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Event

Pausing for Lunch? Lunch Breaks as Embodied, Spatial and Cultural Organisational Practice

  • Wed 11 Nov 26

    12:00 - 13:00

  • Online

    Zoom

  • Event speaker

    Debora Biffi

  • Event type

    Lectures, talks and seminars

  • Event organiser

    Essex Business School

  • Contact details

    Melissa Tyler

This study explores how workplace lunch breaks are socially and physically produced through the interplay of organisational design and workers' daily habits.

Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad, it investigates the tension between management's intended use of eating spaces and the actual lived experiences of employees. The research applies Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to analyse how daily food rituals become physically embodied, showing how deep-seated bodily habits reproduce organisational culture.

Ultimately, it reveals that these mundane breaks are active, contested sites functioning both as mechanisms of managerial control and as spaces for worker agency and resistance.

Speaker

Debora Biffi is part-time PhD student in the Division of Business and Management at the University of Essex. Her doctoral research explores the role of lunch breaks in the workplace. She worked at the University of Essex for 10 years between 2015 and 2025, joining the University as a Teaching Assistant in Languages, before moving to the Essex Business School in 2016. Debora worked in EBS as an Administrator, and subsequently Supervisor for the Postgraduate programmes team.

Prior to joining Essex, she worked as a Programme Administrator at Milan Polytechnic School of Business, Italy, and gained international experience teaching Italian language in China and California.

Centre for Work, Organization and Society (CWOS)
Research from Essex Business School
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