This special issue explores how embodiment shapes business ethics and organizational practices. Growing scholarly interest has demonstrated that embodied experiences—from emotional labor to physical strain—raise ethical questions that abstract frameworks alone cannot address. The issue seeks to ground business ethics in lived embodied experience and practice.
The call invites scholarship examining how bodies are constructed, regulated, and valued within capitalist systems and organizations. Topics include the commodification of bodies in industries like modeling and sports, gendered and racialized norms governing bodily presentation, and the physical toll of labor on workers. Methodologically innovative contributions using sensory or participatory approaches, and conceptual work developing new theoretical frameworks, are also welcome.
Contributors should explore how organizational structures inscribe power relations onto workers' bodies, how economic conditions constrain autonomy and consent, and how ethics can be reimagined to address embodied difference and protect worker well-being.