Knowing Bodies at Work: Embodiment and Ephemeral Teamwork in Anaesthesia

Abstract

In spite of a growing corpus of studies concerned with the body and its relationships to organizing and organization, there is a distinct lack of empirical work to take seriously the nature of `embodiment' in the workplace. This paper presents a video-based study of teamwork in preoperative anaesthesia in order to propose an approach to analysing the body that focuses on organizational members' practical orientations to the body, and in particular dynamic bodies, in the workplace. To demonstrate the value of this approach, the paper considers coordination work among anaesthetic teams and highlights the importance of intercorporeal knowing in the real-time coordination of a team's work. The analytic orientation is drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.