Studying Organizations on the Move: Towards more Embodied Experience in our Research Practices

As a result of increased mobility, leading to phenomena such as telework, remote work, flex work, and new workplaces, ‘the organization' is no longer identified by people's presence in a fixed location. Work itself is not grounded any more in a specific location. People do not go to work but work in mobility. As researchers, we face the challenge of grasping these new forms of organization and organizing in more open and public spheres – defined here as ‘organizations on the move'. This new working context reinforces an idea already relayed by the organizational ethnographic literature: taking the embodied experience into consideration. Although there is an interest in the role of embodiment in our field, the potential of relying on our physical experience in movement as a basis for qualitative research in Management and Organization Studies remains undertheorized. With this paper, we extend an invitation to Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholars to integrate their own embodied experiences into their research practice. Basically, it through their experience of movement that researchers can understand work as a movement.We draw on a phenomenological perspective about sensibility and embodiment in order to develop guidelines for an embodied research practice in MOS.