“I have to go the extra mile”. How fat female employees manage their stigmatized identity at work

Erasing stigmas through storytelling: why interactive storytelling environments could reduce health-related stigmas

In this article we describe how designers can apply storytelling to reduce health-related stigmas. Stigma is a pervasive problem for people with illnesses, such as obesity, and it can persistently hinder coping, treatment, recovery, and prevention. Reducing health-related stigma is complex because it is multi-layered and self-perpetuating, leading to intertwined vicious circles. Interactive storytelling environments can break these vicious circles by delimiting the narrative freedom of stigma actors. We theoretically explain the potential of interactive storytelling environments to reduce stigma through the following seven functions: 1) expose participants to other perspectives, 2) provide a protective frame, 3) intervene in daily conversations, 4) persuade all stigma actors, 5) exchange alternative understandings, 6) elicit understanding and support for stigma victims, and 7) support stigma victims to cope with stigmatization. We elaborate on these functions through a demonstration of an interactive storytelling environment against weight stigma. In conclusion, this article is a call on designers for health and wellbeing, scientists, and practitioners from various disciplines to be sensitive to the pervasiveness of stigma and to collaboratively create destigmatizing storytelling environments.

Re-organising wellbeing: Contexts, critiques and contestations of dominant wellbeing narratives

Wellbeing has emerged as an important discourse of management and organisation. Practices of wellbeing are located in concrete organisational arrangements and shaped by power relations built upon embedded, intersecting inequalities and therefore require critical evaluation. Critical evaluation is essential if we are to reorganise wellbeing to move beyond critique and actively contest dominant wellbeing narratives in order to reshape the contexts in which wellbeing can be fulfilled. The COVID-19 pandemic under which this special issue took shape, provides various examples of how practices continue to be shaped by existing narratives of wellbeing. The pandemic also constituted a far-reaching shock that gave collective pause to consider to the extent to which work is really organised to realise wellbeing and opened up potential to think differently. The seven papers included in the special issue reveal the problematic and uneven way in which wellbeing is pursued and examine possibilities to imagine and realise more radical practices of wellbeing that can counter the way in which ill-being is produced by the organisation of labour.

On (not) fitting in. Fat embodiment, affect and organizational materials as differentiating agents

This paper focuses on the experiences of self-identified fat women employees. Combining the works of Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed, we offer a feminist new materialist analysis of the production of difference in organizations related to size as an entanglement of bodies, discourses, organizational materials and affect. We show how our participants predominantly became shameful and a ‘bad fit’ within their jobs through the intra-action of their large bodies with obesity discourse and organizational materials such as chairs and workwear. Yet we also illustrate how some material-discursive entanglements offered situations where shame was circumvented, instead producing our participants as acceptable within their organizational context. Our research contributes to discussions on embodied normativities in organizations by taking these issues beyond the discursive realm and highlighting the importance of materiality and affect in ‘fitting in’ at work. We offer new theoretical pathways to explore differentiating practices by looking at shame as part of collective and affective histories of marginalization.

Oddity as Commodity? The body as symbolic resource for Other-defying identity work

While studies on the work people undertake on their ‘identities’ in professional contexts tend to focus on inner conversations between different possible selves, this paper considers the impact of ‘inherited’ prescriptions and expectations on such inner conversations and the entwining of identity work with historic conditions written onto the body. It does so by studying performing artists with dwarfism. Taking into account their long history of stereotypical roles within the entertainment sector and their visibly ‘different’ body which guarantees to solicit the gaze of others, this study considers identity in terms of the corporeal positioning of the self of artists whose position on stage is often morally disputed, both inside and outside the community of people with dwarfism. Analysing how people use their Othered bodies as a symbolic resource for identity work, we describe three different ways of engaging in embodied identity work: identity ‘ethicalisation’, through stereotype- avoiding bodywork, ‘queering’, through stereotype- provoking bodywork, and ‘distancing’, through stereotype- acting bodywork. Each strategy is an attempt to redress the incoherence between preferred (personally aspired) and ascribed (historically inherited) identity. By analysing how people preserve an aspirational self and defy the image of being Other, this study contributes to existing debates by highlighting the role of history and the symbolic use of ‘oddity’ as an instrument in embodied identity work. In addition, it offers a reflective note on the problem of ‘academic exoticism’ through the sensitisation of Other bodies and on the potential of able-bodied allyship to attenuate the lack of disability knowledge in management and organisation studies.

Fat stigma and body objectification: A text analysis approach using social media content

This study investigates how female and male genders are positioned in fat stigmatising discourses that are being conducted over social media. Weight-based linguistic data corpus, extracted from three popular social media (SM) outlets, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, was examined for fat stigmatising content. A mixed-method analysis comprising sentiment analysis, word co-occurrences and qualitative analysis, assisted our investigation of the corpus for body objectification themes and gender-based differences. Objectification theory provided the underlying framework to examine the experiential consequences of being fat across both genders. Five objectifying themes, namely, attractiveness, physical appearance, lifestyle choices, health and psychological well-being, emerged from the analysis. A deeper investigation into more facets of the social interaction data revealed overall positive and negative attitudes towards obesity, which informed on existing notions of gendered body objectification and weight/fat stigmatisation. Our findings have provided a holistic outlook on weight/fat stigmatising content that is posted online which can further inform policymakers in planning suitable props to facilitate more inclusive SM spaces. This study showcases how lexical analytics can be conducted by combining a variety of data mining methods to draw out insightful subject-related themes that add to the existing knowledge base; therefore, has both practical and theoretical implications.

How to be a hero: How managers determine what makes a good manager through narrative identity work

The turn to identity within management studies has revealed important insights into management, by recognising its complex, contingent and relational nature, and through focusing on the personal experiences of managers and how they develop an identity as a manager. However, research has focused on processes of being and becoming a manager, rather than how individuals determine what makes a good manager, and what they are actually seeking to be. I therefore present an extended theorisation of narrative identity work which highlights the overlooked role of the ‘personal social landscape’ constructed through narrative, which gives meaning to the actors and actions within it. The theory is illustrated through detailed analysis of three manager accounts, which reveals processes by which managers construct personal versions of the same organisation, as social landscape to their self-narratives, and how these different organisational constructions create different meanings to their self-narratives as acting well as a manager.

When Shame Meets Love: Affective pathways to freedom from injurious bodily norms in the workplace

We explore organizational members’ affective experiences to elucidate how and when the reproduction of oppressive bodily norms can be interrupted. We leverage the exceptional access to hitherto overlooked affective dynamics in one organizational context made possible by the introduction of a video art installation in a commercial art gallery. The artwork enabled both the all-female staff and the researchers to observe, feel and reflect on both the invisible force of body shame and the empowering forces of communal laughter and reciprocal generosity. Our analysis reveals how the repetition of loving encounters around the artwork moved the staff away from crippling individualized anxiety and shame and towards more joyful and carefree possibilities. It further suggests that the organization’s feminist culture and climate of psychological safety facilitated the trajectory from shame to joy through love. By surfacing and explaining such affective pathways to freedom as an important form of emancipatory politics in the context of injurious, discriminatory bodily norms, we contribute to both scholarship on bodily discipline in the workplace and recent work on the critical potential of affect.