Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh: Six views on embodied knowing in organization studies

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SCAMAN-846; No. of Pages 15 Scandinavian Journal of Management (2013) xxx, xxx—xxx

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Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh: Six views on embodied knowing in organization studies Christian Ga ¨rtner * Helmut Schmidt University, Holstenhofweg 85, 22043 Hamburg, Germany

KEYWORDS Embodiment; Embodied cognition; Knowledge; Learning; Socio-materiality

Summary During the last two decades, there has been a fresh wave of interest in embodiment and its role for knowledgeable behaviour and how people learn at work. There are multiple understandings of what embodiment is and how it impacts cognition, knowing and learning. On the one hand, scholars have referred to different (meta-)theoretical conceptions of embodiment which bears the risk of conflating assumptions, omitting crucial analytic perspectives and drawing unwarranted conclusions. On the other hand, having a clear understanding of the several notions of embodiment and their contributions to studying cognition, knowledge and learning allows specifying which perspectives are compatible and can mutually enhance each other. Untangling the various accounts of embodiment in organization studies and delineating their contributions and limits as well as possibilities for mutual enrichment are the main objectives of this review. Six different views are identified. After having outlined their contributions to organization studies, their shortcomings and unwarranted conclusions are discussed. By comparing the different conceptualizations, the paper generates questions and conclusions for further research. It is argued that practice-based notions of embodiment provide a promising platform for integrating insights from other views. # 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction The body is not absent in organization studies. Rather, there is a variety of studies analyzing how embodiment impacts organizational relevant issues such as how people make sense, know and behave knowledgeable, decide, understand others and coordinate interaction. Several theoretical ‘turns’ have emphasized that human bodies make a difference regarding knowledge and learning, thereby

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challenging the dominant picture of agents as information processing subjects. The corporeal turn is a reaction to the cognitive and linguistic turn that have neglected the human body (Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert, 2003; Sheets-Johnstone, 2009; Shilling, 2007). Sociologists proposing the practice turn have emphasized that social encounters necessarily encompass human bodies and a form of knowledgeability that is different from conscious symbolic cognition (Bourdieu, 1990; Giddens, 1984) — and many organizational scholars followed them in order to analyze modes of tacit or aesthetic knowing and learning (Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini, Gherardi, & Yanow, 2003; Strati, 2007). During the last two decades, findings in the field of brain sciences have fostered a neural turn by making neural correlates of

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cognitive activity visible. Meanwhile, economics and organization science are broadly drawing on neurobiological findings in order to explain knowledgeable human agency (Becker, Cropanzano, & Sanfey, 2011; Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2005). Similarly, advocates of the affective turn argue that non-reflective, visceral mechanisms must be considered in relation to cognitive conscious processes and bodily reactions (Clough & Halley, 2007; Franks, 2010). Due to the increasing number of turns, there are multiple understandings of what is meant by embodiment and how it relates to knowing and learning. Management and organization scholars have referred to the above mentioned (meta)theories in order to analyze the role of the body in organizational processes (Dale, 2001; Hassard, Holiday, & Willmott, 2000; Heaphy & Dutton, 2008; Lee, Senior, & Butler, 2012; Nicolini et al., 2003). Since the different turns are built on diverse assumptions, each (meta-)theory provides a specific lens for addressing some issues of embodiment while others are out of scope. The scope is limited ‘externally’, in terms of other perspectives that are neglected, and ‘internally’, in terms of only being able to draw some conclusions while others are not backed by the conceptual underpinning. Being unaware of these bidirectional limitations bears the risk of omitting crucial analytic perspectives, conflating conceptions and drawing unwarranted conclusions. On the other hand, having a clear understanding of the several notions of embodiment and their contributions to studying cognition, knowledge and learning allows specifying which perspectives are compatible and can mutually enhance each other. Delineating the perspectives’ contributions and limits as well as possibilities for mutual enrichment are the main objectives of this review. After having outlined the method, the following sections will describe each view on embodiment by depicting its conceptualization and contribution to studying knowledge and learning in organizations as well as shortcomings respectively. In the last section, I will discuss possibilities for mutual enrichment, generate questions for further research and conclude with implications for managing knowledge and learning.

Method Although there have already been valuable attempts to consolidate different notions of embodiment, extant reviews are limited in two ways: (1) They review only one scientific field without taking notice of insights from other research areas. In particular, they either focus on the cognitive sciences (Anderson, 2003; Glenberg, 2010; Wilson, 2002) or sociology (Blackman, 2008; Crossley, 2001; Shilling, 2005, 2007; Turner, 1991). (2) The few reviews that address

mind vs. body

body vs. lived body

Figure 1

organizational issues are heavily influenced by sociological theories and phenomenology (Dale, 2001; Dale & Burrell, 2000; Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2009; Styhre, 2004; Wolkowitz, 2006). As a consequence, these works hardly consider findings from cognitive psychology and physiological issues. My aim is to provide a review that includes all of these perspectives and how they impact enquiries into cognition, knowing and learning in organization studies. Due to my own theoretical background that conceives cognitive processes and knowledge as being grounded in embodied experiences, I (re-)view accounts of (embodied) cognition, knowledge and learning through a phenomenological and practice-based lens. Thus, I am sympathetic to accounts that do neither reduce cognition and knowledge to processing representations nor to firing neurons, but rather suggest a relational view on knowledge and acknowledge that the ‘body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical’ (Polanyi, 1966: 15). I collected the literature through searches in databases (EBSCO and PsycARTICLES) with embodiment, embodied cognition, and bodily knowledge as keywords of articles published since 1990. This yielded an initial set of 186 contributions. I identified papers as relevant when the abstract or the introduction ensured that the paper dealt with embodiment in organizational settings with a focus on cognition, knowledge or learning. This method excluded, for example, the literature that — mostly by drawing on actornetwork-theory (Latour, 1996) — because these studies are more concerned with theorizing social agency and technology rather than cognition, knowledge and learning. For a similar reason, I did not select psychoanalytical studies for this review because, although they address the body, they focus on issues of mental health or deficiencies rooted in unconscious processes of the mind (see Gabriel & Carr, 2002). This first round of review resulted in a selection 63 articles and books. In addition, the ancestry method was used to capture published output that might have escaped the first round, i.e. I checked and traced down the references of obtained studies, whereby I started with the reviews mentioned in the last paragraph. The final selection included 81 articles and 12 books. In order to analyze the identified contributions, I developed a framework based on prevalent distinctions in the research on embodiment and my theoretical background: (1) mind vs. body, (2) having a body vs. being a (lived) body, (3) embodied subject vs. socio-material environment (see Fig. 1). First, it is evident that the relation between body and mind is at stake when studies ask, for example, how the body shapes the mind or vice versa. The notions of brute embodiment and intelligible embodiment put their main focus on this distinction. Second, the distinction between

embodied subject vs. socio-material environment

Framework for analysis.

Please cite this article in press as: Ga ¨rtner, C. Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh: Six views on embodied knowing in organization studies. Scandinavian Journal of Management (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2013.07.005

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Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh ‘having’ a corporeal body and ‘being’ a living embodied subject is rooted in phenomenological philosophy. These ideas are at the focus of physiological embodiment (‘having’) and enactive lived embodiment (‘being’). The third distinction refers to how the relation between the embodied subject and its socio-material environment is conceptualized. Research that focuses on situated embodiment provides a different perspective on this issue than social embodiment does. Of course, this categorization brushes over some of the overlaps as well as differences between the reviewed studies. However, the benefit of this framework becomes apparent as I use it to organize a diverse literature and to highlight in which area the identified studies have made their greatest contribution.

Six views on embodied cognition, knowledge and learning Each of the following sections describes a view on embodiment, the related conception of cognition, knowledge and learning, its contribution organization studies and shortcomings of the described perspective.

Brute embodiment: the body as a container for the mind This first view on embodiment argues that human cognition is a function of an information processing mind and that the material, physical body is only the hardware on which cognition is realized. I will call these accounts brute embodiment because the body only occurs as a black box and an instrument that hinders or is adjuvant for human cognition. The body is conceptualized as a resource that can be more or less exploited. It is a means to fulfil or execute ends that existent mentally. Knowledge is conceived of as an organized system of information, which in turn is a propositional representation of something (Newell & Simon, 1972). Since knowledge is conceptualized as a system of information organized by schemas and rules of processing representations, learning is accomplished by reorganizing this system (Huber, 1991). Thus, the body as such does not learn human and is just a source for stimuli (perceptual, auditory, olfactory, etc.). It is the mind that turns these stimuli into knowledge and learns. Dale (2001) has already demonstrated that Taylor’s scientific management approach and the Human Relations School treat the body as a container for the mind, thus adhering to brute embodiment. I would like to show that another influencing research tradition follows such a conceptualization, namely cognitivist research about organizations and management. It conceives knowledge as a system of representations that are organized by schemas, concepts or rules and learning as the reorganization of this system of information (Huber, 1991; March & Simon, 1993; Weick, 1995). For example, March and Simon (1993: 28) state that ‘the human organism can be regarded as a complex information-processing system’. This assumption was based on research into computational, i.e. information-processing, models of problem solving on which cognitivism has built in order to analyze individual as well as organizational knowledge and learning (Walsh, 1995). Knowing and learning are cognitive activities that take place in the mind with the brain being the

3 neurobiological realization of cognition. Nevertheless, the brain or other bodily characteristics are neglected in these studies because they hold that the ‘mind . . . thinks’ and ‘acts’ (Weick, 1995: 193). Studies of managerial and organizational have concluded that analyzing cognitive maps, rules or standard operating routines is a way to understand what organizations know, how they learn and secure efficient action and, eventually, rational choice. A basic, but mostly implicit, assumption for this line of argument is that the cognitive processes are neither the realization on the (neuro-)biological level nor the context changes the meaning of information. In ontological terms, the physical and the mental must be conceived as separated epistemological domains, an assumption that reinforces Cartesian mind—body dualism (Spender & Scherer, 2007). An unwarranted conclusion of Cartesian accounts is to attribute rationality to the mind whereas the body is either only a source for stimuli or, even worse, the realm of emotions and irrationality (Damasio, 1994; Ross-Smith & Kornberger, 2004). Moreover, equating knowledge and learning with mentally processing symbols, schemata or rules and focusing knowledge management activities on these ‘virtual’ processes on without considering their (neuro-)biological realization is also an unwarranted conclusion. All the other notions of embodiment provide evidence that cognition, knowledge and learning take place ‘in the flesh’, i.e. they are rooted in situated embodied activity.

Physiological embodiment: the (neuro-)biological body Scholars adhering to this view emphasize that embodiment deserves greater attention in organizational research because it is a crucial determinant of behaviour. I will describe two different sub-streams within this perspective. Their common ground is to conceive agents as ‘having a body’ in terms of a physical system that reacts and adapts to stimuli from the (social) environment. Physiological embodiment I: biochemical systems The first sub-stream assumes that there are ‘physiological substrates of relationships’ (Heaphy & Dutton, 2008: 150) and focuses on the biochemical processes of these ‘substrates’. This research focuses on social relationships such as mentoring, collaboration and social support in organizations and their effect on physiological systems, such as blood pressure, heart rate, hormone levels or the immune system, that are taken as indicators for stress, bodily well-being and resilience (Cooper, Dewe, & O’Driscoll, 2001; Freese, Li, & Wade, 2003; Heaphy & Dutton, 2008). For example, Heaphy and Dutton (2008) reason that positive social interactions shape human physiological systems such as the cardiovascular, immune or neuroendocrine system. Effects in these systems shall affect employee health, work engagement and recovery. These studies follow the longer tradition of exploring biomarkers, i.e. physiological evolved characteristics that display certain cognitive activities (expectations, attitudes, evaluations, etc.), emotions and behaviours. Running examples are hormones, in particular testosterone and the dopamine level, and how higher levels increase peoples’ curiosity, intrinsic motivation, novelty or risk seeking behaviour (Kemper, 1990; White, Thornhill, & Hampson, 2006). A specific

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research area is behavioural genetics that explores how genetic differences can yield behavioural variation when environmental stimuli are similar. Some of the offered evidence is relevant for studying cognition, knowing and learning in organizations. For example, research has shown that physiological and genetic differences impact cognitive ability, motivation to engage in new ventures in order to learn something new or the likelihood of becoming depressed under stressful environments, therefore trying to avoid unknown situations and refrain from learning new ways of coping (Freese et al., 2003; Gilger, 2000). More recently, studies on medical interventions and genetic engineering explore how to modify the ‘human software’, i.e. cognitive activities, knowledge and learning or memory skills, by modifying the ‘human hardware’, for example by using pharmacological drugs (Normann & Berger, 2008). Physiological embodiment II: neural systems The second approach within the physiological embodiment perspective is more focused because it addresses neural activity and does not consider other physiological processes. Scholars in this area search for ‘neural correlates’ or the ‘neural basis’ of cognitive and social phenomena. Of particular relevance are the positions of ‘neuroeconomics’ (e.g. Camerer et al., 2005) and ‘organizational cognitive neuroscience’ (e.g. Lee et al., 2012). Their common ground is the assumption that neuroscience provides organizational and economic theory with evidence about the ‘primal causes of behavior’ and allows considering ‘the most fundamental level of analysis’ (Becker et al., 2011: 934). The phenomena under study range from decision-making (Glimcher, 2003; Platt & Glimcher, 1999), preferences, utility, rewards (Camerer et al., 2005; Fehr & Camerer, 2007), gut feelings, intuition (Gigerenzer, 2007), to fairness, reciprocity, trust and altruism (Knoch, Pascual-Leone, Meyer, Treyer, & Fehr, 2006; Zak, Kurzban, & Matzner, 2004). These studies are relevant for understanding cognition, knowledge and learning for two reasons. First, they show that reward- and emotion-related brain areas impact human beings’ cognitive processes, thus challenging standard cognitivism where emotions, (gut) feelings and intuition do not play a role or inhibit rational decisions (Fehr & Camerer, 2007). Second, it is concluded that the mentioned cognitive and social processes have a neural basis and that stimulating (or inhibiting) the neural assemblies increases (or decreases) the likelihood of these phenomena (Knoch et al., 2006). Summary and limitations of physiological embodiment In contrast to cognitivism, studies about physiological embodiment open up the black box of the body, analyze which physiological systems cause mental, behavioural or social phenomena, and demonstrate that the body is a valuable resource for organizational performance. Advocates of the first sub-stream assume that the environment, i.e. social relationships, organizational structures, technology, etc., provides stimuli that, when perceived, have immediate, enduring and consequential effects on peoples’ physiological systems (Heaphy & Dutton, 2008: 138). In turn, the bodily systems cause more or less knowledgeable behaviour. In a similar way, neuroeconomics assume that knowledge about environmental phenomena

is stored in neural correlates that can be read out and matched with new inputs in order to learn. This line of argument presents the materialized counterpart of information processing models because knowing and learning are treated as causal effects of storing and retrieving either neural or physiological representations. In other words, models of physiological embodiment assume that cognitive and phenomenal experiences can be reduced to neural assemblies or physiological systems. Reductionists explanations are faced with severe epistemological and methodological problems that are well known from the ‘philosophy of mind’ debate: in particular, such accounts cannot explain the intentionality and qualia of conscious first-person experiences (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2009). If they claim to do so, the mix different explanatory categories because they use objective third-person data as representing the causes of phenomenal first-person experiences (Nagel, 1974). Acknowledging these issues rules out causal reduction of cognition, knowledge and learning to neuro-biological systems. Thus, assigning a particular cognitive activity A (e.g. experiences of fairness) to a particular active neural region X (e.g. the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and claiming that this represents the ‘primal cause of behaviour’ is an unwarranted conclusion because other processes also may have contributed to the activation of region X during task A (e.g. activation in the insular cortex; Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003). Inferring that the activation or inhibition of brain regions (e.g. by magnetic stimulation or using pharmacological drugs) causally determines the processes in the mind oversteps the mark. Although most of the claims in neuroeconomic studies adhere to this logical structure, critical accounts are well aware of the fallacy of confusing explanas and explanandum by affirming what has been assumed in the first place, namely that A can be assigned to X (Lee et al., 2012). Advocates of the first sub-stream also push their conclusions too far, whenever environmental outcomes are reduced to stimuli-reaction-pattern of bodily systems. For example, Heaphy and Dutton (2008) propose an unmediated relation between physiological resourcefulness and work engagement. This neglects other factors such as power relations, resource availability, self-efficacy or job structure that impact the relation between physiological states and outcomes such as work engagement (see Salanova, Agut, & Peiro ´, 2005). However, omitting mediating factors is only a minor limitation. The most crucial shortcoming is that physiological embodiment assumes that environmental structures are given and independent from embodied experiences with the latter being caused by the former. For example, Heaphy and Dutton (2008) treat the characteristics of the work context as unproblematic, thus, they cannot consider that exhausted, stressed or excited and energized employees perceive the (work) environment differently and engage in knowing and learning processes differently. This is done by the next view on embodiment.

Enactive lived embodiment: the sensing and moving body Enactive lived embodiment mainly refers to the difference between having a body vs. being a lived body. Merleau-Ponty

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Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh (1962), who is frequently cited as a reference, argues that above and beyond the experience of the biological body as a thing, the lived body is the experiencing body itself: human beings not only have a body but are their lived body while experiencing the world in a tactile, visual, olfactory and auditory way. In Merleau-Ponty’s understanding the embodied conduct itself is already knowledgeable: by means of the lived body human agents possess knowledge about how to cope with what is at hand that neither presupposes conscious representation nor a representation in propositional terms but is ‘knowledge in the hands’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 144). The idea that knowledge is somehow tacit and bound to embodied activity has influenced many other research streams, in particular practice-based organization studies (Nicolini et al., 2003; Yakhlef, 2010). Thus, I will discuss it in greater detail. For Merleau-Ponty (1962: 153) tacit knowing is closely related to a human body’s ‘system of motor or perceptual powers’ which enable subjects to behave knowledgeable in terms of an ‘I can’ (see also Polanyi, 1966). This rather ambiguous explanation has been elaborated by phenomenologists in the area of cognitive sciences (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2009; O’Regan & Noe ¨, 2001; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). For example, O’Regan and Noe ¨ (2001) have shown that perception is dependent on a pre-reflective knowledge of how to use the senses and motor capabilities in order to have experiences: moving one’s body towards an object causes an expanding flow pattern on the retina and moving away causes a contracting flow pattern but there is no similar signature with touch or audition. Thus, the way the different sensorimotor systems work is contingent and each system follows a characteristic pattern. The important point is that human beings do not consciously represent the knowledge about how their sensorimotor system can be manipulated in propositional terms but have a pre-reflective knowledge about how to use these systems in order to have experiences. Therefore, the enactive lived embodiment perspective conceives knowledge as a skilful capability of structuring sensorimotor contingencies in order to have experiences and learning is a process of adapting sensorimotor knowledge in order to appropriately cope with the environment. Learning then is a process of reorganizing possible actions within the environment by exploring the world through seeing, hearing, touching, etc. There are numerous studies in the field of organizational and managerial practices that refer to the notion of enactive lived embodiment by suggesting that organization members use their sensorimotor capabilities in order to accomplish work skilfully, organize interactions and make sense of them (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012; Gherardi, 2001, 2006; Harquail & King, 2010; Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007; Suchman, 2000). For example, Hindmarsh and Pilnick (2007) provide a video-based study of how medical teams in preoperative anaesthesia make use of the coordinating qualities of embodiment in face-to-face (or ‘body-to-body’) situations. Another field of research is organizational aesthetics that deals with the sensory elements of lived embodied experiences and emphasizes the tacit knowledge that is conveyed ‘through’ them (Martin, 2002; Strati, 1999, 2007, 2010; Taylor & Hansen, 2005). For example, Strati (2007: 62) argues that aesthetic or sensible knowledge comprises ‘what is perceived through the senses, judged through the senses, and produced through the

5 senses’. He shows how employees of a roofing firm are able to work on a roof without safety protection by making use of touch (feeling the roof under their feet), hearing and sight (looking with the ears by considering the movements and noises of workmates and objects). Sensorimotor capacities are not only crucial for performing roofing but also for teaching and learning it. Some less known studies have analyzed only one sense, for example hearing and changes in the noise level in a trading pit (Coval & Shumway, 2001), or seeing and the visual perception of commercial images (Belova, 2006). Others again, have focused on the coordination of bodies across time and space in order to analyze how pace, rhythm and timing become entrained into employees embodied movements (Ancona & Chong, 1996). This overview provides an insight into the range of valuable findings how sensorimotor systems work tacitly in concert to achieve knowledgeable performance at work. The studies’ explicit aim is to analyze embodied lived experiences rather than anatomizing the body. However, many of these studies have rather produced objectified accounts of and analyses about the body because they describe observable sensorimotor behaviours and how these contribute to manage and make sense or work or organize face-face-interactions: gaze, touch, vocalization, gesture, posture and appearance are privileged over how employees feel and experience through these bodily enactments (Cunliffe & Coupland, 2012; Grandey, 2003; Hochschild, 1983; Ropo & Parviainen, 2001). Even those who criticized others for a tendency to objectifying the body (e.g. Harquail & King, 2010; Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007) cannot avoid that pitfall and prioritize ‘the ways in which participants see and orient to bodies in organizations’ (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007: 1397). Thus, although providing insights into how medical teams draw on bodily movements in order to coordinate work, Hindmarsh and Pilnick still portray the studied subjects as having a body and the body as an object that is seen rather than considering the seeing lived-body. Besides these rather conceptual issues that apply to several of the mentioned studies, there are some conclusions that are unwarranted as long as they are based on the observing bodily movements. To use Hindmarsh and Pilnick’s study as an example again, claiming that their analysis ‘points to the inadequacy of existing models of coordination’ (2007: 1414) is unwarranted. Their research explains that bodily movements play a vital role for coordination in face-to-face settings but they cannot infer that embodied displays are as crucial in distributed work or virtual organizations. The focus on embodied activity reveals limitations with regard to the understanding of knowledge. First, there is a tendency to confound practices with activity and ascribing knowing or know-how to every activity. For example, Yakhlef (2010: 423; original emphasis) summarizes that practicebased approaches ‘ground learning and knowledge in practices, action and activities’ whereby ‘learning/knowing is a matter of doing’. However, I do not know how to trade securities at a stock exchange just because I can hear the noise in a trading pit. On the other hand, we would confirm that a master pianist knows how to play piano even though she lost her arms in a tragic accident (Noe ¨, 2005: 282). Thus, stating that knowing and/or learning are a matter of doing, which basically equates knowing with acting, is problematic. Even more problematic are conclusions that suggest focusing

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on the extent to which organizational members are capable of harnessing embodied capabilities, for example as criteria for selecting new team members (Strati, 2007: 70). Second, the relation between embodiment and abstract, explicit knowledge is not explained. Rather, the former is conceived to simply exist next to explicit knowledge. For example, Cunliffe and Coupland (2012: 83; my emphasis) state that ‘we make sense of our surroundings and experiences in sensory as well as intellectual ways‘. Such a conceptualization reinforces the dualistic ontology of a body—mind-split, where sensible knowledge ‘resides in our bodies’ (Harquail & King, 2010: 1620; Strati, 2007: 62) and abstract knowledge is rooted in the mind. Thus, this perspective cannot analyze how embodied experiences impact abstract cognition and the content of what is known and learnt. This is considered by the next view on embodiment.

Intelligible embodiment: the bodily basis of thought The perspective of intelligible embodiment aims at explaining ‘how the body shapes the mind’, i.e. how pre-predicative bodily experiences shape the propositional content of abstract conceptual systems like language, reason, and mathematics. I will concentrate on the work of Lakoff and Johnson because organizational researchers have built on their account rather than others’ ideas. They (Johnson & Lakoff, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) assume that metaphors reveal the way people represent and think about abstract concepts and that these metaphors result from interactions of the body with the world, i.e. cognition and meaning are rooted in recurring patterns of sensorimotor engagements between embodied human beings and their environment. This embodied cognition — embodied because all metaphorical structures are accomplished by sensorimotor engagements and are realized by neural assemblies (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) — enables and restrains abstract concepts and reasoning. Knowledge is built up by scaffolding metaphors that have evolved through bodily experiences during an agent’s ontogeny. Learning is accomplished by extending, blending and changing or replacing metaphors. For example, logical expressions such as ‘either a or b, but not both’ are rooted in the many experiences we have had with containers, e.g. cups, bottles, boxes and even our own body, since our childhood. One consistent experience with containers is that we can put things in and out, but things cannot be both. This consistent structure builds an ‘image schema’ (Johnson, 1987) or a ‘primary metaphor’ (Johnson & Lakoff, 2002; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) for containers and reflects our embodied interactions with them. Finally, we learn to extend and blend different schemas or metaphors towards more abstract concepts that have the same structure, so that until the age of four human beings have learned hundreds of metaphors by and through recurring behaviour such as moving through space, grasping objects and interacting with things or others (Johnson, 1987; Johnson & Lakoff, 2002). Thus, we come to understand abstract expressions such as ‘either a paper is submitted to a journal or not, but not both’ in terms of ‘things can be either in or out of a container’. Other examples include the embodied experiences of balance while standing, walking or handling objects which allow

people to know about complex concepts such as physical, emotional or social equilibriums, aesthetic symmetries, fairness or reciprocal dynamics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Lakoff & Nu ´n ˜ez, 2000). Scholars in the field of organization studies that consider intelligible embodiment often reason that embodied metaphors tap into bodily, pre-reflexive forms of knowledge that shape abstract knowledge, thus inducing different embodied metaphors facilitates the reorganization of abstract knowledge (Cornelissen & Kafouros, 2008; Ga ¨rtner, 2011a; Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs & Heracleous, 2006). For example, Cornelissen and Kafouros (2008) argue that primary metaphors are combined to complex metaphors which in turn can be dynamically elaborated, extended and reinterpreted through adding novel primary metaphors. They illustrate the power of embodied metaphors by describing how the primary metaphors ‘good is up’ and ‘seeing is knowing’ underlie the more complex metaphorical expression of a ‘glass ceiling’ which describes discrimination against women and ethnic minorities in organizations. We understand the propositional content of this expression easily by blending the two mentioned primary metaphors: moving upwards is hindered by an object (ceiling) that is not directly overt, thus we know that glass ceilings in organizations inhibits people from getting promoted. Another example is the primary metaphor of ‘organization as a functional unity with distinct, though interconnected parts’ which translates complex phenomena into embodied experiences of seeing, touching or manipulating an object’s physical structure including its form and distinct parts (Cornelissen & Kafouros, 2008: 971). Other scholars (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs & Heracleous, 2006) present data supporting the idea that ‘embodied metaphors’ are crucial for stimulating new insights. They study material manifestations of metaphors, i.e. physical constructions that can be perceived, touched, moved, and find that actors understand, amongst others, power, robustness of relationships and uniformity by and through embodied metaphors (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008). They conclude that embodied metaphors can be used for elaborating complex issues or for interventions that aim at changing perceptions of reality (Heracleous & Jacobs, 2008; Jacobs & Heracleous, 2006). Jacobs and Heracleous provide valuable insights into the usage of spatial arrangements of physical objects and their contributions to sensemaking, learning and change processes. However, and although they refer to Lakoff and Johnson, they study material manifestations of metaphors rather than intelligible embodiment. Despite growing empirical evidence for how predicative understanding is enabled and constrained by bodily experience, there are some questionable arguments with regard to embodied metaphors and cognition, knowledge and learning in organizations. So far, the majority of empirical literature addresses mundane cognition or language, and is based on data about cognitive development during childhood. Thus, an implicit assumption in the above mentioned studies is that managers and employees know and learn about the complexities of organizational phenomena in the same way than children learn about metaphorical concepts, i.e. by and through physical interaction and conceptual blending. However, social systems do not adhere to the logic of physics that give embodied interaction their characteristic pattern of cause and effect. If action is not only determined by cause

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Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh but also based on motives, interests and reasons, organizational members can neither learn about the consequences of their actions based on interaction alone nor are the patterns of blending clear. In contrast to cognitive linguistics, organizational activity is characterized by contradictory goals and ambiguous means-ends-relations that inhibit clear-cut correlations to embodied activities. Thus, management and organization studies about intelligible embodiment should rather demonstrate that applying this notion to knowledge and learning in organizational settings is backed at all before suggesting recommendations. Some of the conclusions seem to have pushed the basic idea already too far. For example, Cornelissen and Kafouros (2008: 972—3) maintain that complex metaphors provide ‘novel’ and ‘rich’ images, and that we should shift from organizations-as-a-bounded-space metaphors to metaphors such organizations-as-patterns or ongoing movements because the latter are ‘inspiring and innovative’. But how do they (see also Jacobs & Heracleous, 2006: 222—3) know that these metaphors are more effective and efficient? Inducing different and more metaphors might as well confuse organizational members because they increase ambiguity. Their recommendations implicitly rely on a more-is-betterlogic (itself a metaphor based on embodied experiences) that is not backed by the cognitive development literature which studies other contexts and explains scaffolding via evolutionary selection. As long as we do not have a thorough understanding of how the scaffolding of metaphors in organizational settings occurs, asserting that some embodied metaphors are better or more innovative than others is speculative.

Situated embodiment: the site of the body in ecological and extended cognition By bundling the following perspectives to one view, I would like to highlight that their common idea is to stress the properties of the environment and how they are linked to cognitive processes. Although they do all refer to the embodiment in terms of sensorimotor systems, they are differing from enactive lived embodiment because they put more emphasis on the environment side of the agent—environment-relation. Proponents of what I call situated embodiment argue that cognition describes and explains patterns of behaviour of an agent in a certain environment, whereby bodies localize agents in time and space. Greeno (1998) outlines that a (meta-)theoretical basis for this account is Gibson’s (1986) ecological psychology. In order to elaborate the environmental dimension of cognition, knowing and learning, Gibson (1986) introduces the notion of affordances: affordances are opportunities for action that are turned into praxis by and through an agent’s abilities in a given situation. For example, chairs afford sitting on them just because our knees, kneecaps and thighs enable movements like bending the legs and sitting down (Gibson, 1986: 127). In this sense, knowledge that is in action is embodied and distributed because it is neither caused by the material nor by the embodied capabilities alone but rather by their relation. The knowledge is also pre-reflective and direct: agents do not see a chair and then interpret it as suitable for sitting-on but directly see a chair as an opportunity for actions like

7 sitting on it. Learning then is the process of generating new meaning by looking, listening, feeling, smelling and tasting what the environment affords (Gibson, 1986: 253). In other words, learning is accomplished by reconfiguring the animalenvironment relation, e.g. by involving another human being or tools into the original relation thereby changing it and its meaning (Richardson, Marsh, & Baron, 2007). Similarly, proponents of situated cognition also portray knowing and learning as products of embodied interaction with the environment, whereby ‘primary learning’ occurs with every action and even ‘secondary (reflective) learning’ occurs in sequences of behaviour over time (Clancey, 1993; Greeno, 1998). A well-known organizational study drawing on such an understanding of cognition, knowledge and learning is Suchman’s ‘Plans and situated action’ (1987). She argues that plans, i.e. systems of symbols, neither determine the course of action nor adequately reconstruct it. Cognitive activities such as interpreting and knowing about a plan are accomplished by sequences of perceiving and acting, for example reading and talking about a plan, rather than by linking perceptual systems ‘in the head’. In the second edition of her book, Suchman (2007: 179, 282) explicitly refers to affordances and how differences between artefacts’ affordances impact knowledgeability and competent accomplishments when humans interact with machines. Conceiving artefacts and technology not as neutral objects but as evoking certain meaning and knowledgeable behaviour has been quite influential. Early enquiries into the design and everyday usage of products and technological artefacts (Henderson, 1999; Norman, 1988) have been extended by studies arguing that the practices of interacting with artefacts, technology and tools are constitutive of knowing and learning within and between organizational units (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002; Kaplan, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007). For example, Kaplan (2011) describes how PowerPoint shapes the knowledge culture of an organization because it creates spaces for discussion, makes recombinations possible, allows for adjustments as ideas evolve and provides access to a wide range of actors. These scholars only focus on material affordances, although Gibson (1986: 128) already mentioned the social dimension of environmental affordances. There are only a few studies that explicitly deal with social affordances in organizational settings (Fayard & Weeks, 2007; Hicks, Nair, & Wilderom, 2009; Zammuto, Griffith, Majchrzak, Dougherty, & Faraj, 2007). For example, Fayard and Weeks (2007) identify social and physical affordances that produce the propinquity, privacy and social designation necessary for informal interactions, e.g. structuring the gatherings around a simple water-cooler. They demonstrate that it is not only acceptable to drink a glass of water at a corner with a water-cooler but that it is also socially requested and appropriate to stop working and have a chat with colleagues. In a similar way, Zammuto and colleagues (2007) argue that understanding a complex technology without reference to the social setting does not make sense, thus affordances emerge from the intersection of technology and organization systems. Proponents of situated embodiment have shown how features of the socio-material environment impact knowing and learning and that they do not simply take place inside individual human heads. However, they put less emphasis on human bodies. A basic assumption of the

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theory of affordances is that artefacts and technologies are neither given nor determining organizational practices because organizational agents perceive a technology as affording specific action against the backdrop of goals, beliefs and abilities. Unfortunately, scholars play down this relational aspect and often neglect embodied cognition and abilities when they analyze affordances of artefacts and technology rather than conceiving affordances as properties of the agent—environment relation (Hutchby, 2001). A very simple but striking example shows that embodied (dis-)abilities impact which opportunities for action are perceivable: chairs do not afford bedridden agents to sit on. As long as embodiment is not fully considered, a central conclusion of such studies is unwarranted: claiming that the notion of affordances shifts cultures of knowing and learning from determinism to practices of knowledge production that emphasize possibilities, re-combinations and adaptive recoordination (Hicks et al., 2009; Kaplan, 2011), can only be valid if human embodiment is addressed as a part of enacting these practices. For example, Leonardi (2011) shows that ‘flexible technologies’ must meet ‘flexible routines’ in order to change knowledge production and work practices — and routines are rooted in learned embodied skills. This also points to a history of repeated experiences and rehearsal that constitute these embodied skills but is neglected by situated embodiment because of its focus on the here and now. It is this history of disciplining and learning embodied skills that is emphasized by the next perspectives on embodiment.

Social embodiment: social structures and the body The last two notions focus on the relation between embodied subject and the socio-material environment, arguing that social structures shape human beings’ bodies and that a subject’s history of experiences is accumulated and realized on a bodily level. Their major difference is that the body is not really present in its physiological corporeality in the first sub-stream, whereas the second sub-stream describes embodiment in exactly these physiological terms but neglects lived experiences. Social embodiment I: the disciplined body This perspective analyzes discourses and social practices that shape differences between sex and gender. Rather than assuming bodies is being constituted by its biophysical systems, this view conceives the body as an object of texts and power relations that produce the ‘social body’ (Foucault, 1980: 55). For Foucault, and those that follow him, the body is constructed by the socio-historical practices of how bodies are conceived, talked about, evaluated and used, whereby these discourses and practices display power struggles which shape identities and performances of gender (Butler, 1993; Cregan, 2006; Tyler & Cohen, 2010). In addition, bodies and identities are not merely constructed but are produced in order to perform certain functions (Styhre, 2004; Witz, 2000). The Foucauldian perspective of a disciplined body has been made fruitful by critical management and organizations scholars who analyze how disciplines yield power and

exercise control thereby producing knowledge and identities (Ball, 2005; Lawrence, Mauws, Dyck, & Kleysen, 2005; Townley, 1993a,b; Trethewey, 1999; Tyler & Cohen, 2010). For example, disciplines such as performance appraisals (Townley, 1993b) or mentoring and practices of the self (Covaleski, Dirsmith, Heian, & Samuel, 1998) structure, normalize and dominate cognition, knowledge and action. On a more societal level, Shilling (2005) argues that employees are increasingly expected to embody corporate ideals of flexibility: amongst others, manufacturers and consultants must be able to produce what customers want and when they want it. Thus, their bodies should ‘stand ready’ and be prepared for serving demands by flying immediately from here to there and being constantly available through mobile phones, laptops etc. A related approach is taken by studies of ‘body work’. Body work refers to the work that individuals undertake on their own bodies and to the paid work performed on the bodies of others as well as the processes through which the physical body is produced, disciplined and manipulated in the workplace (Wolkowitz, 2006). Most studies address body work by analyzing occupations where the body is central to work performance and where bodies are produced in order to contribute to an organization’s core competences. For example, the walking, talking, behaving and dressing of sex workers, sportspeople, dancers, models and soldiers are disciplined in specific ways in order to perform and support the core activities of the respective organization (for an overview see Wolkowitz, 2006). Writings in the tradition of Foucault have been criticized for neglecting ontological dimensions of human embodiment because cognition, knowledge and learning are located in the web of discourses and practices rather than on a bodily level (Hassard et al., 2000; Shilling, 2007). The outside-in-perspective overstates the case: what organizational members know and how they think about themselves in relation to work and others is not only constituted by practices of power and discourses but has also evolved from ontogenetic development as enquiries into intelligible embodiment show. Moreover, such analyses are quite similar to the notion of brute embodiment because the body is conceived as a resource that is shaped, enhanced, trained, punished, exploited or carefully protected (McKinlay, 2006). Again, the body is treated as a separated, passive and material container. However, this time the body is not at the disposal of the mind but an object of social discourses and practices. By so doing, accounts of the disciplined body counteract one of the conclusions that were originally part of the project: rather than replacing managerial accounts of knowledge and human resource management that aimed at isolating, enumerating and measuring human competencies with a relational concept, where social contexts and relationships are the unit of analysis (Townley, 1993a), they end up with a notion of the body as a passive object whose knowledge and knowledgeability are externally constituted. Social embodiment II: the structured and structuring body This view on embodiment is closely related to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus that is defined as ‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed

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Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 53). The operating mode of habitus is practical rather than logical (Bourdieu, 1987, 1990), i.e. agents unconsciously draw on non-propositional knowledge in order to know what to think and how to behave in certain way in a certain milieu. Developing this practical sense entails experiencing social practices by participating in them, imitating others and identifying with them. Thereby, learning takes place from ‘body to body’ (Bourdieu, 1990), i.e. agents mostly learn how to enact rules, routines and rituals without conscious reflection. Bourdieu insists that speaking of embodied knowledge is to be understood in an ontological sense: ‘What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 73). Thus, agents have literally incorporated the principles of what is appropriate and achievable for subjects like them when facing specific social structures. The body of writings that apply Bourdieu’s ideas is growing ¨ zbilgin & Tatli, 2005). Bour(Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; O dieu’s framework is of particular relevancy for studies about communities of practice because knowledge is rather understood as a competency to act and participate in practices (Brown & Duguid, 2001; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Mutch, 2003). In the seminal work of Lave and Wenger (1991) knowing and learning are about being legitimized to participate in the web of relationships among a community of experts. Thus, they focus on how agents are socialized into the practices of a field, but put less emphasis on the embodied habitus. In contrast, an emerging stream of research stresses the relevancy of the habitus as a source for tacit knowing. This discussion is highly relevant for modern, knowledge-intensive work because it highlights that the competence of knowledge workers such as lawyers (Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009) or consultants and engineers (Hislop, 2008) is tied to a specific way of embodied conduct (how workers present their bodies through walk, talk, gesture, etc.). Other scholars try to address both, the idea of the structured structure as well as the structuring structure. They use Bourdieu’s work as support for a dynamic link between knowing and practice and stress that routine and improvisation are intertwined in the dynamics of pre-reflective (re-)production (Gomez & Bouty, 2011; Nicolini et al., 2003). As these examples show, extant research makes use of the habitus concept in several ways, ranging from sensorimotor activity to complex forms of how to interact in a particular professional setting, and from providing a system of rather stable dispositions that constitute identities to changing these attitudes, values, cognitions and behaviours. In fact, the empirical application of Bourdieu’s ideas seems to be more fruitful than the theoretical contribution. Most of the criticism aims at the conceptualization of habitus. First, it seems to reduce embodiment to the body as an object and does not account for the enactive dimension of lived embodied experiences (Margolis, 1999). Second, critics maintain that the notion of habitus does not allow conceptualizing prereflective knowing and reproduction and the creation or change of social structures at the same time (Jenkins, 1982; King, 2005). It is reasoned that the habitus concept is either deterministic — when habitus is described as a physical system that mirrors social structures and inscribes a course of action — or leads to voluntarism, because when agents can choose not to behave routinely but improvise at

9 any time, then, theoretically, agents are free to choose all the time (King, 2005: 465). If the notion of habitus does not provide a conceptual solution to overcoming the errors of subjectivism and objectivism, organizational scholars’ claims that it does allow analyzing routine and improvisation or the creation of new practices are unwarranted. For example, Gomez and Bouty (2011: 935) argue that Alain Passard, an haute cuisine chef, deploys ‘strategic action’ that ‘fit both the field’ and his ‘personal trajectory’ when he decided to use vegetables. They also maintain that ‘his orientation towards vegetables . . . was not deliberately planned’. By describing Passard’s habitus in terms of ‘his declared passion for vegetables’ (Gomez & Bouty, 2011: 932), the misconception becomes obvious: since he explained his personal taste and passion in interviews and bought land for his own organic gardens, we can hardly maintain that his habitus pre-reflectively generates the creative action because it occurred deliberately, was planned and explicitly declared.

Discussion and conclusions This review has revealed the differences between the various conceptualizations of embodied knowing in organization studies, outlined their contribution as well as their limitations (see Table 1). Besides the described differences between the notions, there are several areas for mutual enrichment. In order to sort them out, I will first compare the conceptualizations of knowledge and knowledgeability which helps to generate research questions that aim at achieving an overarching perspective. I will also argue that practice-based notions of embodiment provide a platform for integrating insights from other views and offer promising concepts for addressing the research desiderata. All views, except brute and intelligible embodiment, conceive bodily based forms of knowledge and knowledgeability as pre-reflective or tacit skills that are rooted in sensorimotor conduct, whereas conscious and predicative knowledge is associated with mental activity. By adhering to these differences, scholars are tempted to separate ‘lower-order processes’ from abstract cognition and to focus on senses, feelings and practical accomplishments. Correspondingly, most studies are conducted in the context of manual work (e.g. roofing, fire fighters, sex workers, dancers, nursing), but there is hardly research about work that requires symbol processing rather than learned skilful behaviour (e.g. science, finance and accounting, consultancy). These studies overlook that ‘knowledge work’ is also ‘body work’ and cannot analyze how the latter shapes the former because they focus on the function and structure of embodied knowledge rather than on its content. On the other hand, cognitivistic accounts examine content structures but neglect embodiment which makes them hardly compatible with the other notions. In order to capture how embodiment impacts ‘knowledge work’, I suggest considering insights from intelligible embodiment and social embodiment (see also Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). The former allows analyzing how embodied metaphorical concepts shape the content of abstract knowledge. The latter, in particular the notion of habitus, highlights that the competence of knowledge workers is tied to a

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Conceptualization of cognition, knowledge and learning

Proponents in management and organization studies (selection)

Contribution

Limitations

Brute embodiment

— Cognition is a function of the mind — Knowledge is a mental system of organized information — Learning is the reorganization of this system — Body as hardware on which cognition, knowledge and learning realized and a device for the mind to be exploited

— Taylorism and Human Relations (see Dale, 2001) — Cognitivism: Huber (1991), March and Simon (1993), Walsh (1995), and Weick (1995)

— Revises stimulus-responsebehaviourism by showing how mental states shape knowledge and action — Popularizes the mind-ascomputer metaphor in organization studies

— Knowledge and learning cannot not be reduced to processing symbols and rules — The ‘rational mind’ cannot be privileged over the ‘irrational body’

Physiological embodiment

— Cognition as a function of the brain or caused by physiological systems — Knowledge is stored in patterns of neural or physiological activity — Learning occurs due to adaptively matching these patterns with representations of new inputs

— Biochemical systems: Heaphy and Dutton (2008) and White et al. (2006) — Neural systems: Becker et al. (2011), Camerer et al. (2005), and Lee et al. (2012)

— shows that mental states are not independent from the body’s physiological and neural systems — The body is recognized as an important organizational resource

— Physiological arousal or neural activity cannot sufficiently explain embodied experiences such as emotions, decision or sense making (different explanatory categories are mixed)

Enactive lived embodiment

— Cognition is the result of an embodied agent’s engagement with the environment — Knowledge is the pre-reflective capability of manipulating sensorimotor contingencies in order to appropriately engage with the environment — Learning is the process of adapting sensorimotor knowledge

— Phenomenology & Practice Theory: Cunliffe and Coupland (2012), Gherardi (2006), and Hindmarsh and Pilnick (2007) — Organizational aesthetics: Martin (2002), Strati (1999, 2007), Taylor and Hansen (2005)

— Demonstrates the importance of how sensorimotor systems work tacitly in concert to achieve knowledgeable performance at work

— Provides objectified analyses about the body (contrary to its claims) — Equating knowing with acting is problematic because not every doing implies knowledgeability

Intelligible embodiment

— Cognition is grounded in embodied experiences and realized on a neural level — Knowledge is constituted by scaffolds of metaphors that have evolved through embodied experiences — Learning is to extend, blend or change these metaphors

— Cornelissen and Kafouros (2008), Ga ¨rtner (2011a), Heracleous and Jacobs (2008), and Jacobs and Heracleous (2006)

— Reveals how cognitive content and abstract reasoning are rooted in pre-reflective embodied experiences

— Evidence is based on cognitive development during childhood, thus, a thorough understanding of intelligible embodiment in complex organizational settings is missing

C. Ga ¨rtner

View on embodiment

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Summary of the six views on embodiment.

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Table 1

Proponents in management and organization studies (selection)

Contribution

Limitations

Situated embodiment

— Cognition is a property of an embodied agent’s interaction with the (material) environment — Knowledge is an activity afforded by a specific situation — In general: learning is part of adaptive re-organization of the agent-environmentcomplex; more specifically: ‘primary learning’ occurs with every thought, perception and ‘secondary (reflective) learning’ occur in sequences of behaviour over time

— Situated cognition: Bechky (2003), Carlile (2002), Orlikowski (2007), and Suchman (1987) — Ecological approach (affordances of technology): Fayard and Weeks (2007), Kaplan (2011), Leonardi (2011), and Zammuto et al. (2007)

— Proves wrong the view that knowing and learning take place inside individual heads wrong — Shows how technologies and artefacts (material affordances) shape the knowledge culture of an organization

— Neglects the relational dimension of affordances, thereby plays down the role of human embodiment for enacting knowledge and learning — Focuses on the situated ‘here and now’, thus neglects the history of disciplining and learning embodied skills

Social embodiment

Social embodiment I: the disciplined body — Cognition, knowing and learning are constituted by a web of discourses and practices Social embodiment II: the structured and structuring body — Habitus incorporates former experiences and unconsciously structures cognition — Knowing is a competency to act whereby agents draw on habitual, non-propositional knowledge — Learning can take place from body to body through participation in practices, thereby constituting identities

Disciplined body: Lawrence et al. (2005), Townley (1993a,b), Trethewey (1999), and Tyler and Cohen (2010) Structured and structuring body: Emirbayer and Johnson (2008), Gomez and Bouty (2011), Mutch (2003), Nicolini et al. ¨ zbilgin and Tatli (2005) (2003), and O

— Disciplined body: reveals that technologies of power and discursive strategies constitute a social body — Structured and structuring body: recognizes that humans (re-)produce sociality through and with their bodies while being positioned in a social field, thus allows analyzing how organizational members learn to present their bodies

— Disciplined body: neglects the corporeality of human embodiment and that cognition and knowledge have also evolved during ontogenetic development — Structured and structuring body: does not account for the enactive dimension of lived experiences and cannot explain routine and improvisation

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Conceptualization of cognition, knowledge and learning

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View on embodiment

Cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh 11

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Table 1 (Continued )

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12 specific way of embodied conduct which emphasizes that this comportment is more than mere sensorimotor activity. Since both emphasize that ‘structuring structures’ have evolved during a history of embodied interactions in a certain environment, these notions are compatible. Scholars can then move on by drawing on the basic idea of enactive lived embodiment, namely that people not only have a body during these embodied interactions but are lived embodied beings: work performance does not only depend on being bodily situated in a social field but is based on employees’ sensuous understanding and experience during (knowledge) work. Situated and social embodiment can also be mutually enhancing. Situated embodiment is the only view that explicitly argues that cognition and knowledge are not ‘in the mind’ or ‘in the body’ but distributed between humans and non-human elements. This conception opens up the possibility to include the meanwhile common idea that human knowledgeability is entangled with materials, e.g. artefacts or technologies (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Suchman, 2007). In order to capture the entanglement with the socio-material environment, the notion of social affordances can be put forward because it describes that affordances are not simply inherent in artefacts or technologies. Rather, it is the way these materials can be used by an agent and how they are used by others that afford agents in a certain milieu to enact certain practices. Understood this way, the linkage to Bourdieu’s (1990: 69) argument that habitus acts in accordance with explicit and tacit rules characterizing a particular field of practices becomes obvious, but more emphasis is put on the material dimension of the milieu. Moreover, the theory of affordances, or situated embodiment respectively, is not prone to deterministic explanations as long as affordances are conceived as a relational concept. By so doing, the view considers that affordances are enacted by agents according to their embodied capabilities which can vary, thus affordances are enacted differently by different agents and in different milieus. On the one hand, the notion of affordances can enhance our understanding of the relation between the embodied subject and the socio-material environment. On the other hand, situated embodiment is focused on the here and now. It can benefit from the insight of social embodiment that embodied subjects have learned which opportunities for action objects, others and others’ practices of using these objects provide for them by disciplined repetition and rehearsal. The same agent in the same milieu might enact affordances differently simply because he or she has acquired new capabilities or because the embodied, pre-reflexive capabilities induce an awareness of discriminatory detail that goes beyond mental rationalizing. Thus, I suggest that the notions of (social) affordances and habitus are mutually enhancing because both address the pre-reflective realm on which conscious understanding of things, others and their practices is built. This line of argument also neatly fits intelligible embodiment that shows how knowing — that is grounded in pre-reflective knowing — how to evolve scaffolds of metaphors based on sensorimotor interactions with the environment. Conceptualizing this embodied sociomaterial entanglement is crucial for understanding how agents spot anomalies or details that foreshadow unexpected consequences and deviate from routine behaviour. In other words, it accounts for the embodied and enactive dimension of

C. Ga ¨rtner mindfulness which is often only discussed as a mental process (Ga ¨rtner, 2011b). This discussion can be summarized by two questions for further research: (1) How can we conceptualize embodiment without locating reason and knowledgeability in the realm of the mind or the brain and reducing bodily knowledge to sensorimotor skills? (2) How do an embodied subject’s former and current experiences with the socio-material environment shape the content of cognition, knowledge and knowing what opportunities for action a milieu offers for an individual? Answering these questions requires combining insights from disparate but compatible fields of research such as cognitive linguistics (intelligible embodiment), ecological psychology (situated embodiment), phenomenology (enactive lived embodiment) and social practice theory (social embodiment). Practice-based accounts offer such an integral conceptualization of cognition, knowing and learning in the flesh because they allow considering pre-reflective knowledge that is (literally) embodied in former and current, situated experiences, but also artefacts and social relations embedded in broader historical practices. Within the various practice-based approaches, the notions of ‘sociomateriality’ (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007) and ‘aesthetic/sensible knowledge’ (Gherardi, 2009; Strati, 2010) are promising concepts for integration. Future theorizing should then aim at explaining how the social and the material aspects of practice are linked to the aesthetic dimension of knowing and metaphors, which are aesthetic in nature themselves, in order to conceptualize how these together shape the propositional content of cognition and knowledge at work. So far, scholars often only identified the different aspects of cognition, knowing and learning in organizations (the mental, cognitive, and rational as well as the material, sensible, and emotional aspects), but it is hardly understood how they relate to each other and form the specific competence that is needed to perform at work (Sandberg & Pinnington, 2009). Thus, before scholars can provide valid recommendations, they should make another turn. This time, a turn back to understanding what different (meta-)theoretical perspectives on embodiment can contribute to an integrated account — and this requires interdisciplinary research for which practice theory can serve as a common ground.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the insightful and supportive comments of the three anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Antonio Strati and the editors of this Special Issue for their guidance throughout the process. In addition, I would like to thank Mark May and Gu ¨nther Ortmann for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

References Ancona, D. G., & Chong, C. L. (1996). Entrainment: Pace, cycle and rhythm in organizational behaviour. In Cummings, L. L., & Staw, B. M. Eds. Research in organizational behaviour. Vol. 18 (pp.251— 284). Greenwich: JAI Press. Anderson, M. L. (2003). Embodied cognition: A field guide. Artificial Intelligence, 149(1), 91—130. Ball, K. (2005). Organization, surveillance and the body: Towards a politics of resistance. Organization, 12(1), 89—108.

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