Journal of Management Studies · 2025
How can organizations rebuild ways of working after extreme disruption, and what role does the lived body play in this process?
Sele, K., Danner-Schröder, A., & Mahringer, C. A. (2025). Embodied connection work: The role of the lived body in routine recreation in extreme contexts. Journal of Management Studies, 62(3), 1300–1329. 10.1111/joms.13113
Organizations can usually respond to disruption by adapting existing ways of working or drawing on routines for which people have been trained. Extreme events pose a harder problem. When established routines become impossible to perform, organizations have to reconstruct how people, actions, stakeholders, and organizational commitments fit together under fundamentally altered conditions.
The article examines this problem through an embodiment perspective. Instead of treating organizational recovery primarily as a cognitive process of planning and decision-making, it asks how people experience disruption and rebuild connections through their lived bodies: through sensing, moving, imagining the experiences of others, and feeling whether new ways of working remain connected to what matters.
We ask: How does the lived body matter in the recreation of routines in extreme contexts?
To study this process, we conducted a 12-month ethnography of Nolla, a fine-dining zero-waste restaurant in Helsinki whose established routines were brought to a complete halt by the COVID-19 lockdown. Fieldwork began immediately after the closure and followed the organization in real time as it searched for ways to continue operating. The study combined regular observation, interviews with the owners and suppliers, informal conversations with staff, and documents including menus, photographs, press coverage, and social media. This longitudinal access made it possible to observe how bodily experiences of disconnection shaped attempts to rebuild work, and how new routines gradually reconnected the organization with its stakeholders and core commitments.
Extreme events pose major challenges for the performance of routines as they threaten the continuation of work in all its forms. This paper uses an embodiment perspective to examine a routine recreation process in a fine-dining zero-waste restaurant whose routines were completely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Zooming in on the role of the lived body, our study reveals the importance of ‘embodied connection work’ for the recreation of a new set of routines. We show how this active process of making connections between actors and actions consists of ‘embodied imagining’ and ‘embodied protecting’. Together, these interrelated practices enable the reintegration of stakeholders and the reassembling of what matters to the restaurant owners. Our study contributes to research at the intersection of routines and extreme contexts in three ways: (1) we move away from considering the body as a trained object and focus instead on the lived body and its role in performing and patterning and, hence, in recreating routines; (2) we unpack how novel roles emerge through embodied connection work as new and existing connections are forged; and (3) we conceptualize the relationship between routines and context as mutually constitutive suggesting that actions are situated through the lived body.
The study shows how organizations can recreate ways of working by rebuilding connections through embodied experience.
When the restaurant’s routines collapsed, simply repeating familiar activities or copying practices from elsewhere did not restore a viable way of working. New routines emerged when actors could reconnect stakeholders with actions and simultaneously reconnect their work with the values and commitments that defined the organization.
Through embodied imagining, actors used their own bodily experience to anticipate how customers would experience and perform actions elsewhere. Through embodied protecting, they used embodied commitments to zero-waste and fine dining to bound and steer actions so that new routines continued to enact what mattered.
Embodied connection work enabled stakeholders to take on new roles and helped bridge physical separation. The findings show that roles, relationships, and context are recreated through action, with the lived body connecting people to an evolving environment rather than merely responding to a fixed context.
The study contributes beyond research on organizational routines by showing how embodiment shapes organizing under severe disruption. It speaks to research on extreme contexts, organizational recovery, role making, stakeholder relationships, spatial separation, and the broader role of the body in organization and management.
It also develops a relational view of recovery. New roles emerge as actors anticipate what others can do, separated spaces can be bridged through embodied practices, and organizational context is actively constituted through lived experience. This shifts attention from context as an external condition toward context as something actors experience and shape through their bodies.
Some disruptions exceed what organizations can realistically prepare for. In such situations, recovery may require more than transferring established routines to a new setting. Organizations need to rebuild connections with stakeholders while finding new ways to enact the commitments that define who they are and how they want to operate.
The study suggests two practical forms of work. Embodied imagining means actively working through how customers, employees, or other stakeholders will experience and perform the redesigned activity. Embodied protecting means testing new arrangements against deeply held organizational commitments and shaping actions so that those commitments remain present as work changes.
