Dancing in the office: A study of gestures as resistance

•The practice and theory of expanded dance shows how dance is linked to work and practices of resistance at work.•When work is re-elaborated as dance by artists, gesture’s sensuality stands out, showing embodied agency in office work.•Dance theory defines gesture as arrest or flow, linking it to immobility and rhythm, suggesting several modes of resistance.•The dancing body breaks the rhythm of work, which can also create a corporeal complicity between workers.•Dancing in the office is a post-recognition resistance: it speaks for itself and does not need recognition from management. Following the art-body-ethics turn in management studies we use dance as an analogy in order to explore how the body can resist organisational control in office work contexts. We argue that in office work gestures can be a site of post-recognition resistance. Drawing on two art videos and on dance studies, we explain that this is operated either through arrest or through flow. In fact aesthetic experiments in gesturing disrupt the work rhythm needed for organisational efficiency and enforced by organisational control. This allows us to contribute primarily to the literature on resistance in organisation studies and relatedly to the growing literature on dance in organisation studies through demonstrating how dance can be a source of resistance.