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Abstract

If we truly want to understand the impact of shame on organizational life there is a need to dig deeper into the very heart of our embodied experience. Building on work that has sought to understand how shame shapes and controls us, we push for an embodied perspective on shame to enter into our scholarly inquiry. To do so, in this essay, we draw on feminist and critical race theory to argue that felt shame can accumulate, untethered to specific episodes of shaming, and inhibit bodily expression. We bring attention to this embodied and durable aspect of shame and suggest there is a need to attend to its impacts on our organizations, the ways we are organized, and how we can organize to resist.

Keywords

diversity domination emotions gender identity institutional theory power resistance

I remember overhearing some of the other kids talking when one of them proclaimed, “If you don’t know whether you’re gay or not, it means you are!” My body suddenly flooded with shame.

First, the shame froze me in my seat, scrambling my brain so that I couldn’t react or even think straight. Then it made my heart start to pound. It filled the pit of my stomach with a sick, uncomfortable ache. But at the same time, it told me in no uncertain terms that I had to act like nothing was wrong or the cause of my discomfort would be obvious to everyone. So I pretended like I wasn’t even paying attention, turning ever so casually to gaze out the bus window in case anyone could detect the inner turmoil on my face.

The moment passed in the blink of an eye, but it haunted me for the rest of my life.

A.J. Bond in Discomfortable: What Is Shame and How Can We Break Its Hold?

Has your body ever been flooded with shame? Your stomach filled with an uncomfortable ache? As scholars studying emotions, this quote had surprising resonance when we stumbled upon it. Not just with our lived experiences of shame, but because it captured the intensely visceral aspects of shame that we have long noticed are absent in the literature. It left us wondering: What does it mean for shame to haunt us for the rest of our lives?

Shame is one of the most powerful moral emotions, ‘the master emotion of everyday life’ (Scheff, 2003, p. 239), which acts as a mechanism of social control and discipline (Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2014); it is a ‘self-conscious’ social and moral emotion defined as ‘an emotional response to a negative evaluation of our self as wrong or bad, due to a violation of social norms’ (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007; Turner & Stets, 2005). Much of the current research on shame has focused on our social and behavioural reactions to shame: does it lead to constructive repair behaviours that compensate for the harm done (Daniels & Robinson, 2019; Dasborough, Hannah, & Zhu, 2020; Miller & Tangney, 1994), showing others that one is moral, cooperative and helpful (Bonner, Greenbaum, & Quade, 2017; Kim & Nam, 1998)? Or, does it lead to aggressive and violent outbursts (Elison, Garofalo, & Velotti, 2014), and social withdrawal (de Hooge, Breugelmans, Wagemans, & Zeelenberg, 2018; Sheikh & Janoff-Bulman, 2010)?

Despite acknowledging that shame has very different impacts on people, shame is often characterized as an emotion that is transitory – shame eventually leaves us as we make amends or simply carry on. Yet, as Bond says above, shame can haunt us for the rest of our lives. That is, for many people, shame is not a transitory emotion that passes. Instead, it ‘seeps’ and ‘sticks’ in our bodies (Loveday, 2016, p. 1146; Munt, 2007, p. 2), impacting the way we navigate the social world. This is something we have experienced personally and heard reflected countless times in fieldwork: shame sticks. As one friend told us, ‘It sits at the pit of my belly like a rock that won’t pass.’

Yet, we rarely explore what it really means to have shame stick, for shame to become part of our embodied experience in the world. While several studies acknowledge bodily impacts (e.g. Dar & Ibrahim, 2019; Sandager, 2021; van de Berg, 2022), few speak about its durability and what it really means to carry shame in our bodies. In fact, when we sought to make sense of our own lives and the lives of others, we found only a few studies in the management literature to even begin to understand this aspect of embodied shame (e.g. Pouthier & Sondak, 2021; van Amsterdam, van Eck, & Kjær, 2023; Venkatraman, Ozanne, & Coslor, 2024).

We believe this is because we in organization studies primarily speak of shame in highly cognitive and behavioural terms. The literature, for example, speaks about our awareness of the conditions of shame, how we can take perspective and regulate ourselves to avoid shame; and if we fail, we can make amends or spiral into anger, or we can resist and deny the shame (e.g. Daniels & Robinson, 2019; Dasborough et al., 2020; Kim & Nam, 1998; Leach & Cidam, 2015; Velotti, Garofalo, Bottazzi, & Caretti, 2017). These are all important points about shame, of course, but they downplay or leave implicit the deeply embodied experience of shame and its implications for organization studies. If we truly want to understand the impact of shame on organizational life there is a need to dig deeper into shame itself, to the very heart of our embodied experience.

The few studies in the literature that take an embodied perspective on shame (e.g. Pouthier & Sondak, 2021; van Amsterdam et al., 2023; Venkatraman et al., 2024), and normative embodiment in organizations (Fotaki & Pullen, 2019; Meriläinen, Tienari, & Valtonen, 2015; Mobasseri, Kahn, & Ely, 2024), along with recent work on institutional aesthetics (Creed, Taylor, & Hudson, 2020; Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary, & van Leeuwen, 2013), draw our attention to the institutional and organizational control of bodies. This work inspired us to inquire further and develop a path forward for organization scholars on embodied shame and its implications. To do so, we also draw on feminist and critical race theory (e.g. Dolezal, 2015; Fischer, 2018; Ngo, 2017; Sullivan, 2006) to outline how and why shame comes to accumulate into an embodied form of shame.

Key to this argument is that when amends cannot be made – when it is the very self that is deemed inferior instead of behaviours that violate social norms – shame alters who we are, including our dispositions, the energy we bring, and our very comportment (Bourdieu, 1989; Fischer, 2018). Instead of not acting civil at work or engaging in corruption, shame rooted in a societally (and organizationally) constructed inferiority can come from being in a woman’s body and displaying a femininity that does not match the masculine ideal worker (Trethewey, 1999); it can come from not displaying adequate masculinity in male-dominated occupations (Coupland, 2015; Harding, 2016); for being gay in a workplace that forbids same-sex relationships, such as the Catholic church (Creed, DeJordy, & Lok, 2010); or for any number of ways a person diverges from the ideal.

We show that this shame often is not a transitory feeling that dissipates with amends or rebuttal. Instead it can build up, untethered to specific episodes of shaming, inhibiting bodily expression (Dolezal, 2015). This shame is habitual and highly resistant to deliberation and change as it becomes embodied (Ngo, 2017; Sullivan, 2006). We argue that such shame is not only ethically problematic for reinforcing inequality (Dolezal, 2015; Loveday, 2016), but has distinct impacts on organization life which have not been accounted for.

In this essay, we seek to bring attention to this durable form of shame and outline the implications for organization studies and our understanding of organizations, the organized and organizing (Meyer & Quattrone, 2021). We first review the literature on shame in organization studies and add to it the embodied perspective found in feminist and critical race literatures; we then outline three key implications: (1) how embodied shame shapes the way we engage in organizations; (2) how workers are ‘organized’ through embodied shame; and (3) how embodied shame changes possibilities for organizing resistance.

When Shame Sticks

The dominant perspective on shame in organization studies conceptualizes shame as an emotional reaction to negative self-evaluation. As Creed et al. (2014, p. 280) put it, felt shame ‘is a discrete emotion experienced by a person based on negative self-evaluations stemming from the perceived or actual depreciation by others owing to a failure to meet standards of behaviour’. Ideally, this experience of shame leads to repair work that make amends for harm done (Daniels & Robinson, 2019; Miller & Tangney, 1994). Once amends are made, feelings of shame dissipate and we return to a state of monitoring ourselves, and avoiding behaviours that will elicit further feelings of shame (Dasborough et al., 2020; Kim & Nam, 1998; Sheikh & Janoff-Bulman, 2010).

But sometimes amends cannot be made, and shame does not dissipate as expected. Instead, we continue to carry the feelings of shame, and this shapes our ongoing experiences in the world. For example, in a recent study of (self-identified) fat women employees, van Amsterdam et al. (2023, p. 606) predominantly found that ‘those who cannot inhabit the normativities related to size in organizations can expect to feel uncomfortable: “. . .one’s body feels out of place, awkward, unsettled” (Ahmed, 2013, p. 148).’ It has, in fact, been found that even previously overweight individuals still carried feelings of shame related to their past bodies (Dolezal, 2015), and ‘shame. . .was not a discrete occurrence, but a perpetual attunement’ (Bartky, 1990, p. 96). Shame can haunt us for the rest of our lives.

In one of the most comprehensive frameworks for understanding how shame shapes and controls us, Creed et al. (2014) acknowledge the pervasiveness of shame and argue that we are, in fact, ‘swimming in a sea of shame’. They outline a model of shame showing how ‘systemic shame’ operates within communities to specify what is shameful. Systematic shame is the ‘technology of subjugation’ that exists ‘to make shared rules of what constitutes shameful (as opposed to praiseworthy) behaviour seem objective such that each rule becomes taken for granted as objectively correct or natural’ (Creed et al., 2014, p. 282). Systematic shame then is the taken-for-granted guidelines embedded within society that define what is inappropriate and shameful. This can include wrongdoing and poor performance (Bonner et al., 2017; Daniels & Robinson, 2019), identities (Creed et al., 2010; DeJordy, 2008), or as described above, bodies (Hibbert, 2024; van Amsterdam et al., 2023).

While the concept of systemic shame helps us to understand the institutional roots of shame, the concept does not allow us to explain the very different outcomes that emerge from different sources. Contrast these two descriptions of what is shameful. In Daniels and Robinson’s (2019, pp. 2454, 2462) review of shame in the organization literature, they state:

the most common responses relate to performance failures (e.g., poor work performance), followed by moral transgressions (e.g., hurting others emotionally, lying) and norm violations (e.g., engaging in socially inappropriate behaviour). . .[which ideally] leaves hope for redemption and leads one to believe that there is a viable pathway to acceptance by the group if one makes amends.

This is in contrast to situations that are perceived to be irreparable. Bergoffen (2018, p. 86) explains that it can be the very self – one’s identity, body, or way of being – that can be deemed shameful; her feminist analysis explains how

young girls and women are conditioned to see themselves as shameful (Dolezal, 2015, pp. 106–110). While boys are encouraged to see their bodies as sources of pride and power, girls are taught to view such vital bodily functions as menstruation (functions that attest to a woman’s vitality) as unclean signs of their shameful inferiority.

We argue that feelings of shame triggered by poor work performance or hurting others will be experienced very differently than feelings of shame triggered by one’s gender. More generally, shame that comes from a violation of social norms (that is, behaviours that violate expectations) will impact someone differently than shame that comes from an irreparable element of one’s very self.¹

Core to this argument is that when behaviour is deemed shameful, ‘The subject is able to learn from this experience, readjust or regulate their behaviour accordingly and once again reassert his subjectivity within the flow of social relations’; when it is the self that is deemed shameful ‘chronic shame becomes a. . .background of pain and self-consciousness’ (Dolezal, 2015, p. 92). Women (Bartky, 1990), people who are racialized (Harris-Perry, 2011), who have disabilities (Barrett, 2018), gay men (Bond, 2021) or those in the working class (Loveday, 2016) can experience feelings of shame due to their very selves. Even the white, middle- or upper-class man can feel this form of shame for not living up to the expected masculine ideal (Mobasseri et al., 2024). If we look at the myriad ways that a person can fall short of institutionalized ideals, the number of people who experience irreparable feelings of shame is quite large.

When shame is based on such a societally constructed inferiority of the self, the feminist literature argues that it is not experienced as transitory. Instead, such shame consists of ongoing feelings of shame that form a ‘shame habitus’ (Fischer, 2018; Munt, 2007; Probyn, 2004), altering our very dispositions, comportment and ways of interacting in the social world (Bourdieu, 1989). We understand this to be an embodied form of shame: sedimented layers of felt shame based on the inferiority of our very selves, and manifest in the body as a ‘pervasive sense of inadequacy, insecurity and inferiority. . .a negative space around which experience is organized’ (Dolezal, 2022, p. 741).

Such a perspective shows how embodied shame is distinct from feelings of shame that are transitory and triggered by behavioural transgressions for which amends can be made (e.g. Daniels & Robinson, 2019; Dasborough et al., 2020; Kim & Nam, 1998; Leach & Cidam, 2015; Velotti et al., 2017). When shame is based on an ascribed inferiority, embodied shame becomes a defining part of one’s subjectivity and personhood (Bartky, 1990; Dolezal, 2015), altering habitual ways-of-being (e.g. Ngo, 2017; Sullivan, 2006). Shame defines our gestures, posture, style of interacting with those in similar or different social positions, and many other aspects of our engagement with the social environment.

Feminist scholars point to how this embodied form of shame brings heightened awareness to the body that interrupts the normal ‘flow’ of social relations (Dolezal, 2015, p. 27). In the normal flow, the body is often ‘invisible’, simply engaging in the tasks at hand (Leder, 1990; Merleau-Ponty, 1962); instead Dolezal (2015, p. 113) highlights how shame diverts attention away from the tasks at hand and toward the body, which ‘can alter comportment, disrupting flow and a smooth intentional relation to the world, making movements uncertain, unconfident and limited’. Indeed, long before this, Goffman (1963, p. 13) acknowledged the intensity of emotions that can arise from being deemed inferior, and how it impedes the flow of social interaction:

The awareness of inferiority means that one is unable to keep out of consciousness the formulation of some chronic feeling of the worst sort of insecurity, and this means that one suffers anxiety and perhaps even something worse, if jealousy is really worse than anxiety. The fear that others can disrespect a person because of something he shows means that he is always insecure in his contact with other people; and this insecurity arises, not from mysterious and somewhat disguised sources, as a great deal of our anxiety does, but from something which he knows he cannot fix. Now that represents an almost fatal deficiency of the self-system, since the self is unable to disguise or exclude a definite formulation that reads, ‘I am inferior. Therefore people will dislike me and I cannot be secure with them.’

As a result of the imposing presence of one’s body, a person is likely to shrink – to shy away from the gaze of others, to not draw attention to the failed self, and to apologize for one’s failings in anticipation of shame (Probyn, 2004).

This story by Bartky (1990, pp. 89–90) captures the desire for smallness caused by shame:

I was struck by the way many female students behaved as they handed me their papers. . .While apologizing, a student would often press the edges of her manuscript together so as to make it literally smaller, holding the paper uncertainly somewhere in the air as if unsure whether she wanted to relinquish it at all. Typically, she would deliver the apology with head bowed, chest hollowed, and shoulders hunched slightly forward. The male students would stride over to the desk and put down their papers without comment. . .In their silence, the necessity for hiding and concealment; in the tentative character of their speech and in their regular apologetics, the sense of self as defective or diminished. . .read even in the physical constriction of their bodies.

Bartky explains that the women did not consciously believe they were inferior, yet a lifetime of experiences permeated and shaped their being nonetheless: shame ‘seeps’ into their bodies (Loveday, 2016, p. 1146). Such an embodied perspective does not require cognitive agreement.

Embodied shame is a shame that gets stuck; it stays with us, haunts us, shaping our experiences in the world. This view of shame as embodied can offer much to our existing theory, as there are important implications for our experiences within organizations, the ways we are organized and the possibilities for organizing resistance.

Embodied Shame and Organizations

Our core argument is that embodied shame shapes the ways in which we engage and interact in the social world, and therefore within organizations. Embodied shame leads to shrinking (Dolezal, 2015). The black American comedian Kamau Bell reflected on this shrinking, sharing that

When acquaintances haven’t seen me for awhile, I often hear, ‘I forgot how tall you are!’ I know you did. It’s because I’m trying to make you forget. This is what being black in America has done to me, to others like me. . . (in Ngo, 2017, p. 57)

Such embodied shame we argue will impact the expression of workplace roles and undermine the energetic processes important to organizations.

First, the smallness of embodied shame creates tension in enacting the confident, strong and assertive performances preferred in most workplaces. Beyond completing tasks, workers must also enact the prescribed physicality or ‘habitus’ of the job. Indeed, enacting the habitus is how one shows competence in a role (Bourdieu, 2000; Voronov & Weber, 2016). When a doctor carries themselves in a certain way, or a manager, they are showing competence in their role. We trust them to do the job. Enacting these roles often comes with an expectation of being confident and bold in the way one carries and uses their body in interactions. Embodied shame, on the other hand, which habituates bodily inhibition and smallness, creates tension when trying to enact an alternate, confident habitus.

Bourdieu himself explains the tension he felt in coming from a place of ‘low social origin’ to working as a successful academic during an address he gave at the end of his career:

In particular, Bourdieu (2000, p. 16) believed that the enduring discrepancy between his high academic achievement and low social origin had instituted within him a habitus clivé [split habitus], a sense of self ‘torn by contradiction and internal division’. (Friedman, 2016, pp. 129–130)

As this quote makes clear, we are not saying that all people carrying embodied shame feel powerless or small all the time, or that they cannot do their jobs – obviously Bourdieu was very successful in his working life. The point we are raising is that it creates tension as people enact work role expectations while carrying shame, leading to ambiguities of the self (Bourdieu, 2000). Personally, we have experienced this tension as our own inferiorities run up against our various role enactments in a multitude of little ways as professors, women and mothers. We can simultaneously feel powerful and powerless, good and bad, equal and inferior at the same time. This can lead to feeling ‘fractured’, like the self is ‘at war with itself’ as our embodied emotion is at odds with our desired way of being (Sullivan, 2006, p. 96). In other words, embodied shame impacts our ability to enact the confident, strong and assertive way of carrying the body required in many roles, and also how we feel as we make these enactments even if we pull them off successfully. Despite ‘passing’, tension remains because of the fear of being discredited and the lack of self-validation (DeJordy, 2008; Hibbert, 2024), all of which can lead to a sense of imposter syndrome or ‘persistent status-anxiety’ (Friedman, 2016, p. 139).

The complexity of shamed bodily expression suggests the need for research on the shame we bring into our organizations, and how embodied shame impacts the enactment of work roles and our feelings of tension. How does the impact vary in organizations with different cultures and values, demographics and leadership styles? Does the impact change for ascribed inferiorities that are invisible and hidden versus those that are visible and clear to all around us? What interventions have been used, and can these strategies address embodied shame?

We also think another important implication of embodied shame is in relation to the generation of collective emotions and emotional energy within organizations. Both are sourced from what Durkheim called collective effervescence: ‘That is, when a group of people gather together and engage in intense, focused, and rhythmic behaviours (“co-presence”), their focused attention and shared emotion create “a mood that feels stronger than any of them individually”’ (Zhang, Voronov, Toubiana, Vince, & Hudson, 2024, p. 2219). Collective emotions and emotional energy ensure emotional investment, build agency, enable group flow and willingness to persevere in the face of organizational challenges (Barberá-Tomás, Castelló, de Bakker, & Zietsma, 2019; Fan & Zietsma, 2017; McCarthy & Glozer, 2022). But, as Loveday (2016, p. 1150) explains,

the mere presence of a body [can] create a feeling of disorder within a specific social field. Lisa [a participant] notes how she felt as if her body became ‘disruptive’ while she was pregnant: ‘when I was in academic environments such as campus, a day conference and the academic groups I’m a member of, I felt so awkward – disruptive somehow. . .why did I feel this way? Overall, people were overwhelmingly positive and warm but my embodied feeling. . .was one of apology.’

The shame of the pregnant body – one not completely dedicated to work, signalling the coming motherhood – disrupted the ‘flow of social interactions’ (Dolezal, 2015, p. 85), putting a barrier between self and others. This disruption breaks down ‘focused attention and shared emotions’ critical for collective work. Even when ascribed inferiorities are invisible, such as disordered eating (Newark, 2024) or being gay (DeJordy, 2008), the energy diverted to ‘passing’ can lead to a sense of alienation, disengagement and emotional exhaustion (Ragins, 2008). Additionally, the shame experienced by certain individuals can create a broader emotional context of fear and anxiety among organization members (Maitlis & Ozcelik, 2004).

Numerous studies have pointed out the beneficial impacts of positive emotional energy at work, such as increased citizenship behaviour, collaborative performance, wellbeing and commitment (e.g. Fan & Zietsma, 2017; Lavoie, Baer, & Rouse, 2024; Methot, Rosado-Solomon, Downes, & Gabriel, 2021). Yet emotional energy requires a rhythm that generates ‘a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm’ (Collins, 2004, p. 49). Shame can undermine the capacity to hold onto feelings of confidence and strength (Turner & Stets, 2005). So not only will people feel small and disconnected from others, and may not experience shared emotions, but the very habitus of shame stymies the potential for emotional energy. Existing literature has suggested that ‘failed’ interactions in organizations lead to negative emotional energy. Collins (2004) theorized that such failures come from a lack of shared attention or initial emotion. To the extent that embodied shame causes people to shrink and prevents positive emotional energy, it may increase the likelihood of such failures, leading to negative emotional energy as ‘lack of initiative, and “negative self-feelings”’ (Zhang et al., 2024, p. 2223).

Embodied shame does not lead to disconnection from all others, and this complexity again opens up interesting lines of inquiry. We see embodied shame acting as a type of protective film that can dull collective effervescence; the impact is likely to be lessened between people who share similar sources of shame as there is more safety and resonance between their emotional rhythms, and shared shame can bring people together (Ahmed, 2004). Even within groups who experience similar shame, however, there can be differences based on various intersections of inferiority. Feminist literature has engaged in much discussion of intersectionality, showing how different types of inferiority are not experienced in the same way (Fischer, 2018). So, while we argue that inferiority leads to embodied shame that inhibits bodily expression, the shame of a working mother is not experienced or expressed in the same way as the shame of a man with a disability, and the shame of a black woman is not simply the additive effect of being black and being a woman. For each of these people, the bodily impacts of shame will vary, based on their unique ‘institutional biography’ (Suddaby, Viale, & Gendron, 2016). We expect that emotional energy and collective emotions will be most severely impacted within diverse teams and organizations, as inhibition of the body will be strongest in these contexts, but this is a question for future research. What does this impact mean for workers and organizations? And what strategies are used to manage these impacts, consciously and unconsciously, individually and collectively, effectively and ineffectively?

Embodied Shame and the Organized

Not only do people carry embodied shame into their organizations, but organizations also contribute to the shame people carry in their bodies. Expectations set out by the image of the ideal worker create yet another way people can be deemed inferior (Acker, 1990; Reid, 2015), and exploring embodied shame can expand this research.

Organizations construct ‘characteristic images of the kinds of people that should occupy them’ as a means of organizing, i.e. controlling, workers (Kanter, 1977, p. 250). Feminist analyses of organizations were some of the first to articulate these ideals, pointing out that organizations are not neutral; instead, ‘organizations originate in the male’, and the technical skills and competence of workers are linked to ‘images of masculinity’ (Acker, 1990, pp. 142, 146). This image ‘is assertive, athletic, confident, courageous, competitive, autonomous, strong, stoic, decisive, agentic, rational, and emotionally detached’ (Kanter, 1977; Mobasseri et al., 2024, p. 727). The masculine ideal worker is particularly difficult for working women, with their maternal/feminine and ‘unwanted female body’ (Fotaki, 2013; see also Trethewey, 1999). As Bourdieu (2001, p. 62) states,

To succeed completely in holding a position, a woman would need to possess not only what is explicitly demanded by the job description, but also a whole set of properties which the male occupants normally bring to the job – a physical stature, a voice, or dispositions such as aggressiveness, self-assurance, ‘role distance’, what is called natural authority, etc., for which men have been tacitly prepared and trained as men.

But this ideal does not only render women inferior. The ideal worker is ‘a disembodied worker who exists only for the work’ (Acker, 1990, p. 149); someone who ‘exhibits the unerring ability “to exert control [and] to resist being controlled” (Schrock & Schwalbe, 2009, p. 280)’ (Mobasseri et al., 2024, p. 723). Such an image also renders inferior those with disabilities and chronic illness (Dobusch, 2019), as well as older workers (Cutcher, Riach, & Tyler, 2022). Indeed,

this image necessarily shapes all workers’ experiences, including men’s. Moreover, studies increasingly suggest that men also find demands for work devotion challenging (Galinsky, Aumann, & Bond, 2013; Humberd, Ladge, & Harrington, 2015), suggesting that difficulties with expectations that one assume the identity of an ideal worker are not necessarily restricted to women. (Reid, 2015, p. 998)

The masculine ideal worker is unattainable for almost everyone, since even men will only imperfectly meet the ideal (Mobasseri et al., 2024).

What happens to the way we think of the ideal worker when we consider it from the perspective of embodied shame? This perspective suggests that people can be negatively impacted by the image of the ideal worker without believing themselves to be inferior (Bartky, 1990). When shame takes an embodied form, it does not require agreement or even full understanding of the many ‘enigmatic messages’ sent (Sullivan, 2006, p. 64). The working mother, the person with a disability, the racialized worker may not believe themselves to be inferior – they may well be aware of the systemic biases working against them and they may vehemently reject these biases that casts them as inferior – and yet the message is still received, piled on top of prior messages of inferiority and can still lead to inhibited bodily expression (Sullivan, 2006). Indeed, both of us are acutely aware of the ideal worker image, have rejected it, and yet still feel shame for not measuring up to the impossible standards. Shame still haunts us.

These arguments point to the need for research into the way embodied shame interacts with judgements of inferiority stemming from the ideal worker. This line of inquiry would necessarily need to account for differences between cognitive evaluations and embodied emotional experiences. Research could add into this the divergences and convergences between societally and organizationally imposed shame, and how the sedimented layers of shame carried in the body impact each other.

Extending this line of thinking, particular organizations and even whole occupations can diverge from the ideal. Some forms of work are so far from the ideal that the entire occupation is stigmatized as ‘dirty’ and a source of shame (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999; Ruebottom & Toubiana, 2021), and many of these occupations espouse an image quite the opposite of the masculine, controlled and authoritative worker. Instead, these contexts define an image of the ideal dirty worker as docile and accommodating, aligning in many ways with the inhibition of bodily expression prescribed by embodied shame. For example, domestic workers are expected to show subservience, looking down and trying to be invisible within the employer’s home (Varman, Al-Amoudi, & Skålén, 2023); as are rag-pickers working in the fields (Shepherd, Maitlis, Parida, Wincent, & Lawrence, 2022). Varman et al. (2023) show how these types of occupations prescribe an enactment of humiliation, which furthers acceptance of one’s position as inferior. The interaction between the ideal worker and prior sedimented shame creates an invisible force structuring many stigmatized or ‘dirty work’ fields and the experience of workers in these spaces.

Adopting this perspective encourages us to ask important questions. For example, how might prior embodied shame change the way we study or think about stigmatized work, a literature largely focused on coping? How do these dynamics differ in more masculine stigmatized contexts where subservience is not prescribed, such as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (Kvåle & Murdoch, 2022)? Research attention is needed to uncover potentially reinforcing dynamics of embodied shame within stigmatized work, the contexts where it does not apply, and how it may further entrench inequality for those who do not live up to institutionalized standards.

Embodied Shame and Organizing

So far, we have considered how living with embodied shame shapes organizational life. Yet, we also know that individuals and groups can organize to challenge shame. While social change is highly dependent on discourse and rational argumentation, the embodied aspects of shame are harder to put into words (Mitra, 2018). Our very preferences and desires, which we take to be our own, are in fact culturally prescribed by our institutional aesthetic codes (Creed et al., 2020). An institutional aesthetic code is the ‘correspondence [that] exists between values and beliefs, and the forms and images that materialize them’ (Meyer et al., 2013, p. 527), thereby collectively defining what is deemed aesthetically pleasing to individuals and what is repugnant, disgusting, or shameful (Creed et al., 2020). Creed et al. (2020, p. 422) explain that

As a product of socialization and of a lifetime of intersubjective encounters with other members of one’s communities, a sedimented and therefore evolving personal aesthetic emerges through ‘the writing of the aesthetic code[s] into the eye’ in a way that ‘aestheticizes’ phenomena – including naturally occurring phenomena, social expressions and materializations, or institutional arrangements – such that the person is furnished with ‘schemata of perception and taste, models of vision, “lenses” through which to look at reality’ (Gagliardi, 2006, p. 711).

Our ideas about what is ideal are formed by an institutionalized aesthetic code, resulting in an automatic, bodily reaction to what we experience in the world (Creed et al., 2020). Such a conception of the aesthetic dimension of social life has deep implications for the ‘unsticking’ of embodied shame. The image of the ideal worker, and violations of this image, are experienced at a visceral, automatic sensory level, based on our prior socialization about what is ideal. The image of a masculine or thin body, of an aggressive and charismatic personality, resonates with us at a visceral level, before cognitive analysis begins. Even if we can cognitively critique the notion of the ideal worker, so many of us have internalized this image, such that our personal preferences and idea of a good employee looks like is this image; seeing an alternative image seems. . .well, inferior.

Our internalized aesthetic code raises many questions about resisting embodied shame that require further study. Most importantly, how do we learn to exist in our bodies in a shame-free way, when our very aesthetic preferences are institutionally prescribed? How do we come to see differently, to challenge aesthetic codes that define what is desirable?

We argue that we need new embodied ideas on how to challenge systemic shame that address the bodily reactions that emerge prior to rational critique. The feminist and critical race literatures suggest an important artistic and intercorporeal form of aesthetic resistance that may be necessary to complement cognitive and discursive interventions. This research points to

the need for other genres that often significantly impact unconscious habits. Literature, art, and film, for example, can be particularly useful. . .because their images, tones, and textures often perform subtle emotional work that richly engages with the nonreflective aspects. (Sullivan, 2006, p. 1)

Sullivan points to the indirect nature of aesthetic resistance that is effective for dealing with the habitual and embodied. In fact, such an aesthetic mode of resistance was found in the field of modern burlesque (Ruebottom & Toubiana, in press). Watching the shameless burlesque performances shocked audience members – a violation of the aesthetic code internalized by many (Creed et al., 2020) – making them uncomfortably aware of their own embodied shame. However, awareness was not enough. It was only when these audience members decided to become performers that they were ultimately able to unstick shame from their bodies. By adopting alternative personas, performers felt safe to try on new movements and forms of aesthetic expression that broke with the expected smallness of shame.

Once the new expression was created, it then needed to become a new way of being, habitual and automatic, integrated into their personal aesthetic and affirmed by their communities (Creed et al., 2020; Ruebottom & Toubiana, in press). In another recent study, it was found that drag performers relied on repeated encounters with their community:

over time, and by repeatedly being socially affirmed through positive sensate relations, artists embody the confidence of their drag personas to demand respect across all life domains. . .Over time, the imagined persona became an accomplished body setting in motion new social dynamics. (Venkatraman et al., 2024, pp. 17, 19)

Thus, the new shame-free way of being was reinforced by communities who shared an alternative aesthetic code, a different way of seeing and valuing not found in the mainstream. Such ‘loving encounters’ have an important role in resisting shame (Pouthier & Sondak, 2021, p. 385), and point to the ways in which intercorporeality and community can shape resistance efforts.

These insights open up avenues for further inquiry. How might these two very particular and extreme contexts help us think about organizing against embodied shame more generally? How do we experiment and find new ways of being, with shame still stuck in our bodies? And how do we bring a new aesthetic code into our organizations and work lives to create more liberating, shame-free environments?

In Conclusion

We started this essay with a question about when and how shame might haunt us. This led us on a journey into feminist theory and critical race literature, connecting to research in organization studies on institutional aesthetics and normative embodiment. We contend that when the source of shame is the ascribed inferiority of one’s very self, it leads to embodied shame – a set of dispositions and comportment that inhibit bodily expression. In this case, shame is not a transitory emotional state that passes once amends are made; instead, it becomes a habitual way-of-being.

Embodied shame has important implications for how individuals engage and interact within organizations, how they are shaped and ‘organized’, and how they can organize resistance. First, within organizations, the embodied shame that we carry with us will create tension in the way we enact our roles and the possibilities for emotional energy. Research is needed to empirically explore the varying impacts across industries and organizations with different cultures and values; to uncover the strategies used to manage these impacts by those at different levels within the organization, but also collectively – in teams and across organizations. Second, organizations themselves are engines of shame, depicting an ideal worker that very few live up to, which piles on top of and interacts with our existing shame. Future research should attend to the divergences and convergences between societal and organizational systems of shame, and the conflict between cognition and embodied emotion that can emerge; it is also important to understand how these dynamics play out when the entire industry is deemed inferior. Finally, our ways of organizing to resist shame are challenged by the habitual and constitutive nature of embodied shame and the aesthetic codes that we internalized into our way of seeing. This draws our attention to the need for research on the aesthetics of resistance and how we can shed, transform or over-write a shame that shapes our very ideas of what is idealized and is so deeply sedimented within our bodies.

As organization studies extends its reach into ‘the disorganized and the unsettled’ (Meyer & Quattrone, 2021, p. 1373), future research should also explore embodied shame within these chaotic processes of irresolution and undoing. What is the role of embodied shame in leading people to disorganize? For example, the extreme case of the Hikikomori involves young adults who retreat to their bedrooms and do not leave their parents’ home nor even engage with their family; their retreat is often triggered by ‘a deep sense of shame that they cannot work at a job like ordinary people. They think of themselves as worthless and unqualified for happiness’ (O’Neil, 2022, p. 146). They keep their TV muted, walk softly and try to be as invisible as possible, in a liminal state that avoids participation in the structures of the social world. While extreme, this example illustrates the ways in which embodied shame pushes people out of organizations and organizing. Retreat is one avenue. Can we see embodied shame linked to disruptive efforts in other ways?

Opening lines of inquiry into each of these areas would allow organization studies to better understand the lived experience of shame and its place in our organizations. As we tread further into this age of shame and humiliation (O’Neil, 2022), there is much we do not know. We argue that unless we deeply consider the lived and embodied aspects of shame, we may make grave mistakes in how we seek to utilize and manage shame within organizational life.

The perspective offered here presents several methodological challenges for organization scholars. Studies will need to be designed using culturally embedded, body-based, affective, temporal and processual methodologies that make transparent the elements of experience that are often opaque. We need to uncover the unspoken ‘deep stories’ of shame (Hochschild, 2018). Dealing with these challenges sounds like an impossible task. Yet,

if people ‘out there’ know the world through sensory engagement—through tacit schemata acquired in and for practice—organization scholars can tap that knowledge by subjecting themselves to the same forces, profits, and perils as the people they study. (de Rond, Holeman, & Howard-Grenville, 2019)

The suggestions we have made will not be easy to implement, and there are many questions left to be answered, many methodological tools that will need to be improvised, discovered and reworked. But such effort is critically important for understanding the way shame operates insidiously and often unexpectedly, impacting our experiences within organizations, the way we are organized and how we organize to resist.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Associate Editor Tammar Zilber and three anonymous reviewers for their guidance and encouragement throughout the review process. This manuscript emerged from the helpful feedback of Doug Creed and participants in the 2022 EGOS subtheme ‘Institutional Microdynamics: The Role of Emotions, Values, and Evaluation’ held in Vienna, Austria.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We gratefully acknowledge that this research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

ORCID iDs

Trish Ruebottom

Madeline Toubiana

Notes

Author biographies

Trish Ruebottom is an associate professor of HR and Management at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social innovation and organization, specifically exploring the ways we organize to create social change. Her recent work focuses on stigma, entrepreneurship and institutional theory.

Madeline Toubiana is professor and Desmarais Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of Ottawa. Her research explores the struggles between people and institutions, and the role of emotions, stigma and entrepreneurship in shaping the dynamics of social change.

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Embodied Shame and Organization Studies

Abstract

Keywords

When Shame Sticks

Embodied Shame and Organizations

Embodied Shame and the Organized

Embodied Shame and Organizing

In Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author biographies

References