Valentine 2002

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In-corporations: Food, Bodies and

Organizations
GILL VALENTINE
The Body and the Workplace

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the body became the focus of attention in most
social science disciplines, as the title of this journal bears witness. Yet it remains
relatively under-theorized in relation to the specific socio-spatial context of the
workplace. Within the sociology of work, geography and organizational theory
the emphasis has been predominantly on the sexual politics of bodies in the
workplace (see, for example, Cockburn, 1983; Burrell, 1984; Adkins, 1995; Hearn
and Parkin, 1987; Hearn et al., 1989; Pringle, 1989), notably, the way ‘gender iden-
tities are constructed at work to produce and reproduce the worker as a subject’
and the way ‘social practices reassert or challenge the gendering of work over
time’ (McDowell and Court, 1994: 270). Indeed, in relation to interactive service
work, Leidner (1993: 155–6) has argued that
Workers’ identities are not incidental to the work but are an integral part of it. Interactive jobs
make use of their workers’ looks, personalities, and emotions, as well as their physical and intel-
lectual capacities, sometimes forcing them to manipulate their identities more self-consciously
than do workers in other jobs.
Thus, within certain occupations (e.g. nursing, waitressing, flight attendants),

particular bodily properties and gendered attributes become commodified in the
performance of emotional or sexual labour (Tyler and Abbott, 1998).
More recently, attention has focused on the body as a potential source of
problems within the workplace (e.g. sexual harassment, violence, diet and
exercise, stress management) and therefore as a regulatory issue (Casey, 1995).
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2 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2
Specifically, attention has focused on how it is organized – through dividing prac-

tices, enclosure, procedures and training – and disciplined, for example through
electronically mediated panopticism (Townley, 1993). In this way, ‘cultures of
excellence’ are transferred on to bodies of subjects (Du Gay, 1996). Indeed, Du
Gay and Salaman (1992) argue that restructuring often involves the reconstruc-
tion of employees’ identities too, claiming that some workers internalize identi-
ties in line with organizational change – becoming what the employer wants,
although Halford and Savage (1998) point out that employees also take direct and
covert forms of action to resist the dictates of organizations.
Employees’ bodies are not, therefore, merely reflections of wider social
relations, but are a product of organizational dynamics and the ability of organiz-
ations to wield power and construct meanings. Yet we cannot just read off
meanings and identities from looking at the social relations within organizations
alone. Rather, it is important to recognize that society is produced in and through
patterned networks of heterogeneous materials; and that it is made up of a wide
variety of shifting associations (and disassociations) between humans and non-
humans (Law, 1994). There is no workplace or work relations without partici-
pation between humans and objects (think what humans would have to do if
non-humans were not present). Objects can define actors, the space in which they
move, the ways in which they interact, allocating roles and responsibilities and
vesting them with a moral content. In other words ‘objects have political strength.
They may change social relations, but they also stabilise, naturalise, depoliticise
and translate these into other media’ (Akrich, 1992: 222). Indeed, Akrich (1992)
warns that social scientists should be wary of privileging humans, should not
assume that it is humans who are the prime movers in relations and should recog-
nize the plasticity of objects.
There is therefore a need to move beyond a focus on the relationship between
the body and the workplace per se, to locate the body more firmly within the
dense, networked heterogeneity that is work-life. In particular, there is a need to
focus on the importance of what bodies enter into assemblage with, the materi-
als through which social relations are produced and consequently the practices
through which work-life is ordered (Bingham et al., 2000). In this article I do so
by drawing on an approach – Actor Network Theory (ANT) – which is well
developed within the sociology of science and technology (Callon, 1987; Latour,
1993; Star, 1995). However, rather than focusing on technical objects in the work-
place, I examine food and drink as non-human entities which build, maintain and
stabilize links between diverse actants. Callon (1987: 93) argues that:
The actor network can be distinguished from the traditional actors of sociology, a category
generally excluding any nonhuman component and whose internal structure is rarely assimilated
In-corporations 3
to that of a network. But the actor network should not, on the other hand, be confused with a
network linking in some predictable fashion elements that are perfectly well defined and stable,
for the entities it is composed of, whether natural or social, could at any moment redefine their
identity and mutual relationships in some new way and bring new elements into the network.
Thus food and drink in the workplace cannot be regarded as invariant objects
in a passive setting, nor as impacting on social relations in fixed ways producing
a predictable set of effects, but rather as ‘things’ that materialize for people as
diverse social practices and which may vary as much as the contexts in which they
are consumed (Law, 1994). This emergence in practice only operates in relation
to other practices that make up the background of a particular ‘community of
practice’ (Wenger, 1998) of which any given individual is a member (Bingham et
al., 2000). Thus food and drink may play a variety of different roles within
different organizations and so may be realized as quite different actors depend-
ing on the different ways in which they are ‘made sense of’ within these different
communities of practice (Bingham et al., 2000).
In this article I therefore focus on what happens when people come together
at work around food and the specific sets of relations between people, activity
and organizations that result from this engagement. In doing so I focus on some
of the processes through which working bodies are in-corporated into organiz-
ational life through emerging food practices; and highlight some of the processes
through which working bodies are reconstituted as organizational food practices
are in-corporated into the bodies of employees. Surprisingly, given the quantity
and quality of work on food within sociology, anthropology, psychology and,
more recently, other disciplines such as geography (see, for example, Murcott,
1982, 1983a, 1983b, 1995; Beardsworth and Keil, 1990, 1992; Mennell et al., 1992;
Lupton, 1996), there are very few studies of food within the workplace or other
institutions; instead the emphasis has been squarely on the locations of the home
and restaurant.
The material presented in the article is based on a two-year research project on
food, place and identity (see also Bell and Valentine, 1997; Valentine, 1998, 1999a,
1999b; Valentine and Longstaff, 1998) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It
involved work with 12 case study households and three institutions (a prison and
two schools) in Yorkshire, UK. Multi-method qualitative research techniques
were employed including: food diaries, five themed in-depth interviews with each
participant (which were transcribed and analysed using conventional social
science techniques), video/photographic diaries produced by households, and
participant observation within the schools and prison. Participants were recruited
through advertisements and ‘snowballing’ from a range of initial contacts. The
material presented in this article is primarily based on in-depth interviews
conducted within five of the 12 household case studies, with interviewees

employed in nursing, buying, mining, accountancy and banking (in the interviews
presented, F = Female; M = Male; I = Interviewer).
In-corporations I: The Nurse

People are not passively inscribed into existing power relations, rather social
relations at work must be negotiated, accepted and created as part of the process
of management and organization in the workplace (Ormrod, 1994). Food is one
of the many ‘objects’ at work which leads to an arrangement of people and things.
When Wendy started work as a trainee nurse, the hospital formally partitioned
its staff according to their status through a spatial division of dining areas, with
senior staff being provided with a better range of meals and quality of food than
those who ate in the canteen for junior staff. Although this spatial division of
consumption has now been dissolved, the nursing staff continue informally to re-
construct these partitions through their decisions about with whom they choose
to eat. In such ways, food helps to define actors and the spaces in which they can
move and interact. As Wendy (now a theatre nurse, working in the recovery area)
explains as she describes her former experiences of being a nurse on the wards:
F And we used to go to the canteen at work and have dinner or supper whatever shift you
were on.
I So was that quite a social thing and tied up with people that you worked with. Did you
eat regularly with the same people?
F It was very, oh what, hierarchical [when she was a nurse on the wards. Now she works
as a theatre nurse and so no longer eats in the general staff canteen] . . . you’d go down
at lunch time with the people off your ward and you would sit, you wouldn’t sit with
anybody that wasn’t in your little group. So you would find a table with perhaps other
first-year nurses on that you knew anyway and you’d go and sit there but you would
never sit with a staff nurse or a sister, never, it just wasn’t done . . . you didn’t sit with
anybody who wasn’t in your little class – oh no.
Now that Wendy is a theatre nurse, food orders her use of space in a different
way. Stringent rules about hygiene because of the risks to patients in the theatre
and resuscitation areas of the hospital impose a straitjacket on the staff who work
there. As a potential source of ‘pollution’, no food is allowed in the area – except
in a coffee room – and staff have to change their clothing to safeguard against
contamination if they want to go outside to the canteen or vending machines.
F And we just stay with the area that we work in because we don’t go out of the area so
we don’t have any choice we stay with the same people
I Is this like a separate sort of canteen for you?
F Well, no, I work in theatre so we don’t actually get to go out. You can go out if you want
but it means getting changed.
In-corporations 5
I Oh yeah, it’s a real drag.

[edit]
F So you just sit in the coffee room, so you’re with exactly the same people that you just
walked out of one room into the next room really.
In this context, the potentially ‘dangerous’ properties of food and dining out
constrain the mobility of the nursing staff – who usually choose to remain in their
own coffee area rather than go through the rituals of sterilization – creating a
‘closed’ community of practice.
While food structures the nurses’ use of space; the hospital mediates the prop-
erties and meanings of food to them. The shift-work system forces staff to skip,
change the timing of, and sometimes abbreviate meals if there is an emergency (in
a similar way, Cloutt, 1995 argues that the tight time schedules long-distance
commuters operate under also affect their eating patterns), as Wendy explains:
I So do you work shifts?
F You know you have lunch at like a normal time usually about 12 o’clock time. The late
shifts are awkward ’cos they now start at quarter to eleven until quarter to nine so that
does mess your eating up rather because the people who’ve been on the morning shifts
are obviously going to dinner so you’ve got to stay and cover them for while they’re at
lunch. So although I’ve had breakfast at like 9 o’clock the same as the people who are at
work I don’t actually get to go to my break until 2 o’clock
I Oh no.
F ’Cos you’ve got to wait, yeah. And it’s too early in a morning before you go to work to
have anything to eat so like you’re waiting until 2 o’clock before you get some dinner
which is quite a long time. And then you, like, get another break like two hours later.
So it’s, you know, it’s not very good really
I So do you tend to eat again then at the second break as well?
F Well, your first break is supposed to be like a quick cup of coffee but I always eat me
dinner then. So that’s very rushed but I’m starving by then. And your second break is
supposed to be like your meal break but by then I’ve usually got nothing left, perhaps
an apple or a banana.
For women like Wendy, these workplace practices undermine their enjoyment of
food, both at work – where meals are eaten at irregular times and often at speed
– but also at home where women are often largely responsible for choosing and
preparing meals (Murcott, 1983b; Charles and Kerr, 1988) and so are pressurized
by their work routines into eating quick-to-prepare, but less enjoyable conveni-
ence-style foods, although, for Wendy, social meals with colleagues after work
have also introduced her to the pleasures of different foods, such as Chinese,
which she claims she would not otherwise have tried.
In all the above ways then, food, the hospital and the nursing staff mutually
enrol, constitute and order each other. This is not to suggest, however, that they
do so in a stable or fixed way. Rather, it is important to recognize the plasticity
or inconstancy of actors as they are mobilized in the construction of a network.
The entities of which the network is composed can at any moment enrol new
elements or redefine their relationships undergoing a transformation themselves
in the process (Callon, 1987). This can be illustrated by two examples. While for
Wendy and her colleagues food is often taken for granted as an everyday neces-
sity that must be consumed as quickly as possible, when one particular sister is
in charge the workplace becomes a more stressful environment. In this context,
sharing cake becomes a source of pleasure to relieve the tension, and to bind the
other nurses together in the face of adversity, creating space and time away from
‘work’. In other words, the properties of food are transformed – from refueller
to stress diffuser and pleasure giver.
When one sister’s there – she’s older and it’s very, it’s not very often that she’s actually left in
charge of the department ’cos she’s sort of like the junior sister, but when she is you always
know it’s going to be a horrendous day because it just follows her around, trouble. So we always
have Sally Lunns [a type of cake] on that day. We know whenever Lou’s in charge that we’re
going to get these Sally Lunns for the day which are quite nice and we get them from WRVS
canteen.
In the second example, the theatre nurses organized a sponsored slim to raise
money for resuscitation equipment (and to counter the effect of too many cakes!).
As Wendy describes below, rather than being submerged under the pressure and
routine of everyday work-life, food was suddenly promoted to the focal point of
workplace conversations. What individuals ate in the coffee room was used to
police their adherence to the collective slim, with reprimands being dished out to
those who transgressed the expected mode of consumption.
When they started this sponsored slim after Christmas to raise funds for this resus. thing that
they want it’s the most anybody has ever talked about food was because everybody was going
on a diet. You don’t normally talk about it but because people are on diets then there were
looking at coffee rooms – oh you can’t have that packet of crisps, you can’t have this – and the
whole, for about two weeks immediately after Christmas that’s all anybody ever talked about.
What they’d cooked at home, what they’d had, what they were allowed and what the calorie
content – it was horrendous. I said you’ve never talked about food so much as when you’re
on this diet. I mean their whole life was encompassed in this diet. It was horrendous it really
was.
In this example, too, food was again mediating social relations in the recovery
area in a different way. While the dieting transformed the bodies of the
slimmers, food was also being transformed in the process itself, from pleasure
giver to ‘referee’ in the relationship between fellow abstainers. In this way ‘the
boundary between the inside and the outside of an object comes to be seen as
a consequence of such interactions rather than as something that determines it’
(Akrich, 1992: 206).
In-corporations 7
In-corporations II: The Buyer

As I argued in the previous section, the materialization and use of an object, like
food, within the workplace is a process in which both the consumption and social
elements are simultaneously brought into being. The business lunch has long been
recognized as an essential part of corporate entertainment. During the early 1980s,
not only the ‘power lunch’, but also the ‘power breakfast’, was imported from
the USA into the UK. A recent British survey of advertising executives, found
that on average they attend or host one lunch per week (Athenaeum, 1996). The
restaurant provides a neutral space in which to meet competitors, support services
(e.g. lawyers and accountants) and producers or suppliers, all of whom are often
concentrated within offices in the centre of cities (Bergman, 1979). The import-
ance of these face-to-face meetings was emphasized by Michael Korda, editor-
in-chief of publishers Simon and Schuster when he claimed that ‘the most
powerful place in town [for my industry] is the Grill Room of the Four Seasons
[a restaurant in New York]’ (Korda, 1976, quoted in Bergman, 1979: 236). As
Mike explains below, describing his experience of working in buying, the business
lunch was particularly important for binding people together, creating ‘relation-
ships’, rather than for ‘doing work’ such as negotiating commercial deals.
I worked in buying and buying was, you were always just taken out for lunch by sales people
who came to visit you and er, so you know, I don’t know possibly three or four times a week
really you’d be taken out for meals and go to restaurants or pubs or whatever [edit].
You’d maybe talk the business, they used to come in at 11 o’clock, you’d have a business
meeting for an hour and then go out for lunch . . . you do form relationships and they do matter
you know, because I know people I’ve done business with because I really like them and people
I’ve not done business with because I don’t. So they are important but only about that, about
getting to know somebody, forming a relationship with somebody and not about, I thank god
it’s not at all about hard negotiating or anything like that. . . . I used to go to London about I
don’t know maybe twice a month when I was in marketing working for the advertising agency
that was just an accepted bloody good time, you know you’d catch the train down to London
have breakfast on the train, get there for about 10 o’clock, go to the advertising agency, have
about an hour and a half meeting and then they’d take you to lunch somewhere where you
wanted to go. . . . And then you’d get back on the train about 4 o’clock and get back up here
about quarter past, half past seven . . . it wasn’t at all arduous, it was just pleasant really, you’d
go and talk to really nice people about things that were quite interesting. And the business, it
was almost like business was a bit dirty, you know, get that out the way.
Within this working environment, the food and drink defined the actors as male
and the relationships between them as ‘macho’, ‘naturalizing’ the job as a mascu-
line activity. Outlining a multiple definition of oppression, Young (1990) has
argued that a key mechanism is the confinement of ‘others’ within their bodies.
Food and drink served just this role in this workplace. As Mike explains below,
most women’s bodies could not hold the quantity that he was required to
consume ‘at work’. Without food and drink as mediators, the social relations
within Mike’s organization might have looked very different.
I mean buying was totally male . . . [edit] I mean that was the, the buying, the sales people in
buying. You know the sales and buying interface was very much that sort of, you know, male
get up a pub and, you know, drink so you have sort of two or three pints before your meal and
then a pint with your meal and then a pint after and that was, yeah, that was a business lunch.
So I mean, all that was built very much around food and, yeah, it was really important, you
know thinking about it, in terms of it was the relationships that you made there and if you
couldn’t eat or couldn’t drink you’d be in a real, you wouldn’t have been able to keep the job
really. People would have looked on you as being really strange you know that, well you know
I don’t want someone who can’t eat, I mean it would have been worse as a salesman actually,
you know that there’s a real expectation that’s what you’d do and if someone said, no I’m sorry
I don’t want to do that, you were really sort of frowned on, pushed to one side. You had to be
a hail fellow well met type of person.
But, as Cowan (1987: 29) has pointed out, ‘different social groups, acting in
what they perceive to be their own best interests, can because they are embedded
in a complex network produce effects that may be quite different, perhaps even
diametrically opposed to what they intended’. In the case of Mike, as his business
contacts expanded so his waistline began to in-corporate his commercial success.
I started to put, well I started to put a lot of weight on because I was just eating all the time, I
remember coming up to Christmas and I’d been out for 18 or 19 Christmas dinners . . . I mean
it was basically my stomach that, that started er, I just got you know a big stomach and er my
face was fat . . . but no, certainly it was my stomach that er, that just you know put weight on
so the things like you know trousers you, so I had to you know, buy new, you know big pairs
of trousers and things like that.
Describing the instability of the boundaries of the pregnant body, Young

(1984) has suggested that when a woman gains weight her body boundaries shift
and so does her sense of bodily location, which becomes centred on her stomach.
For Mike, workplace food and drink practices ruptured his sense of bodily
integrity, penetrating the closed borderline he imagined existed between his
‘public’ work and ‘private’ self, refocusing his perception of his bodily location
upon his waistline. In turn, he started cycling to work to shed the polluting effects
of his excessive business lunches and, as a consequence, he was bitten by the
exercise bug, taking up running as a serious and competitive hobby. This moti-
vated him to develop his fitness and so he began to eat more healthily, incorpo-
rating more vegetarian food (already sometimes eaten at home because one of his
daughters was a vegetarian) into his diet and switching jobs to work in further
education. Thus Mike’s experience demonstrates how objects such as food can
generate new forms and orders of causality. Yet, there is no clearly identifiable
linear outcome as a result of the interaction between different factors. Rather, the
interaction between food, body and organization is ‘complex and continuous and
In-corporations 9
all the elements combined are transforming of, and transformed by each other’
(Ormrod, 1994: 43).
In-corporations III: The Miner

Whereas, for Mike, food emerged as a form of work, with the business lunch
signalling both productivity and success, for Paul, located in a different
‘community of practice’ (he was a miner until he suffered a spinal injury in an
accident), food emerged as the opposite. Eating was a leisure, not a work activity
when he was a miner. Food had little place underground (except at Christmas
when the miners held an underground Christmas ‘lunch’ eaten off the conveyor
belts) where pay was based on productivity and downing tools for lunch would
threaten the miners’ income. Paul explains:
Because at end of day you were getting paid, you get a bonus for what you, what coal you’re
getting off, so if you sit there an hour, you’re losing money, but at this other job [his previous
occupation] you were having an hour’s dinner, dinner break and you weren’t bothered about
that because you weren’t getting paid for what you were producing. But down pit you, you get
a bonus on what you produce as well as your wage, so more you produce – more money you
fetched home . . .
[Later he returned to the same theme]
And er – there were never a certain time, they used – ’cause end of day, it were all about
getting coal off at face, that were the important job . . . I used to eat – er just when, whenever
really, just I’ll be walking somewhere I’d just ’cause . . . I could say have a mile distance to walk
underground, so – I’d just have a sandwich say as I were walking to another job sort of thing,
to do another job. So you just see eating and drinking, you just ate when you could and drank
when you could really.
In the same vein, while for Mike the business lunch emerged as a bodily
pleasure – a taste of luxury, being waited on in the best restaurants – for Paul
eating emerged as a bodily hardship – a source of discomfort. Any food had to
be carried long distances, eaten on the move or in cramped spaces, and carefully
negotiated to avoid mouthfuls of dirt, as he describes in these two quotations:
Yeah – mm, well once you go, you go underground sort of thing, say you went on days, you
used to go down underground about six o’clock in morning, you didn’t come up till two o’clock
and er – it’s not just down, I don’t know how deep it was, say five, I don’t know how deep it
were really, on, on shaft sort of thing, we used to go down and then you might have to go, just
trying to explain it from here er – you might be working five, ten mile away from where you
go down . . . so – you’ve got to take everything with you like . . . you’d be carrying everything
’cause you, you got sort of thing, you got to have it in a bag over your shoulder ’cause you’ve
got your lamp on, you’ve got your lamp which is a big battery what you have on your belt, you
got a, a s-, can’t remember what they called it, it were a silver thing like this, it’s like a mask if
there were a gas leak, got to put on sort of thing, er, then all your tools. . . . In some places you
couldn’t er – say it were like, these doors, big fire doors, what they call fire doors, they’re like
bigger than that [pointing to a door], and say I went through there, you could have to, you could
be working, working in the shorts, some blokes were that hot, then you come back here
[through the doors] you’d need a big donkey jacket on it were that cold. [edit]
Well like you’re eating sandwiches, so – soon as you go down your hands are black anyway,
you’re climbing, you know lifting things and that, there’s nowhere to wash your hands, there’s
no sinks or anything to wash your hands, so – when you’re eating your sandwiches you use a
bit of kitchen roll what you’ve got ’em wrapped in and hold it with that sort of thing and then
you throw that piece away what you’re holding you see, so you just have to eat round your
fingers sort of thing.
The composition of an object like food can constrain the actants in the way they
relate to the object and to one another (Akrich, 1992). Paul describes how the
propensity for certain foods to sweat in the high temperatures in the shafts
constrained what the miners ate and affected the meanings of particular food-
stuffs. Those who transgressed the agreed rules of consumption, for example by
taking eggs underground, would be teased or punished – sometimes being sent to
Coventry – in order to teach them the appropriate rules of conduct in the pit.
I And did the sort of discomfort and the dirt and all that affect what, what you put in the
sandwich box?
M Yeah because it’d sweat, if it were hot, it’d sweat a lot you see as well – so you had to
be careful like, if you take eggs or anything like that they sweat, don’t they, and smell
. . . so – main thing’d have been er tuna, what I used to take more than anything ’cause
it kept moist and er – mm, used to take that more than anything. Or er – meat dries up
sometimes, it dried up so it – more or less it’d have been tuna or er – corned beef or what
have you, it’s said to keep, that kept best. But some people would take eggs, and if you
can imagine it’s, they’re like tunnels down pits, you know through and air just goes one
certain way and you could be sat there, there’d be somebody sat up there and they’d
open their box sort of thing and you’d get it and if they’d had eggs or something
everybody down here’d got it, if you went to that side of them you’ll get it ’cause it’s
coming, it’s coming a certain way.
As actors (people or things) are mobilized in the construction of a network

they themselves undergo transformation. For example, the introduction of food
into particular workplaces – like a mine – can change the properties attributed to
humans and non-humans alike. As Paul’s examples of dirty sandwiches and
sweating eggs demonstrate, the physical environment underground transforms
the properties of foodstuffs, while workers’ bodies themselves undergo changes
too. Altered eating (shift workers eat fewer meals at irregular times and graze on
more snacks than day workers) and sleeping habits mean that shift workers can
become nocturnally rather than diurnally oriented (Stewart and Wahlqvist, 1985;
Tepas et al., 1985; Tepas, 1990). Not surprisingly, the uneven meal patterns and
disrupted eating habits (Gaffuri and Costa, 1985) produced by shift work have
also been linked with gastro-intestinal disorders and other health problems –
providing a further example of the way that organizational practices can be
materialized in the bodies of workers through food.
In-corporations 11
In-corporations IV: The Accountant

Lash and Urry (1994) have argued that within contemporary Western economies,
aesthetic and emotional components of labour increasingly have more value than
their technological capabilities, such that having control over workers’ corporeal
capacities has become part and parcel of organizations’ strategies. Employers
frequently intervene in employees’ lives to develop aspects of workers’ identities
as an occupational resource so that the employees must manipulate their bodily
performances to ‘embody’ the organizations in order to become and remain
employees of particular companies (McDowell, 1997; Tyler and Hancock, 1998).
In mapping desirable bodyscapes corporations establish bodily norms and stan-
dards in which being slim is seen as an aesthetic ideal for both women (Chernin,
1983; Bordo, 1990; MacSween, 1993) and men; and as the physical embodiment
of productivity and success. In a notorious recent example of this attitude Gordon
Towell, a UK managing director with the Granada leisure conglomerate, told a
radio phone-in that he would not employ overweight people, stating:
We practise what I guess you would call a policy of slight discrimination [sic], in the sense that
we do not like to, and we will not employ very fat people. The reason is quite simple. They do
take more time off work and they tend to be more unhealthy and they tend to have a more
slovenly attitude towards the job they do. (Gentleman, 1998: 8)
Food, as an object which is implicated in these workplace practices, is there-

fore intimately and complexly involved in some employees’ efforts to incorpo-
rate their employers’ aesthetic standards into their own embodied presentations
and performances through association and more importantly disassociation. In
these quotations, Anna, who used to be an accountant, describes her colleagues’
dieting strategies:
Ninety percent of the office was paranoid about dieting. Well, in my view paranoid. They
probably thought it perfectly normal. Ahm, I think I was the only woman who was not on a
diet, and even a large proportion of the men were on diets. Ahm, I had one manager who went
on the Hay diet . . .
[edit]
Ahm, I think they were all sort of image-conscious. Ahm, it was the sort of area where you
get the young professionals who have to wear the right suits, and I think part of that image-
consciousness is about weight rather than about health. I think they weren’t really that bothered
about what they ate it was more the number of calories in it. Which to me seemed a bit daft,
but that was the way they seemed to feel about it.
As this second quotation implies the calorific composition of particular foods

constrained the actants, both in the way they related to it (a paradoxical desire
for, but avoidance and fear of, high calorie foods) and to one another (admiration
for dieters, criticism and hostility to those regarded as greedy or overweight).
Drawing on Foucault’s (1979) work, Tyler and Abbott (1998) describe the
‘panoptic management’ within an airline organization where flight attendants
have to undergo regular weight checks; while Hennrikus and Jeffery (1996) note
the rise of worksite intervention programmes for weight control. Yet, in Anna’s
office, as in many organizations (see McDowell, 1995; Zrodwski, 1996) it was the
disciplining gaze of co-workers, their shared diets or the praise from each other
that rewarded successful weight loss, which inspired individuals to exercise self-
surveillance and self-discipline. As she recalls, ‘They would talk about it endlessly
and most of them were not overweight at all.’
The relationship between work and people’s sense of identity has been an
implicit concern for those researching work organizations since the 1930s (Du
Gay, 1996). Roy (1973), for example, argues that informal activities in the work-
place forge a work-culture, providing a source of identity for workers and job
satisfaction, and in doing so draw on outside interests and relations in which
work, home and leisure are elided. Thus, du Gay (1996: 41) claims that, in the
contemporary workplace, culture is seen as important because it is ‘seen to struc-
ture the way people think, feel and act in organizations’. Food and drink are
objects that play a key role in aligning workers’ identities and bodies with the
goals of the organization through fostering a sense of belonging or sense of shared
identification (e.g. at an annual or Christmas dinner, work picnic and so on).
Anna was required to attend two obligatory workplace meals a year: an annual
dinner dance in September and a Christmas dinner. Rosen (1988) argues that the
intention behind such events is to establish a model of the workplace as a moral
caring place where employees not only work but are ‘loved’. At Anna’s firm, the
sit-down meal was used to order people. As she describes below, the organization
tried to diffuse staff/manager tensions and temporarily to erase workplace hier-
archies by using the meal seating arrangements to level social relations. In this
way, food and drink were not only used to define actors and their relationships
but to stabilize, naturalize, channel and depoliticize them.
I And did you have, was it all sort of organized who sat with who, or was it, were you
able to choose your own tables?
F Oh no, there was always a seating plan. And they’d always try to get a mix, so there’d
always get a senior partner on a table, a manager, so even more you had to watch what
you said. And you know, you never knew . . . who you were going to be sat next to. So,
I think that made it even worse, just dreading whose table you would end up on.
The transforming properties of alcohol – relaxing people and making conver-

sation flow – are important in uniting colleagues and creating a temporary
intimacy or sense of belonging at these work meals. Alcohol allows workplace
tensions to be diluted, permitting everyday antagonisms and uncertainties to be
In-corporations 13
recognized and acknowledged without challenging the status quo, while also
serving as a convenient excuse if any ‘social norms’ are transgressed (Rohlen,
1974).
F The food was always cold. If you eat somewhere like Cutlers Hall, there’s so many
people there that by the time you ever get your meal – it was always cold. Then you
drink too much as well which doesn’t help. And then I’d have to keep my eye on Keith
as well . . .
I Why . . . ?
F Ahm, well, with the alcohol at these sort of do’s, ahm, as soon as you come in they put
a glass into your hand, and they just keep on topping it up. And Keith was always
terrible at just drinking whatever was in his glass. So, it’s usually an hour or two before
you actually sit down and eat your meal, so by that stage, I’d be wondering what on
earth he’d say to somebody next. And then by the time the meal had finished, trying to
find a taxi to put him into to take him home. Those were fun days [edit]. Ahm, I think
the main pressure I found was just dreading what he’d say or whether he’d put his foot
in it.
Food and drink can be important in producing wider employee–employee

relationships as well as employee–employer relationships. After all, work and
non-work are intimately related (Marshall, 1986). Lunch together or a drink in
the pub after work can define actors and the relationships between them, for
example, by blurring the distinction between work relationships and social
friendships, enrolling particular individuals into social or business networks or
marking others as ‘outsiders’, as Anna recalls:
F I wouldn’t say it was a clique, there was a general sort of person which was there, um
that, I suppose it was a rather stereotype in a way of the high-flying accountant. Um
there was about 95 per cent of them were this type and I was in the 5 per cent. So I was
very much outside their social activities, I didn’t want to join in with them.
[edit: later she returned to the same theme]
I never socialized at all with them. Ahm, that was always quite a big issue at work.
Because, ahm, one time my manager actually, in a sort of written assessment, criticized
me for not socializing with people at work. And I complained about that to the person
above him, because I thought what I do in my own time is no business of theirs, specially
not for a written assessment which stayed on personnel records. In the end he had to
amend it. So that didn’t do much good for our relationship.
I So what sort of thing did he expect you to do?
F Ahm, well he used to say ‘to be part of this team you have to work hard, play hard, blah,
blah, blah’ so, as you were expected to get on socially with your colleagues if you wanted
to work with them. Which, I mean, to me doesn’t matter. The, as long as you’re, ahm,
perfectly OK with them at the time, when you’re working, and treat them like human
beings, that’s what matters. Not whether you go out to the pub with them in the evening.
I So, was it sort of, it was drinking in the pub, or was it sort of eating out at each other
people’s houses that, that they all sort of . . .?
F Oh, it was mainly going to the pub. Friday evenings people would turn out from work
straight into the pub and go home at eleven o’clock.
I Not my idea of fun either.
F So, now and again, well I’d be out on town on Friday night, you know, having gone
home and had my tea, I would see some of them still there. Always a bit worse for wear.
That was the way they liked to do things, so I left them to it and just didn’t join in with
it.
Indeed, food and drink were objects that were also used to define Anna as an
‘outsider’ by her clients as well as her colleagues. Objects can pre-form relation-
ships with actors, vesting them with a moral content. As a vegetarian, Anna’s
mode of consumption vested her, in the eyes of her clients (who were usually
politically conservative), with left-wing or radical political sympathies, feminist
values, animal rights activism and so on, even though these had not motivated
her choice of food. The transforming properties of alcohol, liberating its
consumers from the straitjacket of politeness and manners which usually inhibit
social relationships, sometimes induced clients to ride roughshod over social
niceties and unleash their opinions about Anna. She recalls one unpleasant
encounter:
Ahm, one time one of the senior partners from another office, ehm, came over to review a client
I’d been working on, and we all went out for a very posh meal in the evening. And because I
had a vegetarian dish he started getting, oh he was totally pissed out of his brain by that stage,
he started getting a bit funny about it and he, he was just totally drunk and started wittering on
about vegetarians, and something about red squirrels and he was out of it by that time. And he
just got offensive after a while. But he was in a very senior position in the firm so I couldn’t do
a thing about it so I just sort of stayed quiet and let him get on with it.
Yet, men and women are not passively inscribed into existing power relations
(Pringle, 1989). Roles and identities are achieved rather than given. Anna has
therefore used alcohol herself to assert her place in the organization and her
right to be socially included in a male-dominated occupation as she describes
below:
F Ahm, there was one person I worked with now and again, who was from Singapore, and
had very old-fashioned ideas about women. And one time I got into the bar after a very
long day, and I was extremely thirsty and in need of a drink, so I asked for a pint and
downed it in a rather short time, and he looked at this and said ‘Can’t have a woman
drinking like that.’ And I sort of said ‘And why the hell not?’ So he, ‘Well, I’m not going
to be beaten by a woman’, and he started to throw back his pint.
I Oh no.
F And of course this got me slightly, so I had to just have another pint and another until
several pints down the line, he was in a far worse state that I was.
In all of the above ways, then, organizational bodies such as Anna’s can be under-
stood as constituted in and through interactions between human and non-human
entities like food and drink. In other words, to be ‘in-corporations’.
In-corporations 15
In-corporations V: The Bank Manager

Like Anna’s accountancy firm, the bank where Kate works also employs the
emerging properties of food and drink to define and stabilize the relationships
between its staff and the organization. Rather than food and drink emerging as
tools to relax workplace tensions and diffuse or depoliticize workplace relation-
ships as they did in Anna’s organization, Kate argues that food and drink emerge
within the context of the bank as a reward for employees’ efforts at work and as
an incentive to work harder, while also bolstering her boss’s ego.
We have managers’ meetings after work once a month and every now and again what will
happen is the woman who is in charge of like 25 branches will say let’s arrange to go out for a
meal after the meeting [edit]. When there was period of enforce it was very much about team
building and how you’d work so much better and so much harder if. It’s like somehow they can
treat you like absolute garbage but treat you to a meal once sort of two monthly . . . [edit] and
that’s what, you know some way she’s being kind of told that’s what you should do and that’s
how you’ll get results, which I don’t really believe but because that in itself won’t get results.
And the little bit of me thinks that does she do it because it’s nice to have all these people
fawning over her. I mean I know that sounds dreadful but it does happen and you can see her
look and she does enjoy it.
[later she returned to the same theme]
So that goes on. The other thing that is horrendous that they do at our place which is again,
I mean it’s happening more and more. I mean we’re on profit-related pay anyway, but there’s
also this thing about incentives and bonuses and all the rest of it. . . . So it’s those sorts of
elements that have more and more come into play and the things they have kind of local incen-
tives which are always on the basis of you know a night out for the branch, so like again it’s
back to this thing – and it’s about team building and trying to bring everyone together ’cos then
you work for each other. It’s like they’ve lost the concept of you know you have to treat people
OK the whole year rather than give them a little bit of a carrot that they don’t really want. So
those sorts of things are, you know, which are very much about yeah to do with food and nights
out ’cos it is always like meals but I find it hard because anything like that to do with work then
just I’m not interested in really.
As a relation of differentiation, heterosexuality orders relations within

organizations and everyday life (Hearn et al., 1989). Yet this order does not
straightforwardly produce relations, it is also produced by them (paraphrase of
Ormrod, 1994: 43). Heterosexual relations must be continually created and recre-
ated as part of the process of the management of the workplace, if heterosexual
hegemony is to be successfully established. Food and drink are examples of
objects that can configure the sexual identity of employees and the organization
through enrolling workers at meals in particular relationships. Kate, who is a
lesbian, describes how the meals organized by her bank are underpinned with
assumptions about heterosexual performativity.
I’ve never enjoyed and never will enjoy those sorts of dinners [laughs]. You know, bring a
partner and everyone comes dressed up which isn’t me, and I’ve never yet taken a partner. I’ve
never yet plucked up the courage. Which I keep thinking one of these days I’m going to do it.
And I don’t know why I don’t know why I don’t. I mean in some ways I wish I did but then
it always get to the time when I think I can’t be bothered. Do you know what I mean? The
whole the hassle, the explaining, the introducing, the small talk is the most hideous aspect. . . .
So, no, I’ve managed to avoid those more and more really. I just think I can’t face it really. [edit]
I mean yeah they [the meals] are very heterosexual events with obviously a few exceptions.
Yet sometimes these meals did not produce the effects – defining actors, the
space in which they move and the ways in which they interact as heterosexual –
that might be intended. Rather, at one such dinner, a discussion with another
woman about the vegetarian food they were both eating, led Kate to connect with
another lesbian employee and to extend her social network. When she attends
courses, they now meet up for lunch. In this way the commensality of food has
enabled them to carve out a lesbian space for themselves with the heterosexual
framework of the bank as Kate describes:
I mean I’ve been on courses because the main place in the town centre in Sheffield they often
have courses there, so if I’m on courses and I’m there I know a couple of people that work there
who are the only other two gays and lesbians that I know who work for the Bank and they both
work there. So if I’m there on a course I will always go out for lunch with them, whether it’s a
week-long course or a day course I’ll spend all week, and we kind of catch up on all the gossip
and stuff.
In this way, Kate’s experiences show how intimately and complexly the bits and
pieces, such as food and drink, that are part of our everyday worlds, are involved
in our social relations (Wenger, 1998).
Conclusion
In this article I have sought to move beyond the relationship between body and
society per se by focusing on the importance of what bodies enter into assem-
blage with. I have argued that the workplace is constructed not only from human
bodies and their interactions but also through an unending mutually constituting
interaction of a vast array of material and non-material resources. Specifically, this
article has explored what bodies can do when they enter into assemblage with
food and drink within particular communities of practice.
The five case studies demonstrate that the properties of food and drink are
not inherent or internal but emerge in practice. This emergence in practice only
operates in relation to a host of other practices that make up the background
of that particular ‘community of practice’ (for example, for Mike, the buyer,
food emerged as a form of work, as pleasure and a measure of success; whereas
for Paul, the miner, food underground emerged as a hindrance to work and a
bodily hardship). Consequently, food can play a range of roles within different
In-corporations 17
communities of practice and so emerges as a very different tool depending on

the different ways it is made sense of within them (for example, while in Anna’s
accountancy firm food and drink emerged as tools to relax workplace tensions
and diffuse or depoliticize workplace relationships, at Kate’s bank they
emerged as a reward for employees’ efforts at work and as an incentive to work
harder).
As people, or objects such as food and drink, are mobilized in the construc-
tion of a network, they themselves undergo transformations in the process. For
example, bodies may be transformed and incorporated into organizational life
through food and drink; organizational practices may be materialized into the
bodies of workers; while the properties of food and drink may themselves be
changed in interaction (for example, underground some foods are transformed
from pleasurable to repulsive). Understanding human activity in the workplace,
more or less mediated by things such as food and drink, therefore produces a
clearer understanding of the meanings of work, the food and the workplace itself,
than that generated by focusing either just on the features of work alone, or on
the features of consumption alone (Leander, 1997).
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the research on which this paper is based (award no.
F118AA). I also wish to thank Beth Longstaff for her hard work and enthusiasm while employed as a
researcher on this project; and Nick Bingham for his helpful conversations and advice about ANT.
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01valentine (ds) 31/5/02 1:02 pm Page 1

In-corporations: Food, Bodies and

The Body and the Workplace

Thus, within certain occupations (e.g. nursing, waitressing, flight attendants),

2 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

Specifically, attention has focused on how it is organized – through dividing prac-

4 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

conducted within five of the 12 household case studies, with interviewees

In-corporations I: The Nurse

I Oh yeah, it’s a real drag.

6 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

In-corporations II: The Buyer

8 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

Describing the instability of the boundaries of the pregnant body, Young

In-corporations III: The Miner

10 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

As actors (people or things) are mobilized in the construction of a network

In-corporations IV: The Accountant

Food, as an object which is implicated in these workplace practices, is there-

As this second quotation implies the calorific composition of particular foods

12 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

The transforming properties of alcohol – relaxing people and making conver-

Food and drink can be important in producing wider employee–employee

14 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

In-corporations V: The Bank Manager

As a relation of differentiation, heterosexuality orders relations within

16 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

communities of practice and so emerges as a very different tool depending on

18 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

20 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

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