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From Disembodied to the Embodied: the Possibility of Embodied Management
Lu-jia GE
2017, 40(1):
238-243.
Traditional theory of management is disembodied, influenced by disembodied western philosophy. At the level of philosophical background, "disembodied" philosophy idea, such as dualism, rationalism and positivism and so on, constitute the disembodied management theoretical basis. At the level of historical development of management, both theoretical hypothesis and practice exclude the factors such as "embodiment", "situation" and "generative", at each stage. In such contexts, management remains at an abstract disembodied level, which makes the body become an unknown “black box” of the organization.
The embodied theory provides a new key for opening the “black box”, which means a new research direction for management research. Based on the embodied theory, the concept of embodied management is proposed. Embodied management means "body" factors, as variables, are put into the research category of organizational management, and the organizational behavior and management is explained in the embodied theoretical framework. First, embodied theory provides theoretical hypothesis for the embodied management. Second, organizational cognitive neuroscience and organizational neuroscience provide evidence for embodied management at the level of physiology. Moreover, some researches, such as embodiment leadership, embodiment organization, embodiment decision-making, indicate that embodied management has gotten initial development. Based on the above three points, the possibility of embodied management is demonstrated preliminary.
In the "embodied management" perspective, “embodied information” is regarded as one of the key factors, which affect organization management. What is called “embodied information”? It includes four aspects, body-biological information (such as hormone levels), body-physical information (such as body movement), and body symbol-metaphor information (such as "at the foot of the mountain", "foot" is used to indicate bottom), and scene experience-empirical information (such as "home" experience). Those four kinds of “embodied information” can directly or indirectly act on the management of the organization, and then forming the four possibility clues to explore the embodied management. First, physical-body-clue, based on mainly physical properties of the body, which can be subdivided into: body-movement/posture clues, body-state clues, body-sign/metaphorical clues, according to the different effects of physical morphology on the organization management. Second, metaphor-clue, mainly about the linguistic attributes of the body, which can be subdivided into two aspects, one is based on the individual experience and the other is based on the organizational experience. Third, social-action-clue, mainly about the social attributes of the body, which can be used to study the effect of physical movement or spatial distance on the management, in some special social context. Fourth, physiological-body-clue, mainly about the biological properties of the body, can be further subdivided into hormone level clues, metabolic cues, and brain-neural clues, etc. Each clue represents one or more aspects, influenced economic decision-making and other organizational management. And so, in the view of embodied theory, the management scholar or manager can coordinate organization and management dependent on the four clues, within the context of management.
This research findings that embodied management is possible on the level of theoretical hypothesis and realistic condition, but, it can’t replace disembodied management or be the main stream, in the short term. In the further research, “embodied information” should be considered and took into the more empirical study as new variable.
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