Keeping the Body in Mind

In business communication, terms referring to bodies and body parts are common. For example, in the word organization, we find the physical term, organ. According to Turner (1991), the body proved useful for social terminology, such as the head of state, the body politic, and corporate culture, given their common composition of inputs and outputs in relation to a larger environment, regular functions, production and reproduction, and parts and wholes. “More than we realize, we create organizations in our own image” (Barry & Hazen, 1996, p. 148). Similarly, the word corporation was adopted from the Latin root word corpus, meaning body. By attaining status as a legal corporation, organizations comprising multiple individuals and divisions are unified into a “legal body” with a head and members. This chapter proposes that a better understanding of the ontology of embodiment might help us deconstruct and reconsider an age-old discrimination between the head and the rest of the body. Currently, the head is assigned the privilege of providing any important communication to the (often preferably) mute members in order to direct them to take actions they wouldn’t otherwise have enacted, with the desired end state of the betterment of the head alone.