Let’s Eat Together! Rhythmanalysis of commensality and critique of everyday life in organizations

Abstract

This article offers a rhythmanalysis of commensality, the practice of eating together, in the context of flexible offices, as organizations carefully arrange time-space to engage employees and invoke specific senses of community. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic field study of a major banking organization in Paris, multiple commensality rhythms were found that coalesce and are sutured into rhythms of order and dressage, rhythms of harmony, and rhythms of disturbance and disharmony. These findings offer an open-ended and performative understanding of commensality, which opens up to a triadic view of the organizational everyday and to a critique of everyday life in organizations that integrates rhythms of alienation, disalienation, and new alienation.