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Artwork by Hanna Norberg-Williams

Corporate Bodies

A podcast series with Mark Walton and Kate Swade, exploring why organisations are so weird — and what we can do to make them better.

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About

Most of us have worked in companies at some point in our lives and know one thing for sure, working life is odd. The dynamics are messy, the hierarchies are often unjust and, when things go wrong, people start acting very strangely indeed.

Corporate Bodies is a new podcast series asking: why are organisations so weird? And what can we do to make them better? 

Over 11 weekly episodes, organisational development practitioners Kate Swade and Mark Walton explore how the idea of companies as ‘legal people’ shapes every stage of an organisation’s life—and affects everyone who works within it.

Each episode focuses on a different facet of organisational development, brought to life through conversations with guests who share their own lived experiences of organisational weirdness.

With an informal, irreverent tone, the show uses the human body as a guiding metaphor to structure the series, weaving in vivid language to demystify complex legal ideas like incorporation and limited liability.

Episodes

  1. Birth (with contributions from all the series’ interviewees): Kate and Mark explore the history of incorporation, and the creation of “legal personhood”.
  2. The head and the brain (with Sarah McAdam, Transformational Governance Project): exploring power and control in organisations.
  3. Creating the body (with Liam Barrington-Bush, RadHR): unpicking the idea of humans as resources and how we can reframe recruitment and contracting.
  4. The spirit (with Immy Kaur, CIVIC SQUARE): understanding the colonial roots of organisational culture and how do we balance comfort, care and urgency.
  5. The heart (with Farzana Khan, Healing Justice Ldn): how can we be more intentional about who we are at work?
  6. Injuries to the body (with Abbie Kempson, People Support Coop): managing the dissonance between your culture and your legal obligations when things go wrong.
  7. The immune system (with Mark Simmonds, Co-op Culture): how do alternatives to the status quo like coops and unions protect workers from the corporate body?
  8. The soul (with Zahra Davidson and Daniel Ford, Huddlecraft): exploring succession and how a founder, often the “source” of an organisation, passes that on.
  9. Death (with Louise Armstrong, The Decelerator): how do you know when a particular corporate body has come to the end of its life, and how do you end it well?
  10. Composting (with Esther Foreman, The Social Change Nest): beyond the corporate body. How do we organise ourselves for the challenges of the 21st century?
  11. Brainwaves: Mark and Kate reflect on what they’ve learned, what they’ve changed their minds about, and where they would like to take this exploration in the future. 

Podcast

Corporate Bodies is a production by Mark Walton and Kate Swade, edited by Katie Revell. Artwork by Hanna Norberg-Williams. Supported by CUSP.

Get in touch

Substack: https://corporatebodies.substack.com/
Email: corproatebodiespodcast@gmail.com
Leave a voice note: https://www.speakpipe.com/CorporateBodies