Organization as an Embodied Life-World of Practice

From a phenomenological perspective, organizations and their management can be interpreted as specific life-worlds.1 These worlds of life serve as a starting point and focus for any phenomenological inquiry into organizing and managing (Sandberg and Dall’Alba, 2009). The life-world is the living world of materialities, realities and experiences in which concrete beings in organizations are situated in time and located in place as part of everyday phenomena. As a daily milieu, ‘members’ of organizations dwell on and as ‘bodies’ operate in this world in an unwitting state of mundane engagement that mediates the pursuit of their activities and enables them to perform their tasks. While their respective existences and practices take place and are paced through contextuo-temporal realities and experiential living processes, life-worldly spheres provide the source and media for given, collective meanings and created sense-making (Küpers, 2013b).2 It is this ‘seamless’ stream of embodied living and its meaning as organizing to which the phenomenological approach returns in order to move forwards in understanding its phenomenality. With its emphasis on the lived experience of inhabiting bodies and their connectedness to habitualized embodiment, Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology offers a resource for readdressing organization studies and especially its practice as an embodied one.