The changed meaning of the ‘body shop’, from a section of a car factory–or a garage knocking wrecks back into shape–to The Body Shop, a chain of stores selling products to relax and enhance the appearance of human bodies, is now so entrenched that some younger people may scarcely remember the earlier usage. The shifting connotations of the phrase ‘body shop’testify to complex changes in how we think about the role of the human body in economic life and employment relations. Because much of the production of things has been exported to countries where wage rates are lower, or environmental or other controls less strict, workers in the richer Western nations are increasingly concentrated in jobs in the service sector, in which interpersonal interactions, as compared to the making of objects, is often of greater importance. This shift means that if we want to consider embodiment in the workplace, we need to consider changes as well as continuities in the constructions of the body and its uses that guide, empower, constrain and exhaust many kinds of workers. Based on a wide range of literatures, this book crosses conventional demarcations, demonstrating the contribution that concepts developed in the sociology of the body can make to our understanding of changing patterns of work and employment; equally important, it highlights the impact of work and employment on experiences of embodiment. It shows that the body/work nexus is crucial to the organisation and experience of work relations, and, conversely, that people’s experience of embodiment is deeply embedded in their experiences of paid employment.

To date the body and embodiment have constituted a relatively minor thread in research on organisation, work or employment. Even where they are present, this theme tends to be subsumed within the focus on work cultures and identities. Research and debate have tended to follow the main drift of postmodernist approaches on the body, highlighting the production and consumption of the fluid and dynamic symbolic body as a feature of social