Thinking about Organizational Practices in the Environment: Contributions from the Dwelling Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to outline an experiential way of understanding the organization, from a embodied perspective, that privileges the analyses of organizational practices situated in the environment. We take the dwelling perspective in order to enrich the comprehension of the life-world where the perception takes place and to clarify how knowledge emerges from situated living practices. This paper proposes an approach that describes living practices based on the entwinement with the life-world, such as an embodied process situated in the environment. The paper presents new possibilities of research about  the relation  between individuals and organizations, as the dwelling perspective enables the comprehension that the organization is not only inhabited, but  is a living space. The goal is to fill gaps identified in the two studies on practices in Organizational Studies: (1) the effort to rescue the critical potential of practices in relation to positivist and rationalist concepts imposed on organizational studies and (2) the need to promote clearer articulation about the entwinement with life-world, considering that this idea is crucial for the analysis of practice rooted in the environment.