Received: 30 March 2017 Revised: 16 June 2018 Accepted: 5 July 2018

DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12294

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

‘Please tell me when you are in pain’:

A heartbreaking story of care, grief and
female–canine companionship
Suvi Satama1 | Astrid Huopalainen2

1
Management and Entrepreneurship,
University of Turku
2
Management and Organization, Åbo Akademi
University
Correspondence
Suvi Satama, Management and
Entrepreneurship, University of Turku,
Rehtorinpellonkatu 3, Turku 20500, Finland.
Email: stsata@utu.fi
Funding information
This research was supported by funding from
Liikesivistysrahasto (Foundation for Economic
Education), Grant/Award Number: 160297
What could the underdeveloped research area of canine–
human companionship teach us about gendered body work
as well as offer to the field of organization studies more
broadly? This article responds to recent discussions on
the animal in the organizational academy. We share an
autoethnographic story of female–canine companionship as
experienced by one of the authors of the article and her
beloved dog, who is currently living on the borderlines
between life and death, joy and mourning. We find this exam-
ple relevant for raising important feminist concerns among
organizational scholars about silenced questions around care
and grief as well as for developing more inclusive and ethically
grounded approaches to exploring research topics dealing
with vulnerability. Finally, this article offers a critical reflec-
tion on the potential and limitations of alternative research
in the field of organization studies that recognizes our
affective relations with animals.

KEYWORDS

body work, care, feminist dog‐writing, grief, human–animal

companionship, posthuman ethnography

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

You see another woman standing there, leaning against the hospital's wall — shaking and crying — and you
think, ‘Okay, here we go. I’m prepared for the worst (again), prepared for this devastating news.’ But
you hold on to that brief moment, filled with absolute gratitude for this unique companionship between you
and your dog, see, and that's what makes you keep going, on one hand, and hurts you deeply on the other.

Gender Work Organ. 2018;1–19. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gwao © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1
2 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

(Autoethnographic research note, outside the Veterinary Teaching Hospital of the University of Helsinki,
Finland, 20 June 2017)

To date, animals have been conspicuously absent from the field of organization studies, and the field has largely
overlooked our own species’ organized, meaningful and close relations with animals (see Hamilton & Taylor,
2013, 2017; O’Doherty, 2015; Redmalm, 2015; Sanders, 1999; Sayers, 2016, 2017; Schuurman, 2017 as excep-
tions). As Sayers (2016, p. 370) has written, ‘there is too much humanism in organizational studies’. Nonetheless,
as humans, we share affective experiences, proximate relations, our homes and sometimes our workplaces with
animals, and so they perform a significant role in the orientation of our human culture and identity (Hamilton &
Taylor, 2013).
The opening vignette, which describes a heartbreaking moment experienced by one of the authors of this article
and her dog, serves as the starting point for this article. Specifically, the article contributes to recent debates on gen-
dered body work (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018; Gimlin, 2007; Twigg, Wolkowitz, Cohen, & Nettleton, 2011;
Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006; see also Graham, 1983; Mik‐Meyer, Roelsgaard Obling, & Wolkowitz, 2018) by focusing
on the companionship between this co‐author and her female dog, which entails the tensions between gratitude,
joyful care and sincere love on the one hand and death, grief and distress on the other hand that derive from
mourning the future loss of a beloved pet dog.
This article looks at canines as one example of companion animals, at women as one example of humans in the
human–animal dyad and at grief and care as an entwined pair of possible affective relations in the day‐to‐day shaping
of companionship with a female canine. By attaching the article to the discussion on the femininity of body work
(Witz, 2000), entailing aspects of nurturance as well as its material and intimate characteristics (Cohen & Wolkowitz,
2018, p. 42), we develop our understanding of its caring (Gimlin, 2002, 2007; Twigg et al., 2011; Wolkowitz, 2002,
2006) and grieving (Bell & Taylor, 2016; Butler, 2004; Doka & Martin, 2010; Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996; see
also Redmalm, 2015) dimensions, which are continuously mutually enacting. This conceptual pair is a central dimen-
sion that is underdeveloped in the existing discussion of the body work in the field of organization studies.
For us to talk about organization, we cannot limit our scope to human beings, human agency or human actions.
We must also seek to challenge the ‘taken‐for‐granted neutrality of the ways in which organization studies is written
and theorized’ (Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes, 2014, p. 327). By sharing an autoethnographic story of a specific female–
canine companionship in which grief becomes entangled with the healing and palliative care of the animal, we render
visible our lived experiences of our affective human–animal relations, still largely overlooked by organizational
scholars (Birke, Bryld, & Lykke, 2004; Hamilton & Taylor, 2013, 2017). The focus on female–canine companionship
allows us to explore the gendered constructions of body work (Mik‐Meyer et al., 2018), in which ‘the animal is
understood as a subject, an agent, and a partner in a relationship’ (Schuurman, 2017, p. 211). As such, we describe
the palliative care and mourning the loss of the pet and add it as a complementary conceptual pair to the existing
literature, as described above (Figures 1, 2, 3, 4).
We seek inspiration from posthumanism (e.g., Derrida, 2008; Hamilton & Taylor, 2017; Haraway, 2003; Wolfe,
2003, 2009) and feminist dog‐writing methodology (Haraway, 2003, 2008; McHugh, 2012) to develop and raise
important questions around marginal and overlooked research topics within our scholarly community, including
care, grief and mourning (see,e.g., Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018; Doka & Martin, 2010; Kuzniar, 2006; Redmalm,
2015; Schuurman, 2017). Throughout, we approach gender as relational, situated and complex (Acker, 1990).
Gender is continuously performed and ‘done’ (Butler, 1990; Gherardi, 1994) in our everyday lives. In line with Birke
and Brandt (2009), we work from the assumption that gender is not only performed in relation to other humans but
also plays out in the situated relation between humans and our pet dogs (Schuurman, 2017), and we investigate
how this performance is experienced and negotiated in the everyday (Birke & Brandt, 2009; Birke et al., 2004;
Buller, 2014). As gender is experienced through the body (see,e.g., Pullen, 2006; Thanem & Knights, 2012), we link
the doing of gender with the practice of caring (e.g., Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006) and gendered practices of grief
(Doka & Martin, 2010).
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 3

FIGURE 1 Enjoying the ocean with beloved bitches in Holland. (In relation to discussing companionship, the word
‘bitch’ is interesting and powerful to reflect upon. It animalizes, denigrates and genders female embodiment in both
literature and language) [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

FIGURE 2 Kerttu enjoying summer at the summer cottage [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

We are fully aware of the contradictions and ambiguity of ‘pet’ conceptualization (Vänskä, 2016) and the many
methodological challenges associated with our approach, which we will discuss more thoroughly as we proceed with
the article. By reflecting upon the joys and sorrows of living with a four‐legged friend, our aim is to illustrate how an
autoethnographic story of heartbreaking dog–human companionship can provide more nuanced understandings of
care and grief as complementary dimensions of gendered body work and, in this way, allow for more agency to be
enjoyed in the relationship between the ‘pet’ and her keeper1 (cf. Redmalm, 2015; Schuurman, 2017; see also
Mik‐Meyer et al., 2018, p. 6). The article is organized as follows. Next, we present the theoretical framework of
the article. Then we turn to the methodology. In the analysis, we illustrate how grief and the palliative care of the
animal become entangled with each other in a female–canine companionship. Finally, we discuss the implications
of our findings for human–animal relations and propose contributions to debates on gendered body work and agency
practised in the relationship between the human and the animal.
4 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

FIGURE 3 Picturing the unique bond between Kerttu and Suvi's two‐year‐old son [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

FIGURE 4 Kerttu waiting for the results of the CKD control at the vet [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

1.1 | Dogs as companions in the popular and academic animal literature

It is surprising that animals are deliberately silenced among organizational scholars even though they are not voice-
less at all (Sayers, 2016). As non‐human animals are present, viable and active agents in the daily life of numerous
organizations in their own right (see,e.g., Birke & Brandt, 2009; Hamilton & McCabe, 2016; Hamilton & Taylor,
2013; O’Doherty, 2015; Schuurman, 2017; Schuurman & Franklin, 2018), they deserve our scholarly attention (Doré
& Michalon, 2017). Recently, a number of researchers (see,e.g., Doré & Michalon, 2017; Hamilton & Taylor, 2017;
O’Doherty, 2015; Sayers, 2016, 2017; Skoglund & Redmalm, 2017; Tallberg, 2014) have discussed the prevalent
neglect of other living non‐human agents within our scholarly field by addressing the variety of ways in which animals
actively construct, shape and participate in organizational life.
As Labatut, Munro, Desmond, and ten Bos (2014, p. 1) point out, ‘Much of the critical academic study of our
organized relations with animals is found in sociology and geography, and particularly science studies (Callon,
1986; Haraway, 2003).’ In more recent years, the emergence of human–animal studies (HAS) has brought animals
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 5

to the social sciences. Broadly speaking, this interdisciplinary field reminds us of the ‘entangled nature of interspecies
interfaces, networks and encounters’ (Wilkie, 2015, p. 323).
In organization studies, animals have remained peripheral, despite their crucial role for people and organizations.
This denial of the sensing, feeling and active animal as a subject with agency (Haraway, 2008) is somewhat surprising,
especially if we consider how popular culture largely ‘capitalizes on this need to come closer’ to the animal (Kuzniar,
2006, p. 3). Animals have long been treated as capitalist commodities (Vänskä, 2016) or as something people wish to
have, but rarely as proximate agents, companions (‘pets’ in common language) or participants in organization in more
ethically grounded terms.
Topics related to animals in the academic literature include the practices of veterinary work (Clarke & Knights,
2018; Law, 2010; Sanders, 1995; Schuurman, 2017), the therapeutic effects of pets on individuals in human–animal
interaction (e.g., Brooks et al., 2013; Friedmann & Son, 2009; Jackson‐Grossblat, Carbonell, & Waite, 2016) and
effects at a social level (Wood, Giles‐Corti, & Bulsara, 2005). The recent articles of Hamilton and McCabe (2016)
and Baran, Rogelberg, and Clausen (2016) describe the work of slaughterhouse workers, who face the demands of
killing animals, therefore revealing the struggles of ‘dirty work’. Several studies have highlighted the acknowledge-
ment of the ‘multispecies lens’ (Wilkie, 2015) and the role of animal agency (Sage, Justesen, Dainty, Tryggestad, &
Mouritsen, 2016) within the social sciences more broadly.
Dogs have been the subject of significant academic and popular writing. Moreover, they and their relationships
with humans have been researched rigorously by social scholars (e.g., Brooks et al., 2013; Jackson‐Grossblat et al.,
2016; Knight & Edwards, 2008; Maharaj & Haney, 2015; McCarthy, 2016; Power, 2008; Sanders, 1999; Savvides,
2013; Wood et al., 2005). The variety of topics around dogs and their keepers demonstrates the tremendous poten-
tial that canine–human relations hold for research among organizational scholars as well. Dogs introduce us to rituals,
experiences of attachment, wildness, nurturance, trust and joy, suggests Knapp (1998, p. 6). Jackson‐Grossblat et al.
(2016) explore the therapeutic experiences of dog keepers who interact with their dogs in empathetic ways. Wood
et al. (2005) consider the positive effects of pets for humans in a wider community, studied under the concept of
‘social capital’, which exceeds the limits of ‘ownership’, while other studies consider the role of companion animals
in long‐term health condition management (Brooks et al., 2013).
This article draws on the writings of Donna Haraway (2003, 2008) and her companion species
manifesto. Haraway invites us to engage with the beings on which we are interdependent but so often silent in
our everyday lives. Haraway's manifesto develops ideas about academic writing as a relational endeavour based
on companionship, care and connection rather than on authority, competition and ‘the survival of the fittest’
(see also McHugh, 2012). Following Haraway (2008), we regard dog–human companionship as a constitutive,
changing and historical relationship. This relationship is situated and gendered and includes an ethical dimension
of wanting to act for the good of the animal (Schuurman & Leinonen, 2012). Evidently, this relationship is still
easily romanticized, stigmatized or thought of as a suspect/sentimental form of bourgeois attachment (e.g., Knapp,
1998; Kuzniar, 2006). For instance, Vänskä (2016) demonstrates how the lap dog has long been treated as an
upper‐class phenomenon and how erotic or suspect female subjectivity has been constructed while sentimentaliz-
ing the dog.
The existing studies on dog companionship have tended to focus on the consumer viewpoint (e.g., Beverland,
Farrelly, & Ching Lim, 2008; Dotson & Hyatt, 2008; Ellson, 2008; Vänskä, 2016) or solely on the wellbeing the human
derives from the companionship (e.g., Cavanaugh, Leonard, & Scammon, 2008; Cutt, Giles‐Corti, Knuiman, & Burke,
2007; Zasloff, 1996). As Durgee (2008) argues, ‘for a lot of dog owners, dogs are important reflectors of one's self
and close emotional companions’ (p. 468). Therefore, the self‐identity of humans partly depends on the ways that
they construct themselves in relation to their dogs (Skoglund & Redmalm, 2017). We work from the assumption that
human agency is always co‐constructed (e.g., Satama & Huopalainen, 2016) with, and in relation to, many other living
and breathing non‐human agents (e.g., Cudworth, 2015, p. 1). Moreover, we emphasize the embodied, relational and
affective aspects of the dog–human relationship as well as the human and animal actions that construct this compan-
ionship through mutual interaction (Greenebaum, 2004; Haraway, 2008). In other words, human embodiment and
6 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

other ‘multiple materialities’ (Dale & Latham, 2015, p. 166) always relationally come to shape the companionship that
we speak of here.
Throughout the article, we use an aesthetic epistemological point of departure (Strati, 2000) that highlights the
experiential ways of knowing present in canine–human companionships. Therefore, for us, there is a significant
difference between a ‘thing’ and a companion animal. In our view, a companion animal is a sentient being with a
certain sense of agency, which is gained through a special type of connection with others (Greenebaum, 2004),
managed through the body (Mik‐Meyer et al., 2018, p. 6) and exhibited in subtle and nuanced ways in the everyday
interaction between the animal and her keeper. Hence, despite the great variety of existing studies on animal–human
relations there is a need for studies that take seriously the gendered, embodied and affective dimensions of
negotiating dog–human companionship. Furthermore, we lack studies exploring what it is that actually makes our
companion animals much more than ‘things’ and how we can extend the concept of agency to other creatures. In this
article, we focus on these neglected themes and offer a viewpoint on the unique, personal and intimate companion-
ship between a dog and her keeper.

1.2 | Care and grief as essential dimensions of gendered body work

In this section, we attach the discussion of canine–human companionship to the theoretical notions of care (Duffy,
2005; England, 2005; Fine, 2005; Holmberg, 2011; Srinivasan, 2013; Thomas, 1993; Wolkowitz, 2002) and grief
(e.g., Bell & Taylor, 2016; Howarth, 2011; Redmalm, 2015; Schuurman, 2017; see also Willmott, 2000) and discuss
them within the wider theoretical framework of gendered body work (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018; Gimlin, 2002,
2007; Kang, 2003; Twigg et al., 2011; Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006). Here, body work is understood as not only a matter
of doing things with one's own body but as a wider concept involving the care and cure of others’ bodies (Wolkowitz,
2002, p. 497; cf. Holmberg, 2011), thus entailing gendered constructions of ‘involving the physical touch and manip-
ulation of others’ bodies’ (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018, p. 42). Hence, we critically discuss the notions of grief and
mourning attached to care as inseparable parts of the body work relationally done and undone in the daily practices
that produce our female companionships (see,e.g., Kanov, Powley, & Walshe, 2017).
Care, as a theoretical term, has deep roots in sociology, in which it has been attached to different professional
groups whose members provide care for pay, such as nurses, doctors, teachers and child care providers (England,
2005, p. 381). In its traditional meaning, care refers to providing empathy, compassion, altruism and social justice
(Lindsay, 2008). To us, caring is a set of values, a philosophical and ethical question (Holmberg, 2011; Warren,
2008) and a set of material practices (McGregor, 2004) that involve daily actions, emotional attachment and the
development of empathy towards others, nurturance and reproductive labour (Duffy, 2005). Feminist scholars, such
as Cancian and Oliker (2000) and Tronto and Fisher (1990), emphasize care as an emotional and embodied practice
and explore it as a relational phenomenon based on a human connection.
More recent debates on the gendered aspects of care ask why embodied care work and work entailing physical
touch is ‘largely performed by women’ (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018) and explore the complex boundaries of caring
(Cain, 2017) as well as the fascinating tension between ‘care as love and care as labour’ (Lyon, 2010). Recently,
and connected to the concept of care, grief has been discussed from the perspective of organizational mourning
(e.g., Bell & Taylor, 2016) as well as the practices and individual experiences of grieving, loss and death (Doka &
Martin, 2010; Driver, 2007; Kessler, Heron, & Dopson, 2012; Klass et al., 1996; Palgi & Abramovitch, 1984;
Schuurman, 2017) in the field of organization and social studies. As Willmott (2000) argues, ‘mortality is important
for the study of social action’ (p. 650) for at least two related reasons. First, it touches on the fear of the pain and
anxiety when we are left behind, and second, it has a symbolic meaning in conveying the ‘[loss of] meanings invested
in life‐projects’ (pp. 650–651). As grief arises from a primary vulnerability to others (Butler, 2004), it connects to the
body work which is continuously done and undone with others around us (Wolkowitz, 2002). Therefore, we highlight
the negotiable and collaborative nature of human–dog companionship and empirically explore this constantly nego-
tiated practice as dynamic and complex, deriving from joint (inter)actions between humans and non‐humans.
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 7

A concept that is strongly related to both care and grief is compassion, which can be defined as ‘an empathic,
dynamic response to suffering’ (Kanov et al., 2017, p. 752). Compassion offers a possibility for alleviating difficult,
frustrating and hardly bearable emotions. In general, compassion can be viewed as a relational process involving
various (non)humans (Kanov et al., 2017). Following Goetz, Keltner, and Simon‐Thomas (2010), we regard
compassion as a subjective, affective and embodied experience attached to suffering (Kanov et al., 2017, p. 753)
and practices of care (Holmberg, 2011; Law, 2010) in relational ways (Frost, 1999). In other words, compassion builds
on the fine‐grained, sensory‐based details human (and animal) action, which can be mutually developed in our
everyday lives.
Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, and Margolis (2012) exemplify that care and grief, ‘which are grounded in relation-
ships and relatedness, have much to contribute to an interconnected, suffering, and surprising world’ (p. 504).
Extending this, our aim is to analyse and further conceptualize the interrelations between care and grief to develop
a better appreciation of the various (and often hidden) emotional experiences of organizing, which are typically
unnoticed, underplayed or suppressed. In the spirit of Driver (2007), who writes about suffering, we view grief
as a highly subjective experience, consisting of continuous body work, and discuss it in relation to the notion of
care in a female–animal companionship. Before elaborating on this, however, we turn to the methodology of the
current study.

2 | M E TH O DO LO GY

This study relies on a critical sensory methodology (Mason & Davies, 2009; Warren, 2008, p. 563), which highlights
the lived, sensuous experiences of the researcher. More specifically, we are inspired by feminist dog‐writing
(Haraway, 2003, 2008; McHugh, 2012), which, we argue, as an embodied and relational activity (Haraway, 2008;
Thoresen & Öhlén, 2015) can lead to the production of personal and alternative research material and
interpretations.
More generally, our study is autoethnographic and articulates an affective ontology. Ethnography has been keen
on material objects and artefacts that are interconnected with organizational cultures (Hamilton & Taylor, 2012). Yet
organizational ethnographers have rarely thought adequately about how to take account of the presence and agency
of animals (although, see Hamilton & Taylor, 2017). The empirical material of this article derives from the
autoethnographic diary notes of Suvi, the keeper of Kerttu the dog. Both authors share their lives with retrievers:
Suvi has two Golden Retrievers, Sarnell Velvet Pearl, known as ‘Helmi’, and Greenhill's Coralie, known as ‘Kerttu’.
Astrid has two Labrador Retrievers, Snackbar's Rinse and Spin, known as ‘Saga’, and Snackbar's Sweet Treat to
Wetten, known as ‘Selma’.
The autoethnographic material focuses on the story of Kerttu. Kerttu had three mysterious infections after she
turned one year old, and she was diagnosed with fatal chronic kidney disease (CKD) at the age of one‐and‐a‐half
years. CKD is a progressive disease for which there is no cure (College of Veterinary Medicine, 2016). Like other
chronic illnesses, CKD develops through a complicated combination of biological and biochemical processes and
other environmental and genetic factors (Vijayasingham, Jogulu, & Allotey, 2016). Kerttu's CKD was diagnosed after
several investigations by many expert veterinarians. The illness can prove fatal within months to years, and at the
time when Kerttu was diagnosed with CKD without any clinical signs, her life prognosis was estimated at between
a month and a couple of years.
With Kerttu being an active and happy young dog with no visible symptoms at that point, the diagnosis was, of
course, hard to accept and handle for Suvi and all of Kerttu's other close (human) friends. The invisibility of this
chronic illness (Vijayasingham et al., 2016) makes it difficult to accept as a human as one never knows how sick
Kerttu really is. Given this difficulty, we focus on the controversial sensations, affects and experiences around this
difficult situation in which the dog keeper knows her dog has a fatal disease for which she has the responsibility
to take care of, and most importantly, undertakes difficult decisions concerning the life and the ‘good death’
8 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

(Schuurman, 2017, p. 213) of her dog. This story offers insight into these controversies, which explore tensions
between ‘animal inarticulateness and human morals, between the silent or silenced animal’ (Kuzniar, 2006, p. 9).
Over and above the issue of canine subjectivity, we acknowledge that there are several methodological
challenges involved in this study. First, strong emotional reactions can prevent researchers from being able to focus
analytically on research findings and distance themselves from their personal grief. Grieving lost pets openly is still a
taboo (Redmalm, 2015, p. 19), and grief or heartbreak more generally is ‘rarely captured within our management
texts’ (Whiteman, 2010, p. 331), thus making writing about the experiences of pet loss an ambiguous decision for
the researcher. Furthermore, it is imperative that we remain careful about over‐sentimentalizing our personal and
affective relations to our dogs. For Suvi, it was hard to produce autoethnographic material as Kerttu's diagnosis
had been given just a month before this study began. At the same time, writing autoethnographic diary notes offered
Suvi a platform to record her painful thoughts, memories and experiences and therefore worked as a kind of thera-
peutic activity. Hence, as Whiteman (2010) argues, ‘heartbreak can help scholars analytically and emotionally connect
with their data, the people they study, and shape the purpose of their work and life’ (p. 328).
Second, the challenge of ‘aesthetic muteness’ (e.g., Warren, 2008) is present in all sensory‐based research topics
involving non‐verbal activities that are difficult to put into words, especially when writing about our relations with
animals. How, then, may we relate to the dog's otherness and give voice to her animality without being naive or sen-
timental? We used visual data (Hamilton & Taylor, 2017) to, at least partially, address this difficult question. We are
mindful that the status of photographs as emotional artefacts is as important as the analysis of their representation
(Warren, 2009) but feel they provide an immersive technique to complement the autoethnographic narrative — or
the dog‐writing — for telling the story of Kerttu and capturing human–dog companionship in affective ways.

3 | A STOR Y O F F E M A L E– C A N I N E C O M P A N I O N S H I P : P A D D I N G
B E T W E E N GR I E F A N D TH E P A L L I A T I V E CA R E O F TH E A N I M A L

3.1 | From one precious companionship to another

‘Dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to
others, our needs for boundary and autonomy and distance’, suggests Knapp (1998, p. 210). To continue with her
idea, the attempt of building boundaries for caring between the pet and the keeper, and the tension between truly
caring and maintaining boundaries (Cain, 2017) and thus detaching emotionally from the animal (Hamilton & McCabe,
2016), is visible in the following autoethnographic note:

I always knew I wanted a dog, and funnily, through my friends who had Golden Retrievers, I fell in love with
this breed. I have had three Goldens now, and Kerttu is the third one. To me, a Golden Retriever represents
an intelligent, friendly and versatile working dog, the perfect family dog, therapy dog and assistant dog all
embodied in one lovable figure. When I got my first dog, Venla, I was already acknowledging the fact that
some day, I would need to let go of my dearest friend. Therefore, I tried to build up invisible boundaries
between me and my dog in my mind — a short and thin distance between us two so that one day,
when I should let my dearest friend go, it might not feel so bad. But because of our special kind of
bond, deepening year by year, this turned out to be an impossible and silly thought.
I was working as a visiting scholar in Holland two years ago, and I brought my dogs with me from Finland,
as I had a need to experience living abroad with them. After five months of enjoying life in a versatile
environment in between the Dutch canals, Venla suddenly passed away on a bright and beautiful May
morning. Her death was a very traumatic experience for me; I didn’t know how to deal with it.

As the autoethnographic note above exemplifies, the human does not necessarily make a conscious decision or an
active choice to care for the dog until the very end. As Schuurman and Franklin (2018) state, ‘the situation can be
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 9

arrived at unintentionally’ (p. 110). The note above illustrates C. Thomas's (1993) notion of caring as an emotional
connection to another and the ways the attempts for ‘emotional disconnections between human and animals’
(Hamilton & McCabe, 2016, p. 346) become a part of the keeper's body work (Wolkowitz, 2002), continuously
worked on in the life course of the companionship. In this way, separate from the idea of ‘caring about’ another
human (Cain, 2017; Thomas, 1993), caring for an animal is about constantly negotiating non‐verbal, bodily interac-
tions in which animal agency comes into being (Schuurman, 2017; see also Buller, 2014) by ‘constructing an image
of a family’ (Greenebaum, 2004, p. 119) and in which grief and palliative care are manifested as well.
In the latter part of the note above, losing the dog suddenly touches on a symbolic meaning in conveying the loss
of meaning invested in the project of female–canine companionship (see Willmott, 2000) and reveals the emptiness
of realizing that there is no one to do the ‘practical acts of care’ (see Graham, 1983) or experience physical touch — a
central element of gendered body work (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018, p. 42).
Yet, companion dogs do more than provoke strong emotions and bodily sensuality in humans (Vänskä, 2016). Both
humans and dogs meet and relate to each other in various ways (Haraway, 2003), as the autoethnographic note above
also exemplifies. Performing a good death for a pet is a complex process, reflecting ‘the situated experiences and emo-
tions involved in a human–pet relationship’ and ‘interpretations of animals as sentient beings’ (Schuurman, 2017, p. 209).
Therefore, even if death is ‘an integral part of life’ (Bell & Taylor, 2016), for Suvi, it became a moment of panic that she
would not want to experience again with her dog. This was, of course, an impossible wish; if she wanted to be a dog
keeper, she had to accept the inevitability that the lifespan of these companionships would be short compared to the
life of humans. The desire to keep these companions by her side for her whole life was an incomplete illusion, and the
body work relating to ‘the management of embodied emotional experience’ (Gimlin, 2007, p. 353) she was continuously
working on was, in fact, about handling the tension between care and grief, materialized in the gendered aspect of body
work, of physical touch between her and her dogs (see Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018).
Another diary note illustrates the variety of personalities of the dogs Suvi has had in her life and the social rela-
tions of body work (Wolkowitz, 2002), which seem to be always unique and ‘once‐in‐a‐lifetime’ in nature:

All the important dogs of my life have had very unique and fine, grandly diverse characters: Anni, the
mother of Venla, and Liina, Venla's sister, have left immemorial marks on my life and on me as human
being. Helmi, the 8‐year‐old daughter of Venla, still living with me, is a tranquil, independent and happy
character — the total opposite of her aunt, Liina, who was always outgoing and seeking physical touch
and caring manifestations from the human.

Here, Suvi views the dogs that have been in her life ‘as unique beings possessing human characteristics’
(Beverland et al., 2008, p. 496), and the special canine features of these dogs can be summarized into ‘a spectrum
of anthropomorphic characteristics: happiness and loyalty, as well as wildfulness and mischievousness’ (Skoglund &
Redmalm, 2017, pp. 253–254). Within this history of female–canine companionships, Suvi developed a new compan-
ionship after her first dog, Venla, passed away. The birth of new companionship illustrates that care is an ongoing
process in nature (see Dyer, McDowell, & Batnitzky, 2008), thus reflecting how the objects of care change and
how the grief attached to moments of the material and embodied dimensions of care work (Cohen & Wolkowitz,
2018, p. 44) evolve and change over time.

After Venla died, Kerttu was brought into my life. Kerttu is a happy and lively two‐year‐old Golden
Retriever, who lives with me, my fiancée, our two‐year‐old boy and Helmi. Kerttu has a funny, energetic
and very special personality. She always wants to be at the centre of the action in our family, and she
interacts actively with us humans in our day‐to‐day life.

Even if Venla was no longer physically present in Suvi's day‐to‐day life, her presence was always felt, and Suvi
realized how providing her companion a good death turned out to be an act of care (Srinivasan, 2013). The
human–animal companionship seemed not to end at the moment of euthanasia, and, as Suvi describes, Venla still
had ‘an invisible impact’ and gave Suvi an ‘empowering sense of strength as a human being’. Moreover, bringing
10 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

Kerttu into her life provided Suvi with palliative care while she was grieving the loss of her old dog, Venla. Thus,
following Vänskä (2016), the companion dog can be considered as an intriguing ‘mediating category between the
human and the animal’ (p. 78) — one that continuously challenges the boundaries ‘between self and organization
and, indeed between self and animal other’ (Hamilton & McCabe, 2016, p. 346; Redmalm, 2015).
The pet dog is often constructed as a domesticated and privileged ‘non‐animal’ (Thomas, 1983), particularly as it
may appear to lack the animal qualities of self‐sufficiency and wildness (Fudge, 2008). Nonetheless, a companion
animal is not human, and we must be careful of humanizing the dog as this contravenes a reading of care which relies
less upon anthropocentrism and more on the co‐created nature of the human–canine link. The following note
captures Suvi's respect for the new aperture and ways of thinking about life that companion animals can teach us
(see Haraway, 2003) in general but also caring, both as an emotional process of a ‘feeling state’ (Thomas, 1993)
and as a bodily and material process of having the ability to be present in the current moment:

Kerttu has helped me to see the fine‐grained details of joy when jogging in the woods, and she has proved
to me how important it is to be present ‘in the present’, to live in this moment. Even if Kerttu is friendly and
seems to love humans a lot, she sometimes shows signs of sensitivity and extreme nervousness towards
other people.

As described here, the companionship between Kerttu and her keeper is built on special elements of care, such
as long‐term relationship, high emotional involvement and connection to another (Graham, 1983) as well as the rela-
tional aspect of body work (Wolkowitz, 2002). This materializes by being both emotionally and bodily present in the
moment (Dyer et al., 2008) by continuously sensing and interpreting each other's moves, moods and behaviours and
the simple joys of the current moment (Sanders, 1999), which Kerttu also teaches her keeper, as described above.
Unlike relationships with other animals, such as cats or birds, the dog tends to ‘serve the ideal model of animal
companionship in its ability to engage in a particularly wide range of behaviors similar to those exhibited in human
companionship’ (Zasloff, 1996, p. 44; emphasis added), and some humans value the companionship of dogs more
than that of fellow humans as the latter may ‘produce difficulties and dissatisfaction’ (Archer, 1997, p. 252). Suvi also
recognizes these feelings when reflecting on her human–dog companionships:

After my first dog had passed away only half a year earlier, I had strong expectations of Kerttu and how I
wanted her to be healthy and the ‘perfect dog’ as I had bought her from one of the most renowned
breeders of Golden Retrievers in Finland.

For Suvi, Kerttu represents a vital part of her subjectivity and reflects the qualities according to which she
would love to live her life, as the note above illustrates. The note above also renders visible another dimension
of gendered body work in which palliative care for another dog becomes materialized. Thus, Suvi is here practising
body work not only between her and Kerttu, but also between her, the lost dog and the new dog. To Haraway
(2008), companionship represents a form of lived co‐presence of mutual trust and acceptance, an experience of
gifting and multiple joining, in which buddies, companions or mates of different species participate. It is not a
one‐way relationship in which the dog is supposed to please, obey or accompany the human, or behave according
to the human's demands, but something much more complex which the extract above also supports. In dog–human
relationality, then, Haraway considers both parts to be social subjects with agency. The body work becomes there-
fore a relational practice (Wolkowitz, 2002) in which the agency is also practised mutually in the companionship
(Schuurman, 2017).
Throughout, we work from the assumptions presented above and join the group of writers ‘who refuse to
categorize the female–canine experience as either sentimental or, quite the opposite, sexually illicit’ (Kuzniar,
2006, p. 100). Rather, we work from the assumption that the intensity of care, pure compassion without ulterior
motives, the latter of which is often the case between humans, and tacit knowledge paired with insecurities,
struggles, fears of loss and death, and uncertainty play roles in this relation, negotiated from moment to moment
in ordinary life. These aspects are described in the following section of our analysis.
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 11

3.2 | Facing the truth: ‘It would be a miracle if she lived beyond four years old’
In the following empirical extracts, we describe the fine‐grained nuances of female–canine companionship through
which Kerttu exercises some sense of agency via her body (see Mik‐Meyer et al., 2018; Schuurman, 2017, p. 211)
on the one hand, and Suvi as the keeper interprets the changes in it on the other hand:

It was Friday morning. Usually, when I wake up, my two retrievers follow me upstairs. But this time, Kerttu
stayed downstairs on her own bed and came upstairs a moment later than usual. This seemed somewhat
strange for me. I sensed something was wrong but didn’t know what; therefore, I thought it was just a silly
figment of my imagination. Maybe I had become too sensitive as Kerttu's sister had been diagnosed with
kidney failure and euthanized just a week prior.
Kerttu had something seriously wrong with her kidneys as well, the veterinarians told me. However, they
were unsure about the exact diagnosis, which made me feel even more anxious. I couldn’t believe this
was happening. This was one of the gravest situations I had had with my dogs. I felt pain and
hopelessness. Why me and my dog? I did not know how to think positively after this desperately
devastating diagnosis. What had I done to deserve to be in this situation? These questions haunted me
for months, and having them swarm me made me feel overwhelmed. The vets were unsure about the
diagnosis and didn’t give any life prognosis for Kerttu as ‘she was doing seemingly incredible fine’, but
this uncertainty only made me feel worse. Just a month ago, she had enjoyed the Finnish summer at
our summer cottage by running freely to say ‘hi’ to our neighbours beyond the hill and by swimming
continuously in the lake.

As described above, the relationship between the companion animal and her keeper can be understood as an
actual ‘flesh‐and‐blood’ companionship entailing intense body work, such as assessing, diagnosing and handling the
body of the other (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018, p. 42). In other words, Kerttu is pictured as much more than a ‘thing’
for Suvi; she is, thus, ‘never an it’, as Taylor (2007) insightfully states. Her agency is co‐constructed continuously in a
relational interaction with Suvi (Satama & Huopalainen, 2016; Schuurman, 2017). In this relation, also the thoughts
and actions of the vets matter. As Clarke and Knights (2018) argue, notions of veterinarian expertise often turn
out to be illusory — and so it was also in Kerttu's case as the vets seemed to struggle to find the right answers to
her mysterious disease. The two empirical extracts above capture the fine‐grained nuances of caring about the other
(Graham, 1983), thus rendering visible the complex relation between the giver and the receiver of the body work
(Wolkowitz, 2002, p. 506) and in which the agency of the animal becomes manifested (see Redmalm, 2015).
The relational nature of care (Wolkowitz, 2002), in which Suvi continuously pays attention to the needs of Kerttu
(cf. Tronto & Fisher, 1990), functions without words. Suvi has the responsibility to notice the slightest differences in
her bodily behaviour in order to know when attention and care is needed and to perceive Kerttu's distinct, canine
form of agency without verbal interaction. The story continues with the following episode from early 2016:

Six months later, in February 2016, I drove to Helsinki with Kerttu for further examinations to find out
what exactly was wrong with her. The diagnosis was shocking: she had chronic kidney disease, IRIS
stage 2. She was given between one month and a couple of years to live. For the following week, I
struggled with mixed emotions of relief and anxiety; on one hand, it was relieved to finally talk with a
very professional veterinarian who seemed to know a lot about this disease. On the other hand, I felt so
sad for Kerttu and disappointed for the sake of our companionship. What if she lived for another month
only? For me, it felt absolutely impossible to let her go so soon. The responsibility and the power I have
over Kerttu's life are frightening. How do I know when it's time for her to go and for me to decide to
put her to sleep? Will she show me somehow if she is suffering?

The questions posed here relate to perceiving our companion animals within their own forms of agency —
trusting that they will tell us, in one way or another, if they are in pain. Furthermore, the latter part of the note
12 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

above illustrates the nature of grief as an anxious bodily experience of fear of losing the loved one
(Willmott, 2000), which is entangled with the practical acts of palliative care (Graham, 1983; see also Cohen &
Wolkowitz, 2018). More specifically, for Suvi, the act of taking Kerttu to the university hospital for further
examinations is a form of body work (Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006) in which the management of one's embodied
emotional experience (Gimlin, 2007; see also Schuurman, 2017, p. 208) is essential and in which the aspects of
care and grief are mixed.
Sage et al. (2016) emphasize that animals indeed have ‘human capacities to organize’ (p. 435), and as dog keepers,
we continuously find our dogs triggering us to act in a variety of different ways. This is one way of reading Kerttu's
agency because her actions affect the directions in which Suvi responds. In moments of better health, our dogs evoke
feelings of joy, security, calmness and respect. It is difficult to resist anthropomorphism and sentimentality when we
care for them (e.g., Knapp, 1998; Kuzniar, 2006), an observation which forms the basis for the following final analytical
section of this article.

3.3 | Towards a powerfully fearless female–dog companionship

Palgi and Abramovitch (1984) argue that ‘Death awareness is a natural sequel to the development of self‐awareness
— an intrinsic attribute of humankind’ (p. 385). Death is seen as a private matter in the contemporary culture (Palgi &
Abramovitch, 1984), even though dealing with death and dying is an inevitable part of organizational life. ‘Suffering
can be a pathway to the discovery of spiritual meaning’ (Driver, 2007, p. 611), and dealing with death is an intense
emotional experience (Kessler et al., 2012, p. 293). In pet euthanasia, emotions and ethics as well as human and
animal agencies become entwined (Schuurman, 2017).
Compassion, then, is firmly linked to human pain and suffering. All these feelings are interwoven and are
captured in the following empirical extract, in which Suvi processes facing Kerttu's death and the authentic joy of
her companionship which she still wishes to feel:

Now, it is May, and three months have passed since Kerttu's serious diagnosis. She has been totally fine,
with no clinical signs yet. Already by now, she has taught me many important aspects of life. When I look
at her, I can sense the excitement and enjoyment of life and her attitude to not worry about the following
day. Therefore, there is no need to be afraid of death even if I so often feel I am. Actually, it would be
horrible to live forever; there would be no point in living then … still, it took me months to handle the
heartbroken ‘death sentence’ Kerttu got from the university hospital.

Kanov et al. (2017) state that compassion is needed to act courageously amidst uncertainty. When dealing with
the heartbreaking situation of her dog, Suvi needed compassionate body work to try to overcome the fear of death
and handling the ambiguous emotions of love, compassion and insecurity (Hamilton & McCabe, 2016, p. 345) in her
relationship with her dog. Frost (1999) states that ‘Compassion counts as a connection to the human spirit and to the
human condition’ (p. 131), and for Suvi, it seems that compassion works as a means to understand how her compan-
ionship with Kerttu matters. Kerttu's chronic illness does not make the relationship less valuable or less meaningful; in
fact, the vulnerability and the imperfection of the female–canine relation make it even stronger, deeper and more
dynamic (see Rynes et al., 2012). Suvi adds the following:

Meanwhile, I have realized that there are many other humans attached to Kerttu. For example, my
two‐year‐old son has a special kind of bond with Kerttu [see Figure 3].

The thought of realizing that my son won’t grow up with Kerttu for the next 10 years, as I had expected,
still makes me feel a bittersweet ache in my heart. Even so, it is strange how, during the past few months,
my initial sensations of deep grief, despair and frustration have changed into sensations of great gratitude,
happiness and joy. My senses have become more sharpened. I have become prepared for the death of my
dog, and I now view it as an inseparable part of our lives.
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 13

In the two notes above, the social relations of body work (Wolkowitz, 2002) and the heartbreakingly bittersweet
grief and palliative care between Kerttu and the various humans around her are materialized, which could be also
interpreted as an illustrative example of the tension between care as love and as labour (Lyon, 2010), practised here
by the keeper of the dog. ‘Living and breathing dogs may offer a similarly shameless and dogged, yet faithful, resistance
against the regimentation of life’, suggest Skoglund and Redmalm (2017, p. 260), as the following note highlights:

I now feel deeper companionship and being in the world with my dog, emotionality in the everyday
moments with her, and some kind of ‘silent’ healing.

Knapp (1998, p. 7) states that ‘Dogs lead us into a world that is sometimes kind and gentle but that can be frighten-
ing, frustrating, and confusing, too.’ This is finely illustrated in the autoethnographic note above, in which the com-
panionship between Suvi and Kerttu feels occasionally frightening. Humans need to make sense of the uncertainty
of the state of our companion's health but also listen to their ‘voices's and their agency (see Hamilton & Taylor,
2017; Haraway, 2008). Animal deaths are always ‘culturized’ (Marvin, 2006), meaning that the death of pets is nearly
always carried out by humans (Schuurman, 2017). The emergent question of Kerttu's story is, then, how to accom-
modate canine death in the human–canine companionship? As Schuurman (2017) argues, striving for an experience
of a good death in a human–animal companionship requires an embodied process of tinkering and waiting. In other
words, it requires relational body work (Wolkowitz, 2002), in which gender is also enacted through feminine aspects
of care and compassion (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018).
The following autoethnographic note illustrates the contrast between the (sometimes) insensitive professional
practices of the veterinarians, in which care and killing (Law, 2010) negotiate, and the emotionally driven, highly sen-
sory‐based body work (see Gimlin, 2007, pp. 360–363) continuously practised and managed by Suvi at the clinic:

After passing the woman crying quietly at the front door of the Veterinary University Hospital, I felt
nervous. After waiting for what seemed like forever, the vet called my name and led me to a room in
which Kerttu eagerly greeted me by jumping and chuffing around. They had had her there for
investigations for the whole day. The vet sat officiously on the chair by the computer — while I, fraught
with distress, stroked Kerttu quietly on the floor — and started to talk: ‘It seems that the CKD has not
proceeded as we thought; there are only small changes compared to the year before. So, Kerttu may
have many happy years ahead — who knows.’ I felt enormous relief flow through my body and deep
gratitude for the companionship between me and my dog. Now, I knew that this wouldn’t be over yet;
our story would continue.

In the note above, a strangely vulnerable and painful moment of a situational practice in a veterinary clinic is ren-
dered visible — a moment in which the relationship between the dog and her keeper is celebrated instead of ‘an act of
responsible killing and of care’ (Schuurman, 2017, p. 208), which Suvi seemed to be afraid of having to face at the
clinic one day. Here, the veterinarian practices are also entangled with body work, thus illustrating the cultural dimen-
sion of it (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018); Suvi is emotionally exhausted, while the vet acts coolly and aims at giving
expert conclusions and hiding any insecurities beneath her professionalism (Clarke & Knights, 2018). Moreover, as
illustrated in the empirical extract above, the affective and in‐depth embodied relations between human and animal
are surprising and overwhelming and entail a huge variety of emotions and emotion work (Hamilton & McCabe,
2016) during their journey together. They are always shaped and negotiated together in an ordinary way (see Doré
& Michalon, 2017). Yet, people who have not had the experience of female–canine companionship, or more generally
the affective relationship between human and non‐human animal, may have difficulty understanding the power of
these accounts and view these relations as more generic.
The pending death of the animal companion, of course, causes feelings of pain and sorrow, and thus requires
body work (Wolkowitz, 2002) amidst mixed experiences of joy and mourning, caring love and pain, which actually
helps us understand death as part of a good life (Schuurman, 2017; Schuurman & Franklin, 2018, p. 111). Therefore,
death becomes an act of care (Schuurman, 2017; Srinivasan, 2013) that starts long before the moment of making the
14 SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN

hard decision or the final moment of euthanasia and can be seen as a femininely powerful act and, at the end, as a
palliative element of care in a female–canine companionship.

4 | D I S C U S S I O N A N D CO N C L U SI O N

This article responds to recent discussions of the animal in the organizational academy (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013, 2017;
O’Doherty, 2015; Sayers, 2016, 2017) — discussions aimed at acknowledging our meaningful relations with animals and
the fundamental role that animals play in our human lives. This article has explored the largely under‐theorized area of
female–canine companionship (Haraway, 2003, 2008), which emphasizes the emotional, embodied and sensory‐based
aspect of the relationship (Schuurman, 2017). Through intimate autoethnographic detail, this article has provided novel
insights for critical research on how canine–human relations are experienced by humans and organized from day to day.
We acknowledge animals as being integral to human experience and agency (e.g., Haraway, 2003, 2008) and include the
dogs that we love and our sensory‐driven, embodied and emotional relations (Redmalm, 2015; Schuurman, 2017) with
them in the study of organization.
Our article makes two specific theoretical contributions. First, through the story of Kerttu, we described the
sensory‐based and embodied ways, and fine‐grained details, of everyday behaviours through which caring and
grieving companionship within a dog–human relation was materialized. This insight complements the existing litera-
ture on gendered body work (Cohen & Wolkowitz, 2018; Gimlin, 2007; Twigg et al., 2011; Wolkowitz, 2002, 2006;
see also Graham, 1983; Mik‐Meyer et al., 2018) and the gendered aspects of care (e.g., Cain, 2017; Cohen &
Wolkowitz, 2018; Gimlin, 2007; Lyon, 2010) by illustrating how palliative care and grief as a complex conceptual pair
affect our relations with our companion animals.
Second, we show how nuanced understandings of care and grief as complementary dimensions of gendered
body work allow space for agency to be enjoyed in the relationship between the pet and her keeper (cf. Redmalm,
2015; Schuurman, 2017; see also Mik‐Meyer et al., 2018, p. 6). In the ‘making’ of this companionship the agency
of others, such as the vet, becomes illusory and thus irrelevant (see Clarke & Knights, 2018). Based on the in‐depth
autoethnographic diary notes of the companionship between Kerttu and her keeper, Suvi, we therefore argue that
insights from dog–human companionship can teach us something valuable about care, compassion, mourning, death
and responsibility. These aspects attach themselves to the wider debates about death (e.g., Bell & Taylor, 2011;
Willmott, 2000) and mourning (e.g., Bell & Taylor, 2016) in organizations and deepen our understanding of the
affective relations and their wider effects on organizational life.
Methodologically, we contribute to the recent approaches of posthumanism (e.g., Derrida, 2008; Hamilton &
Taylor, 2017; Haraway, 2003; Wolfe, 2003, 2009) and feminist dog‐writing (e.g., Haraway, 2003, 2008; McHugh,
2012), which allowed us to move beyond rationalized thinking towards more sensuous interpretations and research
findings (cf. Whiteman, 2010) and to treat the researcher as a fundamentally embodied agent, too (Küpers, 2013;
Warren, 2002). In the spirit of Whiteman (2010), our analysis speaks for a view that regards the researcher's personal
experiences, as well as the use of photographs, as embodied and affective points of departure that can provide fresh
and original research outcomes.
But what can we as humans learn from the dog's otherness and animality more broadly without being naive or
sentimental? By focusing on the companionship of a female canine and by approaching the notion of gender as fun-
damentally relational (Acker, 1990), this article provides valuable insights to question everyday human processes of
knowledge‐making (Hamilton & Taylor, 2017), in which ambivalent feelings of joy, distress and uncertainty become
mixed. As human beings, we always construct ourselves in relation to each other. In other words, we build up ideal-
ized representations or illusions of how we would like, for example, our partners to be. Nevertheless, these idealized
representations always become partly broken in human–human relationships. Instead, in a human–canine relation-
ship, it is possible to maintain the illusion, as the animal–human relationship builds on pre‐verbal (non‐discursive)
interaction and interpretations of one another. Therefore, recognizing this fundamental difference between
SATAMA AND HUOPALAINEN 15

human–human and human–canine relationships gives us valuable insights into the ways in which human behaviour in
various organizations is actually constructed.
We have aimed to give an account of the ways in which our companion animals challenge the ‘humanist
hegemony’ in organization studies (Sayers, 2016) and argue that it is time to think more closely about our relations
with non‐human animals, given the significance of other creatures to the meaningful experience of human work
and as organizers in their own right. Future research could focus more on the multifaceted meanings of canine–
human companionships, given that people are willing to spend increasing amounts of time and energy on their rela-
tions with their non‐human companions (see Cavanaugh et al., 2008). We need to develop new ways of accounting
for the agency of non‐humans and place ‘practices — actions, activities, interaction — rather than persons at the
centre of its analytical attention’ (Coulter, 1989, p. 157). Future analysis in other research settings is also important
if we are to fully explore how animal agency might inform organization theory and praxis (see Labatut, Munro, &
Desmond, 2016). Therefore, more research is needed to bring forth our immediate, material and affectual relations
(cf. Pullen & Rhodes, 2015) with non‐human animals (Wilkie, 2015, p. 323), with an ambitious aim at opening up
novel pathways to more inclusive, ethical and caring understandings of organizational behaviour.

ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS
We would like to thank the Special Issue Editors Kate Sang, Lindsay Hamilton and Janet Sayers for their generous
help with refining our article. We would also like thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and
thoughtful suggestions that have helped us in developing our work.
Thank you, our beloved bitches ‐ Kerttu, Helmi, Venla, Saga and Selma ‐ for bringing so many emotions, affective
enthusiasm and connectedness into our lives. Your unique companionship has affected our thinking profoundly and
made us better at living in the moment. We enjoy your warm hugs, wet sloppy dog kisses and our long walks in the
outdoors to the fullest.

DECLARATION OF C ONFLICTING INTERES T

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this
article.

ENDNOTE
1
Throughout the article, we use the term ‘keeper’ rather than ‘owner’ so as not to emphasize a hegemonic position of power
of the human in relation to the dog.

ORCID
Suvi Satama http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8465-3524
Astrid Huopalainen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2739-2115

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Suvi Satama is a postdoctoral researcher in Management and Organization at the Turku School of Economics,
University of Turku, Finland. Currently, Suvi curiously studies embodied experiences in contemporary organiza-
tions, and her passion lies in exploring unusual (and unseen) research topics. She is also interested in applying eth-
nographic and creative research methods, such as visual methods, to the study of organizational phenomena. Her
previous work has appeared in journals including Human Relations, Culture and Organization and Organizational
Aesthetics.

Astrid Huopalainen is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in Organization and Management at Åbo Akademi
University, Finland. Astrid's research interests include feminist philosophy, posthumanism, body work, fashion
and children in relation to organization and management. Her research has been published in journals including
Human Relations, Culture and Organization and ephemera.

How to cite this article: Satama S, Huopalainen A. ‘Please tell me when you are in pain’: A heartbreaking
story of care, grief and female–canine companionship. Gender Work Organ. 2018;1–19. https://doi.org/
10.1111/gwao.12294