies has led to calls for more humane practices and theories, in management and organizations (Taskin & Dietrich, 2020; Petriglieri, 2020). This humanifying or rehumanizing shift echoes the idea of “creating and sustaining our human-ways-of-being-human-in-a-human-world” (Shotter, 2016, p. 116), which could be extended to include the more-than-human society.
 
The lived experience at work is not only embedded in organizational contexts and rules, social norms, intertwined cultural strata, but it is also embodied (Chanlat, 2022; Zhang et al., 2023). Hochschild (1979, p. 551) emphasized in her influential article that emotion can be understood as a “bodily cooperation with an image, a thought, a memory – a cooperation of which the individual is aware”. Similarly, Fineman (2000, p. 8) explored the “embodiment of emotion”, highlighting how specific situations or interactions can “be felt in and of the body.” This perspective aligns with the physical aspects of organizational life, such as experiencing fatigue or hunger at work (Lawrence et al., 2023), which remain underexplored in organizational and management studies despite evidence linking socio-material and physiological conditions to behaviours (Apelojg, 2024).
 
In contrast to Acker’s (1990) criticism of management research as “bodiless”, more recently, the concept of “organizational body work” has been coined to underline the “organizational embedded efforts to shape human bodies” (Lawrence et al., 2023, p. 37), thus suggesting the interactions between the body and the organization, and that the latter might seek to actively shape the corporeal experience.
 
Building on the discussion of how organizations affect our bodies (Lawrence et al., 2023), we aim to explore the interplay between body, emotion, and space, and how this relationship can inspire new narratives, language, and frameworks to better understand lived experiences at work. This understanding, in turn, can promote ethical, responsible, and sustainable actions. Emotions, while embedded in social and cultural contexts, can also be viewed through the lens of situatedness. They are both embodied and serve as a shaping system, intricately tied to corporeal experiences.
 
Previous studies have examined norms and space in the context of emotional labour and emotion regulation within organizations (Dickason, 2022; 2024), as well as their connection to sustained or diminished authenticity and occupational health. However, further research into how organizational and institutional actors are embedded within and embody these dynamics could provide exciting new insights (Voronov & Weber, 2020).
 
Consistent with the above interest in examining how reframing the lived experience at work creates new meanings and understanding in an organizational world characterized by disruptions and transformations, notably with the shift towards a more-than-human society, here is a non-exhaustive list of possible topics we are interested in exploring:

• How are technological innovations and AI transforming work, management, organizations and institutions, and what are the associated emotional and corporeal experiences?

• What can institutions and organizations do to better take into account the lived experience at work? How can this contribute to more authentic interactions and relations?

• How can a better awareness of the body and/or of emotions be used to foster more ethical, responsible, and sustainable behaviours, practices and policies?

• How can institutions, organizations and people foster humanifying relations in a context of despatialization (Taskin, 2010), teleworking and distorsion of time and space? What are the roles of the body, the emotions and space?

• How can a lived-experience approach to work and organizations contribute to new narratives, words and vocabularies conducive to new framings?

• How can the interactional, intersectional and regulatory dimensions of the body, emotions and space be studied? What are the innovative methodologies that can be used to this effect?

• How does the physical presence of employees influence social relationships and exchanges within the organization? What are the links with and between emotions and space?

• How does the interplay between body, emotion, and space transform or maintain the power relations within and beyond organizations?

We invite colleagues to contribute to this endeavour through empirical studies, conceptual papers, and a variety of methodological reflections.
 

References

• Acker, J. (1990): “Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations.” Gender & Society, 4 (2),139–158.
• Apelojg, B. (2024): “I Need to Move It, Move It! How Physiological Needs Influence Feelings, Motivation, and Interest in Learning Situations.” In: N.M. Ashkanasy, A.C. Troth, & R.H. Humphrey (eds.): Emotion in Organizations: A Coat of Many Colors. Research on Emotion in Organizations, Vol. 19. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 13–35.
• Chanlat, J.-F. (2022 [1998]): Sciences sociales, management et sociétés: plaidoyer pour une anthropologie élargie [Social sciences, management and society: a call for a broader anthropology]. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval.
• Cunliffe, A. (2024): “I have a glimpse of something better than this… Being reflexive.” Research Workshop, IGR-IAE Graduate School of Management, Rennes, April 8, 2024.
• Dickason, R. (2022): “‘Discretion remains the rule’: A multilevel study of emotional requirements in a public hospital.” In: R.H. Humphrey, N.M. Ashkanasy, & A.C. Troth (eds.): Emotions and Negativity. Research on Emotion in Organizations, Vol. 17. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 115–140.
• Dickason, R. (2024): “‘It Comes With the Territory’: A Fluoroscopy of Emotional Labor.” In: N.M. Ashkanasy, A.C. Troth, & R.H. Humphrey (eds.): Emotion in Organizations: A Coat of Many Colors. Research on Emotion in Organizations, Vol. 19. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 179–218.
• Fineman, S. (2000): “Emotional Arenas Revisited.” In: S. Fineman (ed.): Emotion in Organizations. London: SAGE Publications, 1–24.
• Hochschild, A.R. (1979): “Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure.” American Journal of Sociology, 85 (3), 551–575.
• Lawrence, T.B., Eva Schlindwein, Jalan, R., & Heaphy, E.D. (2023): “Organizational Body Work: Efforts to Shape Human Bodies in Organizations.” Academy of Management Annals, 17 (1), 37–73.
• Petriglieri, G. (2020): “F**k Science!? An Invitation to Humanize Organization Theory.” Organization Theory, 1 (1), https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787719897663.
• Shotter, J. (2016): Speaking Actually: Towards a New “Fluid” Common-sense Understanding of Relational Becomings. Farnhill, UK: Everything is Connected Press.
• Taskin, L. (2010): “La déspatialisation. Enjeu de gestion [Despatialization. A management issue].” Revue française de gestion, 0 (3), 61–76.
• Taskin, L., & Dietrich, A. (2020): Management humain. Une approche renouvelée de la GRH et du comportement organisationnel [Humane management: a renewed approach to HRM and organizational behaviour]. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck Supérieur.
• Voronov, M., & Weber, K. (2020): “People, Actors, and the Humanizing of Institutional Theory.” Journal of Management Studies, 57 (4), 873–884.
• Zhang, R., Voronov, M., Toubiana, M., Vince, R., & Hudson, B.A. (2024): “Beyond the Feeling Individual: Insights from Sociology on Emotions and Embeddedness.” Journal of Management Studies, 61 (5), 2212–2250.