Written on the Body: Social Theory and the Body

Abstract

Part of the impetus for considering the relationship between organisation studies and the human body is the massive growth of literature about the body in the social sciences and humanities over the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. This not only encompasses the newly marked out territory of the ‘sociology of the body’, but also work across anthropology (see, for example, Haraway, 1990b; Martin, 1994), psychology (Stam, 1998), geography (Ainley, 1998), cultural studies (Featherstone, 1991), art history (Callen, 1995) and feminist theory (Butler, 1990, 1993). In this chapter I want to draw together some relevant threads from this literature to form a brief historical, social and theoretical context for the present work. Through exploring some of the changing academic approaches to the body and some of the reasons for the increased interest in studying it, I hope to prepare the ground before developing a more specific methodological and epistemological framework for the text in the following chapter.

If we were to render the savage world safe for Western, verbalizing man, we would have to bring the mysteries of the human body within the bounds of Western rationality.

(Polhemus, 1975, p. 15)