‘Spirits, dancing in the flesh’: choreography and organisation

The body in organisations has received considerable scholarly attention, whilst the moving body and the ‘flesh’ has largely been overlooked. ‘Flesh’ for Merleau-Ponty connects the body and the world and supposes not an immobile, but moving body. We explore flesh as a movement-related, kinaesthetic phenomenon through a movement/dance-based method and interviews with professionals from a hospitality/service organisation. We apply the notion of ‘choreography’ from dance studies, composed of the elements of ‘writing’ (graphós) and ‘movement’ (chorós). Our findings show that fleshly movement interaction creates invisible structures, or choreographies, that are inscribed into bodies and tacitly confine organisational interaction (‘writing’). Bodies learn to relate to each other through perceptual interpenetration and kinaesthetic empathy and co-create the choreography (‘moving’). Fleshly movement interaction is a submission to choreographies fulfilling the organisational need to reproduce bodies capable of carrying out certain movement imperatives, which however provides momentary openings through the use of kinaesthetic empathy.