This sub-plenary will critically explore contemporary debates surrounding the implications of beauty and normative aesthetics standards on contemporary work practices. The rise of normative and ‘global’ consensus of physical attractiveness has subsequently been accorded individual, social, and institutional rewards within organizational domains. This increasingly leads to significant forms of body work in the form of cosmetic surgery or ‘beautification’ procedures.
 
To interrogate this rising turn further and explore its implications for organization studies, this sub-plenary draws on symbolic violence as a conceptual tool to understand how individuals are organized, subordinated, and dominated through their own “imperfect” bodies. It will explore how ideas and images about the ideal body and facial features circulate globally, and how these are also generated, received, and interpreted locally.