How the Body Participates in the Communicative Constitution of Organizations.

Despite an expanding literature drawing attention to the key part played by the body in various organizational phenomena, and to the way organizations shape the bodies that populate them, the constitution of organizations has, to this day, been limited to either discursive practices or to a variety of non-human artifacts. In this paper, we remind readers that the body is also an object - although a human one. Through the study of three vignettes drawn through various datacollection strategies, we show that the body participates in the constitution of organizations, in particular by attributing actions to the organization it thus constitutes. We then discuss the implication of a greater participation of the body in organization constitution for the study of organizational rituals, the study of materiality in organizations, and for the four flows theory. We conclude that the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) perspective is already well-equipped to extend its ontological generosity to the body - it must simply be willing to do so. This study therefore shows that a CCO framework can be used to study the body's participation to the constitution of organizations, without reducing it to its discursive dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]