Understanding organisational gestures: Technique, aesthetics and embodiment

SummaryBy defining gestures as recognisable patterns of recurring oriented body movements, this article aims to offer a conceptual framework that accounts for the features of organisational gestures. Viewing them as routines of bodily movements is proposed, and technique, aesthetic and embodiment will appear to constitute their three generative dimensions. This article participates to the corporeal and aesthetic perspectives on organisations and enriches the literature on routines through an extension to gestures and embodied artefacts. Choosing a field study that is embedded in the repetitive lines of factory production will offer a challenging context to observe the inclusion of an aesthetic dimension within every gesture and leads to discuss dynamics of learning, control and elegance.