Work as dance

Abstract

This article argues that use of the dance analogy has potential as an heuristic device in ethnographies of work. The nature and variety of dance is explored as a way of studying movement, gendered embodiment, audience, emotion and rhythm at work. It can thus serve to provide a richly multidimensional view of work, while also having the potential to draw attention to the unfolding of patterns of work over time. While such an approach has much in common with classic studies of work, as well as some more recent work that emphasizes work as embodied practice, it may also open up new avenues or at least unsettle some of the dominant ways of researching work and its organization. As such it is offered as a stimulus to debate on the nature of work and its organization and how it might be undertood. There are, however, limitations to the dance analogy and these mean that the approach might be best seen as a useful complement to approaches which focus on the verbal, rather than sufficient in itself.

‘I Write Like a Painter’: Feminine Creation with Arts‐Based Methods in Organizational Research

“…Contemporary choreographies thrive beyond the art world in an ever‐expanding field of applications, including scholarly and political contexts (Butterworth and Wildschut, ). The movement of the body in space and time, also referred to as choreography, seems to be worthy of consideration in management studies and a logical continuation of the ongoing interest in embodied forms of knowing in organizations (Warren, ), developing recent interest in dance as a metaphor for organizations (Chandler, ). For example, Tyler and Cohen (, p. 194) emphasize that organizational space (much like the body) is ‘an intentionally organized materiality’ (Butler, , p. 521) against which gender is performed within organizations, by practices of occupation and appropriation that require non‐static methods of analysis.…”

The need for fresh blood: Understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens

“…Analogies, myths and tropes have long provided a lens through which we can untangle the complexities that shape the world of work and organization (Alvesson and Spicer, 2011;Chandler, 2012;Godfrey, Jack and Jones, 2004;Grant and Oswick, 1996;Morgan, 1986;Oswick, Keenoy and Grant, 2002). Metaphor in particular has become a powerful means of interrogating forms of organizing.…”

Dancing in the office: A study of gestures as resistance

“…Organisation studies lately have focused on political, aesthetic and ethical aspects of gesture (ten Bos, 2011;Bazin, 2013;Bouilloud & Deslandes, 2015). Through the 'analogy' of dance (Chandler, 2012), we argue that experiments with gestures can provide 'post-recognition' resistance (Fleming, 2016) through moving away from organisational control with either an aesthetic of arrest or an aesthetic of flow. This last section of the paper will thus try to show the liberating mechanisms of dance, in other words the links there are between dance and resistance.…”