“Our flight suits are not just plain blue”: The co-production of coordination and bodies in a military air display squadron

Abstract

While prior investigations of organizational coordination have mainly focused on cognitive processes, this article brings the physical and symbolic body more centrally into the phenomenon. Mobilizing the ‘strong’ practice programme, we explore how organizational coordination practice and bodies co-produce each other. Our study is an empirical qualitative analysis of Patrouille de France, a military air display squadron. By successively zooming in and out from pilots’ doings and sayings, we reveal three body-related threads (training, sensitizing, and distinguishing) by which organizational coordination and bodies co-produce each other. We especially point to technical and physical capital, proprioception, kinaesthesia, embodied awareness of co-presence, and the symbolic (re)presentation of bodies as embodied aspects of the actors’ habitus structured by and for coordination. Our findings have implications for our understanding of organizational coordination by showing that there is more to bodies in coordination than just embodied cognition or communication. They also further coordination literature by emphasizing that coordination practice includes organizationally structured bodywork aimed at enhancing bodies; bodywork that is not limited to learning the practice but crucial to maintaining actors in that practice.

Visualizing Embodied Experiences: Drawing as a Form of Reflective Inquiry Informed by Gestalt Art Therapy

“…First, the destruct-reconstruct combination could be seen as a precursor for the contact boundary to emerge, and here emphasis is on 'our own behavior with respect to the object' (Perls et al, 1994, p. 316). Such an approach could lend itself to generating novel theoretical inroads on the importance of the body in craft (Sasaki et al, 2019) and organizations (Bouty and Godé, 2022;Ray, 2019). In addition, another promising line of inquiry focuses on materiality and embodied experiences (Harding et al, 2022).…”

“…Such an approach could lend itself to generating novel theoretical inroads on the importance of the body in craft (Sasaki et al. , 2019) and organizations (Bouty and Godé, 2022; Ray, 2019). In addition, another promising line of inquiry focuses on materiality and embodied experiences (Harding et al.…”

“…The first situates personal experiences vis-à-vis how an industry develops over time, while the second focuses on highly personal experiences that are relatively difficult to verbalize. Insights from these projects are relevant in at least studies focusing on embodied experiences (Bouty and Godé, 2022;Dameron, Lê and LeBaron, 2015;Gylfe et al, 2016;Harding et al, 2022), craft as a situated practice (Sasaki, Ravasi and Micelotta, 2019;Våland, Svejenova and Clausen, 2021), stigmas (Bullinger, Schneider and Gond, 2022) and employee voice (e.g. Cooper et al, 2021;Kougiannou and Men-donça, 2021).…”

“…The first situates personal experiences vis‐à‐vis how an industry develops over time, while the second focuses on highly personal experiences that are relatively difficult to verbalize. Insights from these projects are relevant in at least studies focusing on embodied experiences (Bouty and Godé, 2022; Dameron, Lê and LeBaron, 2015; Gylfe et al. , 2016; Harding et al.…”

Sensuous intoxication: Learning from bodies in organisational ethnography

“…In doing so, it helps move us away from corporeality as bounded bodies to those working together in practice (e.g. Bouty and Godé, 2022; Coupland, 2015). The intoxicated researcher therefore is founded on Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) distinctive ‘le schéma corporel’, acknowledging through our shared physiognomy we communally taste, touch and smell and so forth (Krueger and SaintOnge, 2005).…”