Bodies in Contact: New Directions for Research on Embodiment and Intersectionality in Organizations

Abstract

Although organizational scholars began to study the body in the 1980s, there have been recent calls for scholars to take the body more seriously as an important organizational artifact/concept (e.g., Dale, 2001; Flores-Pereira et al., 2008; Kerfoot & Knights, 1996). We contest that bodies are in a dynamic relationship with the contexts of their contact. How does this dynamic relationship shape the production of subjectivities in workplace? How do various bodies (historical, therapeutic, stigmatized) come to contact in the workplace? Our symposium extends embodiment research by foregrounding a dynamic conception of bodies in contact and their consequences for the production of workplace subjectivities at the intersections of caste, gender, ethnicity and social class. Bridging work on embodiment, identity, and organizational studies allows us to show how external forces – including interactions with other employees, stigma or stereotypes about various occupations, institutional practices, and socio-historical factors – affect the formation and expression (or repression) of identity. The papers in this symposium use survey, experimental, discursive, and phenomenological methodologies to examine such a conceptualization of embodied identity, or the selves that are brought to work. This symposium will introduce fresh perspectives on identity and embodiment via four paper presentations and a concluding critical discussion. The research papers take up questions of identity and diversity in the context of physically taxing work, embodied labor, and dirty work in four different countries (United States, England, India, Canada). Embodied (In)visibilities: An Intersectional Examination of Janitors Presenter: Verónica Caridad Rabelo; U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor Presenter: Ramaswami Mahalingam; U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor Evidence of Intersectionality and Complexity Within the