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Embodied ‘Inter-Practice’ in Organisations – The contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for carnal organisation studies
Embodied ‘Inter-Practice’ in Organisations – The contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for carnal organisation studies
Wendelin KuepersThe purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of practices in organization from a phenomenological point of view. It explores the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s advanced phenomenology and ontology for understanding the role of the lived body and embodiment for practices in organisational life-worlds. Based on an embodied relational approach, the concept of an emergent and responsive “inter-practice’ in organisations will be developed. For showing a possible enactment of this embodied inter-practicing, improvisation is explored. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on embodied responsive and responsible inter-practices in organisations are discussed.
Related Papers
The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of creative practices in organisation from a phenomenological point of view. To develop such an understanding of practice, this paper will first outline a phenomenological understanding of creative practice, understood particularly with Merleau-Ponty as an embodied and situated nexus of action. Subsequently, the paper will show the contribution of pragmatism to an interpretation of practice as an experience-based reality and will describe the significance of habits. After briefly comparing common characteristics of both pro-experiential philosophies, some perspectives on a creative “inter-practice” and an inclusive “pheno-pragma-practice” will be explored. Furthermore, improvisation is discussed as a form and medium for the actual realisation of an embodied, situational inter-practice. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on creative pheno-pragmatic practices in organisation will be outlined.
The chapter explores the significance of materiality and non- or other-human, especially the role of body and embodiment in relation to intra- and inter-practices in organisations (and its culture) from a phenomenological perspective and cross-disciplinary approach. Following a Merleau-Pontyian approach the non-human, respectively an orientation that incorporates a “more-or-different-than-human” view is discussed in relation to cultural practices or practices of culture in organisational life-worlds. Based on a critique of physicalist empiricism and idealistic rationalism, impasses and limitations of naturalist and constructionist approaches are problematized in relation to culture and its practices as being situated within a continuum of the human and non-human. Showing the co-constitutive role of intercorporeality allows then interpreting corporeal materio~socio~cultural phenomena of inter-practices, like ‘arte-facts-use’ and ‘bodies at work’ differently. Then the role of relational ‘(em-)bodiment’, especially the in(ter-)between of bodies multitude and embodied ‘intra- and inter-practices in relation to non-human-human spheres of organisations will be discussed. Finally, the chapter discusses some implications and perspectives on non-human in the study and practice of culture and outlining an ethos of ‘engaged releasement’ (‘Gelassenheit’). This ethos refers to a letting be-come in relation to things and thinking which are relevant for a living ‘bodiment’ of human and more-than-human dimensions and practices in organisations and beyond.
Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies
Embodied Responsive Ethical Practice The Contribution of Merleau-Ponty for a Corporeal Ethics in Organisations2015 •
Following a phenomenological understanding of the body and embodiment this paper explores corporeal ethics as a practice in organisations. With Merleau-Ponty, bodily dimensions and enfleshed intercorporeality are seen as media for ethically enacted and morally responsive thus responsible forms of practicing and relationships. Specific forms of responsive and caring practices as well as the ethical relevance of bodies at work in organisations are dicussed. Finally practical, political, and theoretical implications are offered and perspectives for further investigating and incorporating practicing of ethics in organisations are outlined.
‘Journal of Cleaner Production’
Phenomenology of embodied and artful design for creative and sustainable inter-practicing in organisations2016 •
Based on a phenomenological approach, this paper discusses possibilities of an embodied and artful design in relation to sustainable practices. Moving beyond conventional design-thinking, and by following Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, design of sustainable practices are seen as a situated, emergent process of bodily beings and dynamic, material, social and systemic embodiments in which practices are inter-relationally and meaningfully enmeshed. In particular, then inter-practices of embodied design in organisation and leadership are presented. Furthermore, then the roles of eco-aesthetics and embodied artful design in, for and of organisation are discussed. Finally, some limitations and concluding perspectives are outlined.
Cultural Horizon – a journal of philosophy and social theory
Embodied, Inter-Affection in and beyond Organisational Life-Worlds2014 •
This paper presents a phenomenology of affect and discusses its relevance for organizational life-worlds. With Merleau-Ponty, affects are interpreted as bodily and embodied inter-relational phenomena, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and e-motional qualities. Relationally, they will be situated as ‘‘interaffection’’ that are part of the inter-corporeality of the ‘‘Flesh’’ of wild be(com)ing. Affect and inter-affectivity are then related to organizational lifeworlds, through a critical exploration of different phenomena and effects generated by positive, negative and ambiguous dimensions. Finally, the potentials of affects and affection as part of the nexus of an embodied responsive responsibility and sustainability are discussed and critical perspectives on affective becoming outlined.
2004 •
Organizational Aesthetics’
States-of-the-Arts in Organization & Leadership Practices that " make sense " – A Poly-logue in Three Parts: Part I -Embodied Senses and its making in Organizations2017 •
Entry in the forthcoming : H. Tsouaks and A. Langley (eds) (2016). The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies. London: SAGE
The Learning Organisation’
Embodied ‘Inter-Learning’- An Integral Phenomenology of Learning in and by Organizations2008 •
Purpose – Based on showing the significance of embodied and relational learning, this paper aims for contributing to a more comprehensive and integral approach to learning in and of organizations and its underlying dynamics. Design/methodology/approach – Methodologically, advanced phenomenology and an integral framework are used for generating a more comprehensive analysis and relational understanding of learning in organizations. Findings – Learning in and by organizations is an ongoing embodied, responsive and relational practice. As such it is covering internal and external as well as individual and collective dimensions entangled within an interdependent nexus and developmental context and integral cycle. Based on these findings perspectives on an “inter-learning” are presented. Research limitations/implications – Some theoretical and methodological implications are discussed as well as avenues for future research outlined. Practical implications – Some practical implications and specific measurements for different domains of learning are outlined briefly. Originality/value – The paper contributes to a needed non-reductionist, integral and relational understanding of learning in and by organizations. Following a process-oriented turn, the article provides innovative perspectives on embodied learning as an inter-relational process, including interior and exterior as well as individual and collective dimensions within an intertwined nexus.
The most basic way in which managers are involved in their performances are their embodied, emotional and expressed inter-+-action respectively. “inter-+-passion”. In perceiving and enacting the embodied “life-worlds” of their daily work and inter-+-relations the same are felt and constituted symbolically as meaningful. On the one hand managerial performances evoke specific thoughts, feelings, images and communications. On the other hand the pre-positional, tacit and expressed processes of their performances are always embedded always already co-determined by specific con-+-textual pre-forming rules. The situational “con-+-Text” or “con-+-Textuality” emphasises that it is the relationship between texts - here understood as any instance of a communicative performance act, spoken, or expressed - that continuously constitutes or excludes meaning. The article shows, how advanced phenomenology and social constructionism can help to render explicit the “incorporated” and “inscribed” experiences and inter-relations of managerial performances. Particularly, Merleau-Ponty`s phenomenology offers a descriptive and interpretative approach to the elementary and interlacing role of body-related, perceptual, and expressive inter-relations of performing processes. Besides emotional and aesthetic dimensions a particular focus will be given to the role of improvisation. The article concludes with some open, critical questions and methodological implications for understanding and interpreting the inter-relational process of (managerial) performance.
Embodied ‘Inter-Practice’ in Organisations –
The contribution of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for carnal organisation studies
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of practices in organization from a phenomenological point of view. It explores the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s advanced phenomenology and ontology for understanding the role of the lived body and embodiment for practices in organisational life-worlds. Based on an embodied relational approach, the concept of an emergent and responsive “inter-practice’ in organisations will be developed. For showing a possible enactment of this embodied inter-practicing, improvisation is explored. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on embodied responsive and responsible inter-practices in organisations are discussed.
Key Words: • phenomenology • Merleau-Ponty • lived body • embodiment • practice
Introduction
The topic of practice is an old and continually re-emerging topic in social science in general and organization, respectively management studies in particular. The recent return towards practice, is marked by a search and research for developing more adequate approaches, vocabularies and interpretations that allow transcending divisions between entities and levels. As practices are multi-folded and complex, referring to a broad range of actions, orientations and methodologies, there are various theoretical and empirical ways for thematising and investigating them. Practice seems to be an umbrella term and facilitating boundary-concept that is open enough for multidimensional analysis and creative exploration across disciplinary borders, allowing different traditions with their distinct perspectives to join a discussion.
As a comprehensive, seemingly all-inclusive term, practice seems to be a multifarious referent for all kinds of doings, approaches and interpretations, however as a buzzword, it is also in danger to become an over-coded notion. For example the generating of practice-based knowledge via simplified principles of best practices have been problematised as fashion (Clark, 2004).
The consideration of ‘practical implications’ and the debate about dealing with or overcoming the so called ‘theory-practice-gap’ is emphasising either the supposed relevance of practice to research or of research to practice, respectively showing that research is itself a form of practice which implies taking theorizing as an engaged and critical practice (Zundel & Kokkalis, 2010). Furthermore, engaged scholarship (Boyer, 1996) has been advocated as guide for social and organizational research (van de Ven, 2007) and the generation and use of academic knowledge for business practice discussed (Jarzabkowski, et al. 2010). As ‘practice-oriented approaches’ are taking various perspectives and foci, there exist many distinct understandings of and approaches towards practice as they have been inspired and guided by different philosophical theories and meta-theoretical orientations. These include, among many others, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (e.g. Schatzki, 1996; Shotters, 2005), and pragmatism (Küpers 2011b; Schatzki, 2006; Simpson, 2009; Wicks & Freeman, 1998) or Bourdieu's theory of practice (Everett, 2002; Gomez, 2010; Splitter, & Seidl, 2011). Moreover, the notion of ‘practice’ is used in different ways within social sciences (Schatzki et al., 2001). Although there is not and probably cannot be a ‘unified’ practice approach (Schatzki, 2001), and practices are intrinsically interlaced with other social practice (Schatzki, 2005, p. 473), for many organisational researchers phenomenal practices constitute both the starting point, processing reality of individuals and their organisations and the ‘end’, to which all investigations and understanding of meaning serve.
Diverse and specific organisational phenomena are investigated as practices, such as knowing and learning in organisations (e.g. Gherardi, 2008; Nicolini et al., 2003; Orlikowski, 2002; Yakhlef, 2010) or technology (Orlikowski, 2000). In particular, a ‘strategy-as-practice’ approach is used (e.g. Balogun et al., 2007; Golsorkhi et al., 2010; Jarzabkowski, et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2003; Samra-Fredricks, 2003; Whittington, 2003, 2006) for investigating daily activities of practitioners, such as strategic planning, strategy workshops, and strategy reviews. Furthermore, many practice-based research practices try to “bridge the gap” between scientific knowledge and lived reality “by engaging more deeply in the empirical details of organisational life on the ground” (Orlikowski, 2010, p. 24).
Even though many practice-based approaches are inspired by phenomenological life-worldly interpretations (Holt & Sandberg, 2011), the contribution of advanced phenomenology and ontology of Merleau-Ponty has not been used systematically in an integrated way. To consider sufficiently the entwinement of life and world of practice (Sandberg & D’Alba, 2009), a specifically reintegrated practice needs to be seen as an embodied one. Accordingly, the ‘practice turn’ requires to be related to a ‘body turn’. Complementing, both turns can serve as a critique of positivistic, cognitivistic and rationalist as well modernist and representational conceptualization of organisations, with their ensuing neglect of the body or ‘somatophobia.
The body turn (Hassard et al., 2000, p.12) signifies an attempt to integrate a constitutive, but mistreated, undervalued or ignored, dimension for understanding practice in organisations (Dale, 2001; 2005; Dale & Burrell, 2000; Yakhlef, 2010). Facing the prevailing neglect and marginalisation and instrumentalised understanding of the body in social and organisational theory, a phenomenological approach can help to re-member the nexus of body, embodiment and practices in organisations. This re-membering allows not only a critique of reductionistic understandings and misled interpretation of practices within a management of everyday life that prioritises instrumentally orientated action (Hancock, 2009); it also contributes to an extended reflexive practice, allowing reflection in and on action (Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009). Moreover, this bodily approach helps reintegrating experiences and material qualities for a re-embodied organisation (Styhre, 2004; 2004a) or a body-aware strategic organisation (Minocha & Stonehouse, 2007).
The premise of the following is that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology (1962, 1995) provide an important entry-gate for approaching and interpreting bodily and embodied practices in organisational life-worlds as an emerging event. From a Merleau-Pontyian perspective, all those involved in organising and managerial practices are to be considered first and foremost as bodily sensuous beings, embedded in the embodied situations of their specific life-worlds. Even more, groups and entire organisations, as incorporations of practices, are manifestations of embodiments. Based on primordial and pre-reflexive dimensions, phenomenologically, practicing is not only embodied, but being embodied is always already a way of practicing mediated by living bodies within a situated and responsive praxis. Furthermore, research itself can be interpreted as embodied practice, in which organisation researchers are bodily involved in their research con-text and produce insights and findings, then expressed in bodies of texts (Essen & Winterstorm, 2012). Thus, not only can Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy present good reasons for critiquing approaches of ‘objectified disembodiment’, it also provides the base for post-dualistic approach and an re-embedment of recursive corporeal dimensions into practices of organising and researching (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011).
The body of the following text will be organised as follows: First, a phenomenological, particularly Merleau-Pontyian understanding of embodied practice will be presented. On this basis then, the praxis in organisations are interpreted as relational processes of what will be called ‘inter-practice’. Furthermore, improvisation will be explored as an exemplarily form and medium for the actual realisation of an embodied, and situational inter-practice in organisations. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on a phenomenological interpretation of practice in organisation will be outlined.
Phenomenological Understanding of Embodied Practice
Phenomenology contributes to an enriched understanding of practice by returning to phenomena, things and events in their life-worldly situatedness and meanings. This turning is one towards the embedding horizon of “all activities and possible praxis” (Husserl, 1970, p.142) as an embodied and situated nexus of experience, intention and action. Phenomenologically, organisations are situated life-worlds (Sandberg & D’Alba, 2009), in which practices take place through experiential processes and thus living action while providing the source and medium for meaning. Ontologically, the situatedness of practices comprises a spatio-temporal dimension. This implies that it occurs through relations to places (Küpers, 2010) and states of durability as ‘contextuo-temporal’ realities (Elkjaer, 2000), both providing conditions for occurring events, activities and sense-making. Practices are always already co-constituted within ‘Being-in-the-World’ (Heidegger, 1962, §12, 13), which makes them “unfolding, fluid, ongoing, shifting, wholistic, and dynamic” (Weick, 2003 p. 459).
Phenomenologically, practices and practising are embodied, while inter-involving various bodily modes of practical belonging and engagements in the world (Csordas 1994, p. 12). According to Merleau-Ponty (1962; 1995), our body is our way of being in the world of everyday-life. Specifically, embodied practice is built upon a pre-reflective and ambiguous ‘ground’ of experiences-as-lived-through and its expressions. From this viable perspective, the body and embodiment are not only functioning as surfaces for inscriptions or discursive constructions, but are having an experiential depth and specificity (Leder, 1990).
What renders Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment particularly important for a critical understanding of practice in organisation is his critique of both empiristic realism and materialism, as well as rationalistic idealism and intellectualism. Both reduce live-worldly phenomena, perception and sensation either to the realm of matter or to that of ideas, each failing to explain the expressive sense of emergent practices. Instead he develops a bodily-mediated and embodied understanding of practicing as part of an interwoven post-dichotomous nexus of “self-other-things” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 p. 57) and perspectival “integral being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1995, p. 84).
As practice is first and foremost embodied and its practitioners are primarily bodily beings, they are both parts of the world and coextensive with it; constituting, but also constituted by it (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 453). Accordingly, the life-world is found meaningful mainly with respect to the ways in which practitioners perceive, feel and act within it and which acts upon them (Crossley, 1996, p. 101) within materially, socio-culturally, historically, gendered, and technologically impacting realities.
Embodiment does not simply mean a physical manifestation, nor is a body a physico-perceptual objectified ‘thing’ or physiological resourceful system to be measured for appraising the pulse of an organization (Akinola, 2010). Rather, being embodied implies that practitioners are dynamically incarnated in and mediated through mundane experiences, (inter-)actions, emotions and moods, especially through receptive, situated affectedness or sensually being-at-tuned. Thus, the embodied practicing subjects as well as their socio-cultural embodiment are situated in a ongoing sensual that is tactile, visual, olfactory or auditory way. Whatever these incarnated subjects perceive, feel, think, intend or do as well as make sense of or cope with, they are bodily exposed to and process their practicing within a synchronised field of interrelated senses and synaesthetic sensations (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 207).
Within the sphere of such experienced practice a member of an organisation does not only feel ‘I think’, but also ‘I relate to’ or ‘I do’. In other words, the atmosphere within which practices is situated, is not only what people conceive about it, but primarily what they live through with their ‘operative intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. xviii, 165) as a bodily, pre-reflexive, concrete spatial motility. Accordingly, the active and moving body serves as a medium that is implicated in experiencing and signifying. As lived-body is constantly present it is functioning as a perceptive and intentional as well as responsive organ dispositioned as an ‘I can’ (Husserl, 2001, p. 50-51). This implies that the ‘I can’ (or ‘cannot’) and the ‘I feel’ (or ‘do not feel’) are capacities to experience or to do certain things. Moreover, this bodily disposition and propensity to reach out, relates, precedes and impacts the possibility of the ‘I know’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 137, 173; Gherardi, 2008; 2009a,b).
With this understanding of embodied-based practice, there is a close link between what is actually given and what is intended and situated responses. This responsiveness refers to a specific answering practice (Waldenfels, 2007, 2008) within a responsive order (Gendlin, 1997), which resembles experiences of dance where each step calls for responding to another, the Other and the environment, evoking situated creativity (Joas, 1996; MacLean & MacIntosh, 2012) in finding variations or improvisations, allowing the rhythm of an unfolding life. As a living body and being embodied, practitioners respond to meaningful questions, problems or claims posed to them through embodied, material conditions and their embedding or affording contexts. Thus, practicing arises from engaged participation in bodily experiences, acts and responses of organising. Moreover, by considering dynamically interpersonal dimensions, which are proceeding and grounding all theory of practice, this phenomenological approach contributes to an extended understanding of social practicing. Specifically, it allows studying embodied practicing as joint, plural action and cooperation, processed through We-Mode-intentionalities as forms of collective reasoning, responding and commitments (Tuomela, 2007; Schmid, 2009). Importantly, these entwined spheres of social bodies and embodiments are not seen as fixed loci or representations, but dynamically emerging and open relationships as an enacted ‘We-can’.
From a phenomenological perspective, not only is practicing embodied, but being embodied is always already a way of mediating the practicing through disclosing ‘bodies-in-action’ in their lived and shared situations. Within this situatedness, living bodies inter-mediate responsively between internal and external, subjective and objective as well as individual and collective dimension and meaningful practices.
This socio-culturally co-constituted, body-mediated process coordinates the relations between individual behavior, social relations and artifacts and institutions, particularly through language and communication as expressive media of inter-relation (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 197). Thus, practices can be seen as a function and emergent process of vivid bodily subjects and a dynamic embodiment of socio-material realities in which practitioners are inter-relationally entangled.
The entwinement or infringement between practitioner and their intermediating embodied practicing allows considering multi-folded spheres of experiences and realities of practices together. This mutual entanglement permits to explore the interrelating perceptions, affects, feelings, meanings and actions as well as inter-personal, social and material dimensions of organisational practices in a fluid, reversible and integrative fashion (Küpers, 2011b; Küpers & Edwards, 2008).
Embodied Practices and ‘Bodies at work’ in Organisations
People involved in organisations can be interpreted as ‘body-subjects’ or bodily agents, whose embodied experience connects them to their life-world in a particular time, space and socio-cultural context. As such, embodied practitioners are comported intentionally and responsively towards a material world, while their experience opens up to inexhaustible, but meaningful possibilities. For example, turn-taking participations in business meetings are organised through embodied orientations and conducts as a multimodal practices, displaying specific local expectations regarding rights and obligations to talk and to know (Maraki & Mondada, 2012).
This understanding corresponds to reviewed tenets of practice theory, which considers practice as “embodied materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organised around shared practical understandings” (Schatzki, 2001: 3). Practice for Schatzki is a “temporary unfolded and spatially dispersed nexus of doing and saying” where the body and artifacts are sites of understanding (1996: 89). Expressive bodies not only signify biological or psychological states, but are central in the enactment of social and organisational life as “it is through the performance of bodily actions that the performance of other actors is constituted or effected” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 44).
Organisational practices are made up of a collection of embodied orientations, feelings, thoughts, intentions, and activities related to equipment and tools as well as shared socio-cultural milieus. The latter includes also traditions, values, norms, procedures, routines and agencies of collaborating and performing practioners, who are realising joint practical purpose (Reckwitz, 2002).
In contrast to mere doing, practicing refers to actual (micro-)activities within a situated sphere of embodied praxis as the interconnection and embeddedness of actions, actors and agencies, forming a Gestalt-like ‘held-togetherness’ and conduct of life.
A particular embodied practice of organising can take various forms, varying or morphing with changes in worldly situations and its structurations within specific, altering margins and horizons. For this reason, these practices are not singular and unitary, but multiple and contingent. Being implicated within various horizons, and processing ongoing corporeal differences (Weiss, 1999), embodied practices are not closed, but are evolving towards preliminary results. As such they remain open, indeterminate and incomplete as well as mutually related to other practices and social embodiments.
One form in which embodied practices can be concretised are those which involve “bodies at work” (Wolkowitz, 2006, p. 183). These practices involve working bodies or work that is done on another bodies respectively when the context becomes the body. What has been called embodied labor refers to ways in which members of organisations are operating as bodily-engaged beings within occupational milieus (Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2009, p. 222). For example in performing somatic work (Vanini et al., 2011) or sensory work in organisation (Hockey, 2009) practical work-experiences of the embodied practitioner create, manage, reproduce, negotiate, interrupt, and communicate somatic awareness and sensations. This kind of embodied performance is often processed in critical relation to rules and organisational circumstances and enacts a corporeal sense-making or sensuous making of meaning (Waskul & Vanini, 2008). Furthermore, various forms of affective labor refer to a kind of embodied practices, which produces or modify affective and emotional experiences in people to manipulate senses and affects as part of an affect-oriented consumer culture (Featherstone, 2010) and experience economy. In embodying emotional labour (Knights & Thanem, 2005), the body acts as a medium of affective and symbolic communication through bodily language, gestures and appearances, especially in service-work (Bolton, 2005) with highly ambivalent effects, that is not only impoverishing, alienating or exhausting, but also mutually connecting acting out and enriching or satisfying working-life (Küpers &Weibler, 2008; Lapointe et al., 2012).
As both actor and mediating instrument the knowing mindful body is the ‘conditio sine quo non’ for actions of emotional practices (Scheer, 2012), like mobilizing of psychophysical and social capacities, or naming, communicating, and regulating. Another form of embodied labor is the bodywork involved in caring, which is often stigmatized as low-status, low-paying and dirty work, deemed more suitable for the bodies of women and migrants (Dyer et al. 2008; Huang et al. 2012). Furthermore, aesthetic labor is a an embodied practice that entails supplying, mobilizing, developing and commodifying embodied dispositions, capacities and attributes transformed into competencies, which are then aesthetically geared towards producing a ‘style’ in service encounters (Warhurst et al., 2000, p. 4). As a form of presentational performance aesthetic labor displays approved social attributes of the body or embodiment for example to create and preserve a professional and/or corporate image or keeping up appearances for example in the fashion industries (Entwistle & Wissinger, 2006). As an on-going production of the body/self specific embodied capacities in aesthetically oriented labor have been investigated as experienced also by interactive service employees in the retail and hospitality industries (Witz et al., 2003; Warhurst & Nickson 2007). Self- and other-oriented presentational labor are embodied practices, in which front-line personal service specialists overtly or subtly know about the relationship between emotional and aesthetic labor, acquiring emotional and aesthetic litera cies that are essential to their performance in maintaining a close, personal relationship with their clients (Sheane, 2012). Occupational and somatic particularities of diversity workers can also use micro-political ‘strategies of embodiment’ as a form of resistance or co-optation, which involves forms of symbolism of racialized and gendered bodies and body work for example in the context of new public sector management (Swan & Fox, 2010).
Also forms of impression management use agency-oriented body-techniques (Crossley, 1995a), and embodied emotions or aesthetics for specific forms of communication. Furthermore, studies show how practitioners are incorporating embodied knowing, as intertwined with feelings and cognition, into social work practice (Sodhi & Cohen, 2012). They not only use their body as a viable and valid source of knowledge and trusting their somatic sensations as part of their professional activities, bodily knowing serves also as is an experiential, contextual, reflective learning process.
Embodied Inter-Practice in Organisations
Similar to the conceptualization of practice-configurations in a radical process-orientation (Chia & MacKay, 2007), practices are not only a collection of purposeful activities of self-contained individual actors and material things. Rather, they are also trans-individual, social and systemic events of emergent becoming and meaning-giving complexes. With its emotional dynamics and active responsiveness, this relational practicing resembles more an iterative, explorative way-finding and dwelling, then a planned navigation and building, thus dares for example to process strategies without design (Chia & Holt, 2006).
Closely connected to this relational process-perspective and following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, practices in organisations can be interpreted as ‘inter-practices’ (Küpers, 2009). Based on the post-dual ontology of ‘inter-being’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208) such radicalised relational orientation understands practice and practicing as an emerging event. Phenomenologically, this inter-practicing is always already co-constituted and continuously influenced by embodied pre-subjective and pre-objective capacities of experiential processes within what Merleau-Ponty calls the “Flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, 1995, p. 131).
This elemental mediating flesh refers to an incorporated intertwining and reversibility of pre- and non-personal with personal and interpersonal dimensions. Serving as common connective tissue, this flesh ‘enables’ phenomena to appear in the first place and processes a meaning woven through all levels of experience, making possible all particular horizons.
The polyvalent variegated open-ended term and metaphor of flesh is Merleau-Ponty’s central ontological principle, which sustains his attempt to overcome traditional metaphysical dualisms as well as to expand and ontologize his concept of the lived-body, signifying a polymorphous, open systems, a multivalent, and horizontal ambiguous Being and foundation of the possibility of expression. As a universal dimensionality the elemental Flesh subtends all other categorization and typciality (Weiss, 1981, 91). Not being a static totality or stasis or metaphysical identity it is a process of incomplete difference-enabling Being as ongoing explosion tied to dehiscence as the manner in which the perceptual and meaningful horizon remain open, through differential progress and sedimentations of meaning (Weiss, 1981, 91). Understanding “flesh, as a kind of originary absence” (Madison, 1992: 97) it is what makes the presentation of being-present possible, but which never presents itself as such. Thus, it is “non-space” of in-between, an “ecart,” the gap, the separation, the differentiation between the touching and the touched, the seeing and the seen, mind and world, self and others. That gap that space of corporeal difference is the "there is" within "the Being that lies before the cleavage operated by reflection, about it, on its horizons, not outside of us and not in us, but there were the two movements cross. . ." (Merleau-Ponty, 1995, p. 95).
The ontological concept and carnal metaphor of “flesh” expresses and allows associations to the sensible, bodily commonality of beings and to the generative capacity of being as becoming. As a dynamic medium, this flesh inter-links the sentient and sensible body through which in- and outside, passivity and activity enmesh, while “permeating all interrelated, interwoven things” (Cataldi, 1993, p. 60).
In the social world of organizations, flesh manifests as an inter-mediating, open-ended soma-significative and dialogical exchange as chiasmic wave-like flow and entwinement between embodied selves and others processing their shared “We-can-Mode”. The relational flesh creates ‘in-between spaces’ (Bradbury & Lichtenstein, 2000) of inter-practicing, which include various interwoven, emerging processes and feedback-loops (Calori, 2002; Lukenchuk, 2006). Providing possibilities for an unfolding in-betweenness flesh serves as generous source (Diprose, 2002), enacted as a corporeal generosity of embodied mutual recognition organizational life-worlds (Hancock, 2008).
The concept of flesh-mediated embodied inter-practice helps to reveal and interpret the relationship between being, feeling, knowing, doing, structuring and effectuating in and through action, both individually and collectively as they are implicated in organizational every-day life. For example, Hindmarsh and Pilnick (2007) have demonstrated how the body and an inter-corporeal knowing and sharing constitutes an important resource for organising effective real-time coordination of emerging interdependent activities of operating teams.
The concept of inter-practices can be used for inquiries into the negotiating inter-play of the inherently entwined materialities, subjectivities, intersubjectivities, and objectivities. Exploring inter-practices inquires into the interplay of entwined embodied materialities, subjectivities, and intersubjectivities as they occur and are processed in organisational life-worlds or practices of leading and following with its multi-modal orchestration of bodies, artifacts and discourses (Streeck et al., 2011).
Embedded within the complexities of human pragmatics, inter-practice covers both: experiential actions of bodily agents and institutionalised operations of organizations as ‘incorporations’. In this way, an inter-practice considers more inclusively the corporeality of practice-based dimensions (Yakhlef, 2010). For instance Küpers et al. (2012) showed in their empirical study how performative narrative inter-practices of strategising are mediated by lived, embodied experiences in organisational life-worlds. For further exploring the creative inter-practice, the following discusses improvisation as one of its possible forms of enactment.
Improvisation as enactment of inter-practice
The phenomenological understanding of the corporeality of organisation as mediated and engaged through embodied inter-practice can be explored by studying improvisations. Generally, improvisational practice in organisations has been studied as an inventive competence and responsive, performing action, which takes place in a spontaneous and intuitive fashion in specific circumstances (Crossan, 1998). Importantly, improvising practices in organisational life-worlds are situated, provisional and emerging in relation to embodied, material and social flux of bodies and locally sensitive knowledge. Recent research confirmed the role of intuitive and improvisational skills for situated practice for example in cases of nursing, financial trading, and scientific practice (Styhre, 2011) or project management (Thomas et al., 2012).
Processes of improvised practicing, as they are occurring through affection in real-time in individual and social interactions are always embedded within specific materially, structurally, and culturally embodied con-texts of relationships. These relational embedments imply that practices of improvising agents are informed, constrained, and possibly also co-determined by bodily, social and institutional conditions as well as the nexus of its performance (Pinnington et al., 2003). As a ingenious practice, improvisation involves constant organising, dis- and re-organising, while moving between material and intera- and inter-subjective realms, as an experiential and experimental moment the improvisation ‘mid-embodiment’ as a haptic creativity is moving between the lived (active) body and the objective (passive) body (Myers, & Dumit, 2011, p. 249). Relationally, improvisation not only helps to adapt to complex outer environments, but also allows expression of inner complexity (Montuori, 2003). Metaphorically, improvisation can be characterised as a dance between the exterior and interior, often occurring as a skilled, ‘improvised in-situ-coping’ (Chia, 2004, p. 33), a practical coping that involves an absorbed intentionality of the body Chia & Holt, 2006, p. 648). Although based on and dynamically related to bodily memory and habits, improvisation happens ex-tempor-aneously, outside the normal flow of time, that is un-predictabe and with little known cause or causal relationships. In this sense, improvising does not belong to a regular chronology in a linear sequence of events, but processes an authentic temporality (Ciborra, 1999). Improvisations are or can trigger an affective and ecstatic experience of an inter-ruption. This ruptive experience is characterised by a sense of immediacy, suddenness, transgression of pre-determined plans, thus re-forming dis-positions, which in turn pre-dispose to act or respond in particular ways. For example Lanzara (2009) showed how the disrupting introduction of new media in a bureaucratised professional setting triggered a perception-based coping and affective migration of practitioners to a different medium usage to perform their work, which uncovered unknown dimensions of practice and sense-making.
As an unsettling, albeit situational process, improvisation is “embody(ing) different senses of persons in different situations” (Machin & Carrithers, 1996, p. 345). Thus, it can be highly contingent upon emerging circumstances and its interpretation in which design and action take place simultaneously (Weick, 1998). Converging design and execution, improvisation co-creates an ongoing embodied, inter-practice as it unfolds, thus being responsive in real time (Crossan & Sorrenti, 1997). Embodied improvising agents like individuals, teams (Vera & Crossan, 2005) or entire organisations (Miner et al., 2001), develop and realise their improvisatory practices while being open, responding to situated questions, problems or opportunities on the spur of the moment.
This openly responsive quality can be traced back to the Latin root ‘improvisus’, meaning ‘unforeseen’, which provokes the improvisers to create and deal or cope with surprise or processes of change (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997) for example in form of improvisational choreography in tele-service-work (Whalen et al., 2002).
The embodied, irruptive, and responsive character of improvising implies that it defies measurement and objectifying approaches and methods. Accordingly, the subversive power of embodied improvisation can be found in its quality of challenging the prevailing objectivist and cognitive or rational paradigm, which still governs many organisational practices and its theorising.
Improvisational activities in embodied inter-practicing occur as contested and negotiable. As such, they are not a harmonious, simply fluid or a free way of acting, yielding positive results. On the contrary, they entail paradoxes, dilemmas and conflicting needs and interests of those involved. At the same time, improvisational practices are also a source for reflecting ways of dealing with these tensions (Blackler & Reagan, 2009), for example serving as a means to reconcile basic tensions such as those between flexibility and structure (Kamoche & Cunha, 2001).
Using and making sense of something in improvisation is a full-bodied, sensory project, which demands an enlivened sensory, vibrant state of readiness for alternatives. As an interstitial practice, improvising allows spaces and times for surprise and discovery, without eliminating choice. Moreover, practitioners can make swift and resolute choices, while engaging also socially in bricolages of material, mental, social and cultural resources (Nicolini et al., 2003): 27). According to Duymedjian and Rüling (2010, p. 140), assembling bricolages are an ideal-typical configuration of practice, epistemology, and metaphysics that is an inter-relational acting, knowing and world-view, in which resources like objects, space, symbols, ideas, documents, the bricoleur herself are created. These heterogeneous resources are dialogically processed over time as repertoires, collected during unplanned encounters and built up and used idiosyncratically with no predetermined intention, purpose or outcomes. As collective bricolage, this inter-practice involves dialogue, sharing mutual learning between co-present, collaborating bricoleurs and their repertoires and resources. Additionally, improvisation can be regarded as a significant contributor to organisational learning through the mobilisation of embodied tacit knowledge, for example in relation to emergent strategies (Bergh & Lim, 2008). While being related to other practices, and inter-organizational dynamics and distributed agencies (Garud & Karnøe, 2003), improvisations are instances of embodied practice-making and practice-changing. Therefore, inter-practices of improvisation are formations of what could be called ‘re-evolutionary’ organising and trans-+-formation (Küpers, 2011c).
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Practical, Political and Theoretical Implications
Practical Implications
With its experiential, dynamic and provisional status, the described forms and transformational qualities of embodied inter-practice in organisation defy control and elude manageability. Because these relational practices do not exist as a given, stable, fixed entity, they cannot be simply organised or manipulated. Instead of being designed directly, inter-practices can only be designed for, that is, allowed and encouraged. Part of this challenge is to prepare and offer supportive conditions and relationships that engender targeted facilitations or circumstances on a situation-specific basis (Küpers, 2009), by which embodied moments of inter-practices can flourish in organisations.
Particularly, improvisation, as a disciplined craft of enacted inter-practice, requires situationally applied orientations and skills that can be learned through continual practice (Crossan et al., 1996, p. 25), as “…improvisation has no existence outside of its practice” (Bailey, 1992, p. x). Following a phenomenology of surprise (Depraz, 2010), and approaches towards learning to be surprised (Jordan, 2010), improvisational practices can be prepared by cultivating an attentional openness, an attending with and to the body (Csordas, 1993). An attitude of expecting to be surprised brings out the stratified rhythmic of affective emotions that subtends it and allows the emergences of difference and newness. The paradoxical capacity of expecting surprise as an active receptivity for the unpredictable, are part of a phenomenology of birth and event (Dastur, 2000) contributing to openness towards indeterminate futures. As practice is a protensive temporalisation, the future is always already present and is actualised in the immediate present (Adkin, 2011). Therefore the imagining embodied organisational member in her or their improvisational modes experience the forthcoming with a quasi-bodily anticipation, specifically of ‘what is to be done’. To practice improvisation and to “rehearse spontaneity” (Mirvis 1998, p. 587) individually or in communities of improvisation (Machin & Carrithers, 1996), requires fostering settings such as the cultivation of creative habits (Tharp, 2003) or team-training for improvisational action (Vera, 2002).
Basically, the capacity for innovation and learning in organisations for developing inter-practices depends on the ability to nurture between-times and between-places for the co-creation of value in different constellations (Berthoin-Antal, 2006; Normann & Ramírez, 1993). Furthermore, instead of assessing success according to degrees of conformity to existing plans, what is needed are possibilities of active deviations without evaluating them as a symptom of failure (Orlikowski & Hofman, 1997, p. 20).
To realise embodied inter-practices, leaders and followers, as improvisers, require having access to available material, financial as well as affective, emotional, cognitive and social resources (Cunha et al., 1999, p. 302). Likewise, the construction of sensory systems, the search for creative destruction, and the cultivation of connections to increase an organisation’s resilience and its capacity to deal with the unexpected have been suggested (Schwartz, 2003). All of these resources and facilitating conditions are closely related to political implications.
Political Implications
By enacting facilitations for realising inter-practices it will be important to consider that these are not value-free or politically neutral processes. While inter-practicing aspires contributing to the flourishing of interrelated embodied human persons, communities, and systems, such undertaking raises questions of values, morals, and ethics respectively ethical bodies (Al-Saji, 2006) and linking embodiment and the socio-ethico-political as social flesh (Beasley & Bacchi, 2007). Consequently, politics based on Merleau-Pontyian critical thinking (Coole, 2007, p. 175), pays attention to underlying principles and purposes as well as considers strategic and moral choices in organisations that are made. Providing reliable guides to the question ‘useful for what?’ is actually complex, because it raises critical issues such as: Who defines what is wanted, for whom and within what temporal horizon? Therefore, the question is not simply one on the narrow basis of ‘Does it work?’ or ‘Which are direct outcomes-based performance measures and within what temporal horizon?’ Rather: ‘How can potentials and actualities of micro-inter-practices be integrated into broader organisational and even societal circumstances?’
Considering inter-practices as a connected nexus avoids falling into the fallacy of an individualist actionistic heroism or collective action-driven orientation, which both could have suboptimal or even dysfunctional effects (Bruch & Ghoshal, 2002). Alongside this, the reductionism of a short-sighted ‘practicalism’ needs to be problematised. An outcome-fixation and utilitarian course collapses practical instrumentalism with practicality, while loosening access to emergent, indeterminable qualities and an understanding of possible other meanings. Politically sensitive approaches towards inter-practices are critical of technocratic ideologies, thoughtless calculative rationalities and exploitative, managerialist appropriations. An absorption by such instrumentalistic preoccupations and reductionistic practices, can imply a loss of considering emergent, ethically and aesthetic and reflexive dimensions. Moreover, such techne-driven orientations may lead to pre-conceiving all entities as intrinsically meaningless ressources, that impoverishes and undermines the potential for creative engagement.
Furthermore, some practices may become entrenched among others as more dominant, in that way that some become more equal than others and end up anchoring nets of activities (Swidler, 2001). Critically, an inter-practical approach requires analysing the ways in which political practices in organisations are exercised to achieve and maintain power or control, by which then certain forms of practicing are excluded or superimposed. Particularly, this critical stance refers to the issue of how specific embodied experiences, meanings and practices are discriminated, marginalised, degraded and ignored or dominated, subordinated or disciplined. Therefore, a critical approach towards inter-practice can be used for studying the ordering and normalising of disciplinary techniques and encumbering processes of forced or imposed practices or how bodies functions as potential site for resistance to power (Ball, 2005).
With regard to politics of identity, Kenny and Bell (2011) discussed the problems involved in ’representing the successful managerial body’, especially women’s embodied experiences of managerial cultures. Also Haynes (2008; 2011) showed the significance of a ‘professional body image’ manifest in appearance, demeanour and service-interaction as part of professional identity formation and embodied practice in which gendered ‘physical capital’ is implicated in processes of socialization, subordination and control.
Improvisational inter-practice not only refers to purposive actions, but also to non-purposive, non-rational and especially silence(d) practices in organisational life. Phenomenologically, it is important to explore what is not practised or not said, including un-noted actions or actors and all kinds of omissions. Additionally, this implies those phenomena that are strategically unthinkable, supposedly un-doable or tabooed in decision-making and those excluded as possible practices (Carter et al., 2007, p. 94). Following Rancière (2010) postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of disruptive politics of dissensus, this implies a re-arrangement of political order and of the different regimes of perceptual part-taking, which determine what can count as perception, experience or sense, also collectively, that is modifying a sensory framework distinguishing the visible from the invisible, the sayable from the unsayable, the audible from the inaudible, the possible from the impossible.
In the same vein, and for countering the danger that a practice orientation falls into the aforementioned practicalism of over-doing, it will be important to explore experiences and practices of ‘Doing Nothing’ understood as infra-ordinary “non-events” (Ehn & Loefgren, 2010, p. 5). These often subversive, embodied event and acts may manifest in occurrences like waiting or day-dreaming, which are powerful undercurrents of daily life in organisations. Similarly, tactics and micro-political processes in relation to the everyday-of-living (de Certeau, 1984) can be studied as an employment of a creative intelligence and practice of governance. Through these tactics, embodied occupants of work-environments or resisting groups, subvert all-pervasive pressures in order to re-assert and re-appropriate a sphere of autonomous action and self-determination. These tactics – understood as ‘art of the weak’ – are based on complex intersubjective relations of sociality, intimacy and affect and take advantage of opportunities through playing with ‘strong strategies’. De Certeau’s interpretation of tactics helps to reflect on the encounter between the plurality of everyday practices with its irreducibility and un-intelligibility and the narratives of and at the margins. By engaging with the Other within immanent and everyday practices, de Certeau foregrounds a political ontology that sees otherness as the starting point to take the very irreducibility of everyday practice as a creative challenge. Nevertheless, this irreducible practice can be translated into ethnographic practice and by this explore narrative human subjectivity in more nuanced and ethically engaged ways (Napolitano & Pratten, 2007).
By applying varied perspectives on embodied inter-practices and their interconnections, researchers are better equipped to shed light on tensions that come along with lived practices by exposing seemingly incompatible demands and disparities as complementary and by demonstrating that apparently opposing interests are actually interwoven.
Another critical concern relates to the danger of a kind of a possible retro-regressive orientation. While there seems to be an increasing need for reviving forms of experiential practices of embodiment, there exists the threat of falling prey to a pre-modern longing for ‘unity’ and retro-romantic fallacies or irrational sentimentalities. As understandable as such yearning for returning to a pre-reflective union for the disembodied, alienated, rational modern and fragmented, relativising consciousness appears, there is no way back to a retro-regressive coincidence with nature or supposed pre-existing truths. Rather, what is required is an adequate and integral orientation and practice of transformation (Küpers, 2011), which follows a co-creative way forward or cyclic movement spiraling back and forth with a reflective somatic awareness and consciousness (Shusterman, 2005) and its practical enactment through embodied agency of a transformative politics (Coole, 2005; 2007: 175).
Theoretical and Methodological Implications
Phenomenology allows approaching practices in their fullness and complexity as they arise as experiences and realities in rich, often unstructured, and multidimensional ways. Compared to the second-hand constructions of positivist science – for example, a priori theory and concepts, hypotheses, predetermined methodological procedures, statistical measures of correlation and causality – phenomenology retains a sensibility and awareness for how organising appears and manifests processually and structurally. Following an extended method of suspension (bracketing), a phenomenologist specialising in organisations’ attempts to meet phenomena, as they appear in as open and unprejudiced a way as possible. The results of this phenomenological methodology are revealing descriptions and understandings as well as moments of deeper clarity in which practice can be seen and interpreted in a fresh and more adequate way. In contrast, or supplementing what psychological, behavioral, cultural, constructionist or system-theoretical investigations can provide, a phenomenological approach of embodied practices in organisations contributes to enriched interpretation of its relational dimensions and meanings. With such relational orientation a phenomenological investigation is close to process-oriented approaches, which likewise emphasis the dynamic and creative-imaginative practice, opening up towards the realities of movement and becoming (Chia & Holt, 2006; Nayak, 2008) or entering the chiasm between being and becoming (Weik, 2011). With regard to avoiding a reifying and entitative approach, instead of labeling boxes, phenomenological approaches toward inter-practice emphasis the arrows, the actional dynamic relationships and performances that create effects and ‘outcomes’ (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011, p. 1247).
In terms of language, a focus on inter-practices invites the use of more doing-words and gerunds for expressing processual acting and signifying how practices are in the making, always becoming and evolving while providing life-enriching and imaginative potentials (Carlsen, 2006). For example, research on improvisation related to organisation as embodied and creative performances in an immersion-in-activity (Hyland, 1984) can be explored, by which imagination and inter-practicing are mediated and unfold. Approaching improvisation methodologically as an inter-practice supports the development of a multilevel theory that explores improvisational processes at different levels and links them to each other in a business context (Vera & Crossan, 2005, p. 221).
To further explore the body and embodiment in organisation, research needs to become a more multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary endeavour, opening up for multiple and innovative methods. This requires considering and using approaches, methods and findings from other disciplines like social sciences and humanities, but also sciences. Taking research itself as a form of inter-practice, cross-disciplinary bridging helps to show the significance of bodily and affective or embodied processes involved in inter-practices. For exploring the embodiment of inter-practiced organising, a more integral epistemology and methodological pluralism need to take first-, second- and third-person perspectives in singular or plural forms with each of their specific, inherent methodologies or modes of inquiries as well as their complex interplay (Küpers & Weibler, 2008). Epistemologically and ontologically, such research orientation contributes to the radically reflexive reworking of subject-object distinctions with their knowledge problematics (Cunliffe, 2011).
Overall, carnal organisational studies embrace a more sensorial and fleshly stance in relation to bodies of all its members and the mediating embodiment at work as part of organisational every-day worlds. Developing such embodied organisation research, requires to shift from a theorizing about or of bodies, in a disembodied, objectifying or subjectifying way, towards a mode of inquiry that is sensing and making sense while thinking from and with lived bodies and embodiment. Such orientation calls for more sensual methodologies and art-based research practices (Warren, 2008; Knowles & Cole 2008). For example, collecting and analysing embodied, sensuous appearances by integrating videography into research methodologies helps to study and (re-)present bodily senses (Merchant, 2011).
Conclusion
This paper has shown the significance of a phenomenology of embodied practice and practicing in organisational life-worlds. Following the phenomenological ‘re-turn’ to practice and to the body, specific interconnected embodied dimensions of practice have been discussed with the aim to open up the possibility for a more integral and processual understanding of an ‘inter-practice’ in organisations. Moreover, the characterisation of inter-practice(ing) contributes not only to reconceive the embodied ‘base’ of organisational practices, but also allows conceiving new ways of approaching how responsive and improvisational practicing co-evolves within a multidimensional nexus of organisations.
If practices in organisations are shaped by bodily processes and an embodied operative intentionalities and responsiveness, then inquiries into practice that fail to take them into account may miss not only significant aspects, but also how practices are happening in and through a ‘space in-between’ (Bradbury & Lichtenstein, 2000). The potential of a situated bodily action-research explores actual, ongoing practice as one that is shared by both the practitioners of the practice and of researchers in their different roles as practitioners (Shotter, 2010, p. 281).
However, a critical reflection concerning various difficulties, limitations and problems involved in realising embodied inter-practices, needs to consider the danger of an escapist retro-regression. Returning to an embodied practice requires being aware of not falling prey to a pre-modern longing for unity and retro-romantic fallacies. A historiographically and culturally informed account of the embodiment prevents falling into a kind of neo-sensualism or neo-sensationalism, but links the embodied sensorium of practice to contemporary forms of sense-making for example in cyberspace, with its tele-presences and multi-media applications Facing the complexities of current organizational practices and their embeddings, it remains important to recognise that not all what is involved in them can be understood properly by bodily or embodied processes alone.
Nevertheless, putting into practice an embodied inter-practice in organisations invites possibilities for critical study and different realization of organising practices. On the one hand, such approach helps to critique disembodied practices, in which individual and collective bodies or embodiments are neglected, merely comprehended as constructed or rendered only as instrumentalised objects for an utilitarian exploitative ‘practicalism’. Such a reductionist approach is blocking the enfoldment of creative potentials of inter-practices and improvisational experimentalism in organisations. Functionally separating the lived body and embodiment from praxis inhibits the further development of practice and its research.
On the other hand, focusing on and facilitating inter-practices may contribute to the emergence and realisation of alter-native, ingenious and more suitable forms of practicing in organisations, that is ‘other-birthly’ ways of living, entailing socio-cultural-political and ethical dimensions. Knowing about embodied inter-practice helps to learn about the particular possibilities and constraints of the conditions within which practices are enacted and thereby allows recognising alternative ways of performing and improving concrete work practices that is “uncovering [of] new or alternative routes of action” (Nicolai & Seidl, 2010, p. 1270). This circumstantial and circumspective orientation becomes even more relevant as today’s organisations are situated in increasingly complex, often paradoxical and dilemmatic individual and collective settings. Furthermore, actualising an embodied inter-practice helps not only in developing more relational ways of leading and following in the form of an ‘inter-leadership’ (Küpers & Weibler, 2008a). A prudent inter-practice mediates the cultivation of integral well-be(com)ing and practical wisdom in organisations (Küpers, 2005; Küpers, 2007) and a post-paradigmatic phronetic, ‘real’ social science (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Flyvbjerg et al. 2012) and a corresponding embodied wise practice. Instead of imposing formulae and rules or norms, a wise inter-practice embodies a capacity for appropriate responsive improvisation in the face of particularities, heterogeneity and imprecations. Taking the predicament of our current state of affairs, organisation and civic society can only ignore the cultivation of the art of wise inter-practice (Küpers, 2011) at their peril.
It is hoped that the phenomenological interpretation of practice as proposed here provides possibilities to re-assess, re-vive and further investigate the relevance of bodily and embodied processes and bodily realities of inter-practices in and through organisations. Re-membering, reflecting critically and re-searching living experiences and dynamic intricacies of practicing in re-embodied organisation are a challenging endeavor and demanding journey. But this undertaking is a timely and worthwhile one, as it contributes to much needed, more integrally transformative and sustainable practices in organisational life-worlds and through them to future economic, political, ethical and societal relationships and realities in with their inter-becoming.
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