Bodies Matter: Professional Bodies and Embodiment in Institutional Sport Contexts

Introduction: Why Pay Attention to Bodies?

Bodies are always present in organizations. They are often an absent presence because they may be seen but are frequently unacknowledged. The lived body, however, is part of an individual’s system of knowing, of presentation, of meaning making and identity or subjectivity (Haynes, 2008). This activity or system of knowing does not stop when a person enters an organization. There is a growing body of scholarly work that draws attention to the role of bodies in organizations, in scholarship, and in management. This work analyses how bodies matter, and how they are shaped by institutional contexts such as schools, sport, and universities (e.g., Brewis & Sinclair, 2000; Colls & Hörschelmann, 2009; Dale & Burrell, 2013; Larsson, 2014; Puwar, 2004; Styhre, 2004; Sykes & McPhail, 2008; Tyler & Cohen, 2010). A research focus on bodies in organizations means paying attention to meanings assigned to physical appearance, various forms of body work, and ways bodies are used to express identity and embodiment, that is, how organizational members express, enact, and experience bodily pleasures and emotions (Morgan, Brandth, & Kvande, 2005). Our focus in this article is on the bodies of professionals working in sport who are part of institutional contexts such as schools, universities, sport clubs, and sport organizations. These professionals include teachers, academics, researchers, managers, directors, support personnel, coaches, and so on. We refer to their institutional contexts as organizations.

Bodies in organizations are engaged in formal and informal work and are also valued, scrutinized, and regarded in various ways. They increasingly serve as a site of cultural values and social norms and as a way to present the self in terms of appearance including body size, ability, gender, ethnicity, and health (e.g., Levay, 2013; Meriläinen, Tienari, & Valtonen, 2015; Van Amsterdam, 2013). Haynes (2008) contended that professionals attach importance to their physical body because it symbolizes an embodiment of their perceived identity.

Bodies also play an often unacknowledged role in knowledge reproduction of scholars (Michel, 2015). Bettez (2012) argued that researchers who study social phenomena use their scholarship to construct how they themselves see those phenomena. Those constructions could be considered “regimes of truths”: taken for granted knowledges that shape what is seen as “objectively true” and legitimize disciplinary practices based on this perceived truth (Foucault, 1979). When this research is passed on to those working in organizations, these regimes of truth may thus be used to normalize or abnormalize others. Sport scholars, for example, may develop theories about physical gender differences and about how these “truths” about women and men should inform the management of diversity in sport organizations. The results of their empirical work based on these theories are then passed on as “truths” to students and professionals via conferences, workshops, textbooks, lectures, and guides as tools for doing their work. These theories may subsequently work as a panopticon that informs how employees, including scholars themselves, do their work or see others. Theories about bodies in organizations may therefore become generative (Michel, 2015). This generativity of theories through embodied culture may also explain why homosocial reproduction of male sport managers and directors continues to occur. Specifically, those in positions of leadership tend to reproduce themselves, that is, select people who look like themselves, as being best suited for the job (see, for example, Claringbould & Knoppers, 2008; Holgersson, 2013; Hovden, 2000). The circulation of theories (and their application) about gender by professionals working in sport can therefore add to ways social inequalities are reproduced and legitimized (see also Haynes, 2008, 2012). In turn, researchers may use what they see as manifestations of this gendered embodiment in organizations as evidence for their theories. These are just a few examples of how bodies and the ways scholars and other organizational members construct them play an important role in organizations.

Although a great deal of scholarship about bodies and organizations has been developed, scholars tend to write about professionals and other organizational members as if they are disembodied. This includes scholars who focus on sport. Although sport scholars have looked at the bodies of those engaging in physical activity and sport, they seem to have largely ignored the bodies and embodiment of those who work in sport. A cursory review of sport management journals, for example, suggests that researchers who have published papers in these journals tend to have a Cartesian view of the body. Specifically, they seem to assume implicitly that individuals are disembodied. Scholars who have investigated issues dealing with professionals working in sport such as teachers, researchers, coaches, managers, and academics seem to have paid little, if any, explicit attention to bodies, except when dealing with diversity. Even then such research, including our own, has usually been presented in disembodied ways. Scholars have rarely looked at how members of sport organizations and they themselves, enact their bodies at work or how that enactment might be shaped by the sport focus of the organization or their job. This is puzzling because working in sport organizations implies working with or for bodies that engage in sport. We argue that scholarly neglect of bodies of professionals working in sport means neglecting the impact of aspects of the construction of bodily norms and of embodiment on identity formation, meaning and theory making, and power processes in these contexts. The purpose of this article, therefore, is threefold: to present possible reasons why scholars have rarely paid attention to bodies/embodiment in institutional contexts and specifically in sport organizations, to offer arguments why they should do so, and to give suggestions for what scholarship on bodies and embodiment of professionals working in sport might look like using various theoretical frameworks.

Embodiment in Institutional Contexts (of Sport)

In this article, we focus primarily on professionals who work in sport organizations—including sport clubs, schools, and universities—that teach sport skills, coach, sponsor, manage or regulate sport competitions, or govern other sport organizations such as national and international sport federations. We purposefully ignore intersections of the body with physical activity and how bodies are viewed by audiences or by athletes themselves because this topic has received attention already (see, for example, recent work such as Hunter & Emerald, 2016; Vannini, 2016; Wellard, 2016). Our focus is on scholarship on embodiment of professionals working in sport. We situate our arguments in the first half of this article within a Foucauldian framework. The use of a Foucauldian framework is especially suitable for research that looks at sport and bodies because it assumes that the “social” is inscribed on bodies (Markula & Pringle, 2006; Rail & Harvey, 1995). Consequently, a Foucauldian framework may be particularly appropriate for exploring embodiment in sport organizations. This framework assumes that bodies are socially constructed and controlled and managed through regulatory policies and discursive practices. Organizational wellness policies that focus on eating and physical activities, for example, often implicitly suggest that individuals need to control and manage their weight (Levay, 2013). Such policies often reflect broader initiatives that are part of a state’s efforts to control the health of its citizens. Foucault called such monitoring and regulating of the body “biopower” (Foucault, 1979).

Fleming (2012) has drawn on Foucault’s conception of biopower to argue that bio-management or management of physical bodies has become increasingly important for organizations. He contends that in addition to forces of bureaucracy and technology, a third organizational force, biocracy, has begun to control individuals working in organizations. Fleming defines biocracy as the way biopower (monitoring and regulating of bodies) informs the workplace experience and normalizes some bodies and abnormalizes others. A Foucauldian perspective, therefore, can be used to explore how certain bodies become the norm in sport organizations while others are seen or experienced as abnormal or undesirable. This biocratic control occurs through practices that “teach” employees what desirable bodies look and act like in a specific workplace. Sport organizations that promote physical activity, for example, may want their employees to look slender and/or muscular. They may encourage employees to participate in running events and pay a lot of attention in their news bulletins to individuals who participate in sport (see also Henderson, 2009; Maravelias, 2015).

How individuals experience this critical attention to their bodies and the lens they use to judge the bodies of others is part of embodiment. Embodiment refers to how biocracy at the macro/meso levels is enacted at the micro level. Embodiment is “shaped by formal arrangements and structures (divisions of labor, job specifications, etc.) and informal practices such as patterns of inclusion and exclusion and sexual harassment . . . [and] by expectations of others” (Morgan et al., 2005, p. 4). This embodiment is informed by a panoptic view that often produces conformity with contextualized expectations for the body. For example, organizational members may embody or feel they must enact a certain body shape that is implicitly associated with their function in the organization or their profession (Waring & Waring, 2009). Those in positions of leadership may try to, or feel they must, conform to popular notions about how a leader should present himself or herself in accordance with the time and place and associations with the sector or primary activity of the organization (Acker, 1990). Research in the Netherlands, for example, shows that coaches in a variety of sports often felt they were expected to have bodies that could outperform their athletes (Knoppers & Bouman, 1996). Many coaches dropped or were expected to drop out of coaching when they perceived that their physical performance of sport skills was inadequate. Little is known about how those working in sport experience embodiment and expectations for their bodies. We return to the subject of ideal organizational bodies and how individuals experience biocracy further on in the “Phenomenological Approach: Lived Experience” section about phenomenology. We assume that these ideal bodies may vary per context and are socially constructed in multiple ways. Gimlin (2007) has called this diversity in what bodies do and represent “body work.”

Doing Body Work

Gimlin (2007) distinguished four ways in which bodies are embedded in the primary activity of an organization. One way in which bodies are part of a work setting is what Gimlin calls “body-making as work.” Athletes, actors, prostitutes, and fashion models, for example, use and make or shape their body to earn a living. This body-making as work is one of the few situations where the bodies of relatively few individuals are subject to the gaze of many others, often the whole world. Mathiesen (1997) has called this the synopticon. He assumes the panopticon and synopticon work together to discipline bodies and to inform awareness of one’s own embodiment and that of others. A substantial body of research published in many academic journals and handbooks (see, for example, Bush, Silk, Andrews, & Lauder, 2013; Potrac, Gilbert, & Denison, 2012) has been devoted to the body making of athletes by coaches, trainers, and others. It is, however, beyond the scope of this article to discuss this work on body making and how this is informed by panoptic and synoptic principles because the focus here is on professionals, their assumptions about bodies, and the body work they may be ignoring.

A second form of body work is that which is used for corporate branding. Specifically, women and men may (have to) manage and shape the way they look to fit the desired image of their organization or profession. This includes appearance, clothing, and modes of conduct. This image produces a panoptic view resulting in a frequently unstated or invisible norm that may discipline employees to conform and to synoptically normalize their judgment of other bodies. For example, Knoppers and Anthonissen (2008) looked at managerialism in sport organizations and found that these managers constructed impression management as an important task in their work. Their choice of clothes depended on the kinds of tasks they had on a specific day. They literally dressed for the public and criticized peers who did not do so.

Third, bodies are also specifically involved in the physical work individuals do for others (Gimlin, 2007). For example, cleaning buildings that house sport organizations, giving massages, and taping ankles involve bodily work. Sport organizations that are specifically constituted to enhance the performance of athletes may employ physiotherapists, coaches, nutritionists, athletic trainers, doctors, and other support personnel who all work on sporting bodies. These professionals all have notions about how an ideal body should function and often base that knowledge on what they have learned during their training (see also Varea & Tinning, 2016). They may see such knowledge as true and neutral and try to shape the bodies on which they work to comply with these knowledges. This constitutes another example of the workings of taken for granted knowledges as regimes of truth (Foucault, 1979). A considerable amount of research has been conducted in this area with the bulk of it focusing on coaches and how they attempt to use technical knowledge as regimes of truth to discipline athletic bodies (see Cushion & Partington, 2016; Denison, Mills, & Konoval, 2015, for a summary and critique of these practices). A few scholars have paid attention to the assumptions that professionals working in physical education (PE) have about bodies of their students. For example, we (Van Amsterdam, Knoppers, Claringbould, & Jongmans, 2012) looked at “regimes of truth” PE teachers used to talk about (dis)ability, gender, and health of their students. We found that these teachers constructed binaries such as abled/disabled and as male/female as immutable and natural givens. Simultaneously, they constructed a healthy/unhealthy binary—based on their perceptions of weight—as changeable. Little is known, however, how these teachers construct their own bodies and those of their colleagues and use panoptic and synoptic principles as forms of self-discipline and social control.

Last, bodies are also used in organizations to display emotions and pleasure (Gimlin, 2007). The ways in which these emotions are shown are often informed by organizational culture and implicit and explicit job descriptions (Hochschild, 1983; O’Brien & Linehan, 2014). A receptionist, for example, may be expected to smile at all who enter the building regardless of how he feels. Flight attendants, teachers, and those working in restaurants are required to enact a pleasant demeanor at all times. Public physical temper tantrums are usually unacceptable, with the possible exception of coaches. Such behavior may be seen as a display of their deep felt passion for performance excellence. Hatcher (2003) has argued that currently managers need to enact “heroic passion” for their work, while Simpson, Clegg, and Pitsis (2014) contended that compassion and the way it can and must be shown vary by organizational context. Kantola (2014) described how what he called an “emotional regime of enthusiastic individualism” must now be displayed by managers of corporations. Similarly, Maguire (2001) found that personal trainers of athletes showed excitement because they thought such displays would motivate their athletes. Henderson (2009) has pointed out that the objective of many sport organizations is to enable and increase spectatorship. This may mean that employees of such organizations may have to show passion or “enthusiastic individualism” for the team or events that the organization manages or with which it is associated. Peterson (2014) summarized the literature on sport and showing emotions. She argued that the showing of emotions and which emotions may be shown in a sport setting vary by gender. Little is known to what extent this gendering carries over to employees of sport organizations. Even less is known about the ways the (expected) enactment of embodiment by employees in and scholars of sport organizations varies by other social markers with respect to social relations such as social class, race, and (dis)ability.

Obviously then, bodies and body work are an integral and important part of organizations including those whose focus is on sport. Shilling (2005) concluded that body work “is a fundamental source of work” (p. 78) in paid employment. It is a necessity in organizational contexts, often enacted in informal ways and is part of the unpaid labor employees do as part of their job. Sport organizations may, for example, expect their employees to stay in shape but may not permit them to work on their fitness levels during their working hours so that staying in shape becomes part of the unpaid work employees are expected to do. Employers may implicitly expect employees to show passion for a specific team and to have the physical stamina to work long hours. Gimlin (2007) concluded her description of four ways in which body work occurs in organizations with the suggestion that research is needed to look at how organizations produce bodies and how individuals enact and resist desirable norms and activities through body work. At the beginning of this article, we explained why this is important. In the following section, we explore possible reasons why sport scholars may have ignored bodies in sport organizations and seem to assume disembodiment.

Why Pay Attention to Bodies and Embodiment?

Dispositional Approach: Capitalizing on Bodies

Because Bourdieu’s work focuses on the intersection between bodies and the social world, it is especially appropriate for investigating body work in sport organizations. According to Bourdieu (1986, 1990), the body reflects social values and is a bearer of physical capital. Space does not permit us to explore all of Bourdieu’s ideas about the body. ¹ We focus here on his ideas about the role of “habitus,” “capital,” and “field.”

The habitus of individuals constitutes their internalization of behaviors over time at the subconscious level. Specifically, dressing, walking, talking, behaving, and living are bodily practices informed by the habitus (Bourdieu, 1990). The habitus is always embedded and represented in, and known by the body. This means that institutional contexts can be seen as fields that consist of individuals whose bodies represent their social history. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus can be helpful to explore embodiment in a sport organization. It could, for example, focus on the social history of employees and managers and how their bodies represent physical capital that can produce and is produced by other forms of capital. Their capital emerges, for example, in and through social networks (social capital), education (cultural capital), money, and goods (economic capital). These forms of capital act as resources from which bodily expressions are drawn. For example, Blackett, Evans, and Piggott (2015) found that directors judged coaches who embodied an elite athletic history to be better coaches than those who obtained their coaching expertise through formal education (see also Coupland, 2015a). Bourdieu (1990) emphasized the dynamic character of the habitus as both produced and producing suggesting body work entails a continual process. Bodies take on different positions depending on their habitus and a specific field and adapt to and construct the fields they participate in and vice versa (e.g., Dagkas & Quarmby, 2012; Olive & Thorpe, 2011; Swanson, 2009). These positions are also informed by social relations such as gender, race, and (dis)ability. Various researchers have looked at the ways athletes define and experience corporeal femininity and the extent to which it produces physical capital for them. Caudwell’s (2003) project in which she looked at how women football/soccer players describe bodies and the physical capital they may (not) generate suggested that what is described as a “butch” body may generate physical capital in the sport itself but not outside of it. To what extent are these women and others who excel in sports marked by corporeal masculinity seen as ideal or abject candidates for positions of leadership in sport? The use of Bourdieuian concepts such as habitus, field, capital and also dispositions, distinction, symbolic violence, and taste may generate further insight into how processes of marginalization and/or privileging in sport organizations are negotiated by bodies through the enactment of their habitus, the capital they are able to generate, and the specific field in which their body is situated.

Phenomenological Approach: Lived Experience

Another approach that could provide insight into the workings of bodies, body work, and embodiment of professionals working in sport is the phenomenological approach. This approach is inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962) and assumes that people perceive the world first and foremost through their bodies. Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2007) wrote that a phenomenological perspective assumes that “[. . .] we know the world through the body, just as that body produces the world for us” (p. 117). Similarly, Leder (1990) wrote about the centrality of the lived body and how it can be considered the subject of people’s perception through which the world around them is formed: “The lived body is not just one thing in the world, but a way in which the world comes to be” (p. 25). A phenomenological perspective, therefore, assumes that experiences are always embodied and relational. Individuals first meet each other through their bodies (e.g., Ladkin, 2013; Thanem, 2013). Specifically, experiences are formed through the senses after which the perceiver translates this into conscious thought. ²

Various scholars (e.g., Hargreaves & Vertinsky, 2007; Hockey & Allen, 2007) have argued that despite the increased attention that is paid to bodies in sport sociological research, there is still a lack of knowledge regarding the lived or “fleshy” body. Bodies are often approached as theoretical or abstract entities, not as sensuous and sensing phenomena. A phenomenological approach illustrates what happens at the level of embodiment and how this informs people’s perceptions and actions. Scholars from within and outside of sport have argued the need for conducting such research on embodiment using phenomenology (e.g., Allen-Collinson, 2009; Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2009; Ladkin, 2013; Thanem, 2013). Ladkin (2013), for example, found that the behavior and thinking of leaders and their followers was shaped by how they experienced leadership through their bodies. Ladkin argues that the use of a phenomenological approach allowed her to address “the experience of being in a leadership relation [. . .] and the feelings it engendered” (pp. 321-322)—a topic that could not be adequately addressed by existing leadership theories.

The use of a phenomenological approach can include a variety of methods as well. Lambert (2009), for example, used autoethnographic poetic accounts to analyze the experience of being at the 2002 Sydney Gay Games. Phenomenological approaches could also be used to explore body work in sport organizations. It could illuminate how leadership is embodied in this masculine, racialized, and ableist context and possibly explore differences and similarities in the embodiment and perception of leaders pertaining to their gender, ability, and race and how they are perceived. With its focus on the senses, a phenomenological approach can unpack how leadership relations are embodied and experienced by both leaders and others. This approach thus specifically analyses the bodily aspects of leadership and management relations such as feelings and sensations that these relations may involve. The use of new materialist perspectives can add to this focus on fleshy bodies and sensations. Such perspectives can give insight into other “matter” that might be important for the lived experiences of professionals in sport and the body work they engage in. For example, one might consider how medals, cups, or other prizes on display in the buildings housing sport organizations may produce affect within assemblages related to sport for professionals working in sport. Similarly, physical phenomena such as muscles, hair, sweat, pain, or supportive technology may produce affect as part of the assemblage related to sport. How these material aspects (can) produce affect and affective connections cannot be understood without paying attention to markers such as gender, ability, race, and social class.

Deconstruction and Transgression: Queering Bodies

Beyond the sensations and feelings that can be unpacked through a phenomenological approach, a significant body of research has focused on the intersection of gender and sexuality as a very important determinant in shaping the construction of sport. Much of this research focuses on how athletes who identify as gay, lesbian, transgender, or nonbinary cope with heteronormativity (see, for example, Anderson, 2011; Caudwell, 2011, 2014; Hargreaves & Anderson, 2015; Waldron, 2016). Compared with this body of research, the embodiment of heteronormativity circulating among those working in sport organizations has been underresearched. Queer theorists predominantly interrogate the discourse of heteronormativity, that is, they question the assumption that the behavior and thinking of male bodies and female bodies complement each other. A queer approach therefore focuses on deconstructing and disrupting what are common sense binaries and identities in different contexts (e.g., Bendl, Fleischmann, & Walenta, 2008; Caudwell, 2009, 2014; King, 2008; Sykes, 2006). This deconstruction can not only include gender and sexuality but also be used to interrogate other categories, for example, pertaining to race, ethnicity, (dis)ability and body size and shape (e.g., Sparkes, Brighton, & Inckle, 2014; Sykes & McPhail, 2008; Van Amsterdam, 2013).

Moreover, this critical perspective assumes that often used bodily categories, such as those pertaining to gender, ability, and sexuality, are not separate static categories but blurred, fluid, and fragmented. This perspective is used to explore how these notions are challenged and transgressed in (organizational) life. It has been used to look at the experiences of sport participants (see Hargreaves & Anderson, 2015, for examples) but has only occasionally been used to look at those working in sport organizations. An exception is the work of Kauer (2005). She used queer theory to examine how lesbian coaches challenged and disrupted heteronormative boundaries and simultaneously strengthened dominant norms and practices in sport. She did not, however, investigate how these disruptions informed the organizational cultures where these coaches were employed or the practices of embodiment of those working there. Such research into disruptions is needed because there is some evidence that those who do not identify as heterosexual are accepted as long as they seem to fit into organizational culture and conform to dominant normative heterosexual practices, subjectivities, and bodily representations (Woodruff-Burton & Bairstow, 2013).

Such findings also suggest that use of queer theory should not be confined to the experiences of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, and nonbinary individuals, but should be used to explore how heteronormativity and other embodied social categorizations are maintained and disrupted in organizational practice (see, for example, Cherney & Lindemann, 2014). Sport is a context where the use of queer theory could be useful because both heteronormativity and other practices of inequalities play a dominant role for both males and females, albeit in different ways (for examples of queering of binary structures in sport, see Tamburrini, 2014; Torsson, 2013, and of queering intersections between disability, sexuality, and sport, see Sparkes et al., 2014). The queering of bodies and embodiment of professionals working in sport has rarely been addressed in the literature. This may mean that researchers need to draw on the critical management literature where various scholars have attempted to queer management and organizations (see, for example, Bendl et al., 2008; Rumens, 2015). Rumens (2015) argued that queer theory can be used to “undermine the epistemological foundations of the academy, creating, say, a continuous series of little earthquakes that rupture and destabilize rather than finding comfortable accommodation within university departments” (p. 43). Such ruptures are needed in sport organizations as well if social change is to occur in theory and practice and in diminishing social inequalities.

Concluding Thoughts

The foregoing suggests that a research focus on bodies and embodiment of professionals working in sport is significantly underresearched. This lack of scholarly attention might help explain why diversity has thus far not been realized at the managerial level in sport organizations. The description of possible approaches and avenues for research is not meant to be exhaustive or confined to diversity, but we use it to argue that scholars need to pay attention to bodies, body work, and embodiment of professionals in sport organizations. The reasons given for ignoring embodiment discussed in the “Why Pay Attention to Bodies and Embodiment?” section need to be addressed so that sport research can take an embodied turn. Such a focus is needed if scholars are to gain more insight into the ways social inequalities are sustained in daily organizational life and practices, into issues of diversity and identity formations and into the organizational consequences of not taking embodiment into account (Dale, 2005; Hassard, Holliday, & Wilmott, 2000). Gimlin’s (2007) concept of body work provides an excellent starting point for exploring possible new directions in this research that takes bodies and embodiment into account. We have presented various directions such research might take.