Body and Organization

Citation

Holyoak, L. (2003), "Body and Organization", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 24 No. 6, pp. 353-353. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730310494338

The majority of the chapters in this edited book started life as papers at a conference organized by the authors. In the editors’ words, this book is intended to first “redress a tendency for analyses of organizations to be disembodied in ways that marginalize the body as a medium of organizing practices” (p. 2), and second, “to counteract a marginalization of the realm of employment and work organization within contemporary analyses of the body” (p. 2). At the end of the day, they achieve these aims, but as tends to be the way with collections from numerous authors, progress on the way can be rather stop‐start, with some chapters thoroughly engaging the reader and some not at all. Admittedly, the chapters which I particularly enjoyed might not be those enjoyed by others, but such is the range of content and style that I think there will be high and low points for most readers.

The book itself is organized into an introduction and four sections, which are: “Functions and flows”, “Discourse and representation”, “Performance and regulation” and “Self and identity”. It would be difficult to provide a synopsis (or even a list) of all the chapters in the space available, so I will focus on certain aspects of the book. Apart from one notable exception (of which more later) I generally found the chapters in the second half of the book to be more interesting and/or accessible than those in the first half. Certainly, I think that Joanna Brewis and John Sinclair’s chapter entitled “Exploring embodiment: women, biology and work” offered a very good introduction to the general area, which would greatly benefit the novice reader, but by being tucked away as Chapter 10, I fear that the potential benefit is lost as a great many novices would have given up by then. In fact, the whole of that chapter was very interesting and readable, but I do concede that it might not appeal to all readers. Other “highlights” for me were the chapter on office design and organization by Johanna Hofbauer and the case study about a post‐1992 university in Craig Prichard’s piece. The surprise of the book had to be the discussion of female ejaculation in the second chapter (“Dangerous fluids and the organization‐without‐organs” by Stephen Linstead), which was about the only thing that grabbed my attention in the relatively poor first half of the book.

Body and Organization is very much intended for an academic audience, and there is little here that the practitioner could readily utilise. That is not to suggest that practitioners are not interested in academic debate, more that if you are a busy human resource manager looking for information that could easily be applied to your work, you will not find much of use in this book. However, if you are interested in a more theoretical debate, and you have a passing knowledge of the disciplines contributing to the area, then I am sure that you will find something of interest here.