Abstract
Noting that from its very inception Organization laid claim to having a central interest in the ethics and politics of organization, in this article we review contributions to the Journal over the past 20 years in order to consider the ethical thinking that has developed. We suggest that there is a common thread of ethical interest that characterizes much of this work—one that clearly differentiates it from more conventional approaches to business ethics. While business ethics has as its locus of interest the ethicality of organizations themselves, central issues that have emerged in Organization concern how individuals might (or might not) maintain a valued experience of themselves as ethical subjects despite the behaviour of organizations, and how organizational arrangements might be politically contested in the name of ethics. We explore this in relation to a question that unites much of the study of ethics in Organization: how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference? We consider this question in terms of the issue of ethical subjectivity and the relation between an ethics of consensus and an ethics of difference. The article concludes much as the Journal started—with the proposal that ethics remains a pressing challenge for critical scholarship and practice.
In the first article of the first edition of Organization a rallying cry was issued: ‘The central task for students of organization in the closing years of the 20th century […] is to construct new analytical narratives and ethical discourses that speak to the radically changed structural, theoretical and ideological realities that we now face’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 6). Championing intellectual heterodoxy and scholarly innovation, the founding editors promised that the Journal would use this diverse intellectual firepower to debate ‘some of the most pressing ethical and practical dilemmas that confront organization members’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 11). To stimulate such debate one of the proposed themes of the Journal’s intellectual endeavour related to how:
the ethical and political relevance of ‘organization’—at the end of a century in which any remaining faith in the inherent justice and goodness of the latter has been irreparably shattered by the reality of world war, genocide and ecological destruction—required further clarification and evaluation. (Burrell et al., 1994: 10)
As suggested by these comments this Journal was conceived with a central interest in the ethics and politics of organization.
This article examines the ways in which this initial call has been responded to in Organization’s 20 years of publication by providing a critical review of articles published in the Journal that have explicitly addressed and implicitly pertain to questions of ethics. We delineate a common thread of ethical interest that characterizes much of this work—one that clearly differentiates it from more conventional approaches to business ethics. 1 Conventional business ethics may be understood as seeking to provide standards against which the ethicality of business can be evaluated and to establish a solid theoretical basis for ‘managing the ethical behaviour of individuals in organizations’ (Trevino and Weaver 1994: 121). This approach yokes ethics to business performance (Hitt and Collins, 2007), management decision making (De Cremer et al., 2010), corporate social responsibility (Lindgreen and Swaen, 2010) and other matters of organizational and managerial salience. What we identify post-hoc in the critical approaches to ethics in Organization is a substantively different (if not directly opposed) purpose. That is, ethics related scholarship in Organization concerns how individuals might (or might not) maintain a valued experience of themselves as ethical subjects despite the behaviour of organizations, and how organizations might be politically contested in the name of ethics. The key difference has been to see organizations not as the locus of ethicality, but rather as the context in which, or against which, ethics needs to be negotiated.
To begin our consideration of the ethical difference of Organization we review contributions to the Journal that have had an interest in ethics and subjectivity. Special attention is on the emergence of ethics in contexts that are both highly subjective and localized yet impinged on by dominant organizational forces and pressures to conform to organizationally governed expectations. In the second section we argue that ethics and subjectivity in the context of organizational relations lead to two identifiable ethical positions that underpin work in Organization on a variety of substantive topics. These positions are surfaced by considering the question of ‘how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference?’ The responses are an ethics of difference, which foregrounds resistance to oppression and valorizes diversity, and an ethics of consensus, which foregrounds ideals of dialogue and democracy. In the final section we bring our discussion of subjectivity and difference together to point to an approach to ethics within Organization’s scholarship that works to mediate ethics and political action in the realm of the realities of organizational life. We argue that this way of relating to the ethical within organizations regards ethics less as a particular, discrete, object of inquiry or even a general theoretical approach, but rather as the animating core of the project of critique that informs Organization.
Ethics and subjectivity
Business ethics has been accused of being an apologist for a neo-liberal moralization of the market and a supporter of the moral legitimacy of organizational self-determination (Shamir, 2008). Concern has been expressed that ‘all this talk of ethics is just that—talk; new forms of corporate self-presentation that have no reference to or influence on what is practised in the name of the corporation beyond those associated with good public relations (Roberts, 2003: 250). Business ethics—as it is practiced and researched—is cast as yet another manifestation of contemporary capitalist managerialism. As one might expect it is critique of such matters that informs much of the ethical work in this Journal; a critique of how organizations might work against the emergence of ethics rather than enable it (even when they do so in the name of ethics). In Organization the effect on and response of organizational members to this has been attended to most especially in terms of the relationship between ethics and subjectivity (Chan and Garrick, 2002; Hancock and Tyler, 2001; McMurray et al., 2011; Roberts, 2003). This relation can be understood as ‘how people manage to define their ethical position in relation to their everyday practice’ and how they ‘constitute themselves as subjects in relation to ethics’ (McMurray et al., 2011: 544). This constitution takes place in between the moral technologies built into organizations so as to ‘govern the dispositions that make up subjectivity’ (McMurray et al., 2011: 544) and a person’s ability to forge a sense of self outside such modes of governance and in the service of others. Matters of difference dominate in the form of the negotiations and contestations which have the potential to show what is not yet colonized, rationalized or determined in the organizational space. This attends to how difference and self-formation might (or might not) survive in an organizational world that so often seems hell bent on producing a homogenous, conforming subject (Bardon and Josserand, 2011) and marginalizing difference (Boogaard and Roggeband, 2010).
While critical organizational scholarship itself has been taken-to-task for producing its own homogenizing subject positions (Wray-Bliss, 2003)—for instance the hopelessly immoral manager (Mangham, 1995) or the resistant-but-entrapped-by-their-cynicism employee (Fleming and Spicer, 2003)—there has also been explicit awareness in Organization of the importance representing difference through scholarship and of not producing homogenizing portrayals of the subjectivity of organizational members. Nash (1995), Randels (1995) and Srinivas (1999), for example, warn against portraying the managerial subject as amoral, immoral or anti-moral functionaries. Nash’s caution, where she weaves a running metaphor of demonization, is especially compelling. As she observes,
the character of the business person has been particularly vulnerable to exaggerated claims of various demonic qualities … To this degree we falsely deny the role of the manager the capacity for larger moral meaning … such characterizations provide a nice cop-out for the philosophers who are stymied by more complex views of human nature and accomplishment. Demonization provides a fast escape out of the inescapable conflicts of compassion and expediency that plague any practitioner of conscience. (Nash, 1995: 230)
Expanding beyond the managerial subject to wider issues of ethics and subjectivity, Feldman (2005: 139) advises critical organizational theory to avoid a ‘simplistic view of the human soul’ and an equally ‘simplistic reduction of all human experience to externalized relations of power’. Such a caution has been echoed more recently by Deroy and Clegg (2011: 648) who stress the importance of representing the ‘distance between living action in which events, as symptoms of a living self embedded in a social network, unfold and the rationalization of action represented in the institution’. Bardon and Josserand (2011) and Jones and Spicer (2005) have both provided theoretical support for a non-reductionist and homogenizing view of the ethical subject. Jones and Spicer’s (2005) work, though focussed upon the substantive topic of entrepreneurship, draws upon Žižek and Lacan to show how subjectivity and the subject are always incomplete and fragmented. Even when a subject sees, recognizes and constructs its subjectivity in response to some wider organizational discourse, this is never total—there is always a lack: ‘it is this inability to close the gap within ourselves, to “truly become ourselves”, that keeps us becoming, identifying and speaking’ (p. 233). The subject, therefore, is always ‘a question, and one that should be open to continuous scrutiny and rethinking’ (p. 239). Bardon and Josserand (2011) re-examine the contributions that Foucault and Nietzsche can make to our understanding of ethics and subjectivity. Arguing that critical scholars of organization have, to date, drawn upon such works largely in the negative—to problematize the idea of a sovereign subject for instance—they stress the neglected possibility of drawing upon such theoretical resources to explore how individuals ‘practice their liberty by reconstructing their own morality’ and act as ‘ethical subjects’ (p. 511). The implication of these works is that ethical subjectivity—the nature and possibility of ethical understandings and self-formation in organizational contexts—is a question which must be answered locally and empirically, not an answer to be read-off from a safe theoretical distance.
Lending weight to critiques of organizational scholars’ abstract rather than embodied engagement with ethics (Pullen et al., 2012; Wray-Bliss, 2002) although work in Organization suggests or stresses the importance of examining ethics and subjectivity empirically, remarkably few articles over the 20 year life of this Journal have actually sought to do so. We counted only six. Of these Casey (2004) provides an amalgamation of several research studies to demonstrate the presence of spiritual and mystical practices in organizations as performed by the ‘ethical subject-actor’ (p. 77). Though highlighting interesting issues, the article uses its empirical material largely for illustrative purposes and as such it does not really provide a level of detail beyond the anecdotal. Articles by McKinlay (2002) and Kelly et al. (2007) both examine the constitution of subjectivity through organizational discourses and practices. For Kelly et al. it is workplace health and fitness programs that come under scrutiny and for McKinlay it is the disciplinary and moralizing effects of the banking career that are examined. The predominant (in McKinlay) or total (in Kelly et al.) focus on the disciplinary organizational processes rather than people’s localized response to these does, of necessity, only attend to one side of the coin—that is although the institutional pressures on subjectivity are expounded, the potential ethical response of people to those pressures is not substantively attended to.
The remaining three articles do attend, in part, to some empirical aspects of ethics and subjectivity. Jensen and colleagues’ (2009) examination of an American parent company’s attempt to impose a corporate code of ethics on its Swedish subsidiary effectively illustrates organizational members’ abilities to actively and differentially translate, rather than merely receive, organizational ethical stipulations—in other words to preserve their own difference in the face of organizational power and control strategies. Kuhn’s (2009) empirical study of lawyers’ use of ethical discourse to justify their organizational behaviour focuses directly on individual’s construction and articulation of subjectivity and makes some interesting contributions in this regard. The author’s choice to frame the research in such a way that remains ‘intentionally silent on these junior attorneys’ personal identities’ (Kuhn, 2009: 699), though, ultimately privileges the focus of ethics research to again be on the explication of organizational discourses over the subjectivities of those people who populate organizations. McMurray et al. (2011) present a close reading of the discursive construction of ethical subjectivity in the body of a letter, sent by one medical partner, contesting the management of the Primary Care Trust in which he worked. Though focusing on a singular, bounded, textual construction of ethics, they demonstrate the complexity and tension in a subject’s articulation and enactment of ethical subjectivity, as well as the enduring reality of ethical agency within even a highly political organizational realm. The work also highlights, specifically, the need for critical scholarship to go beyond a bounded and singular study of ethics in organization so as to explore the
different ways that different people in the same practical context give convergent and divergent accounts of their own and others ethical subjectivity, as well as how the interactions between those people shape their sense of their own and others ethical subjectivity as it relates to the ethical demands to which they feel answerable. (McMurray et al., 2011: 557).
Collectively the conceptual and (limited) empirical work on ethics and subjectivity within this Journal points to the ethical tensions that people find themselves in within organizations—most especially tensions arising from those pressures on them to adopt particular modes of subjectivity through their work and the desire to form a sense of ethical selfhood that is different from and not reducible to dominant/dominating organizational discourses.
Studies focussed on ethics and subjectivity highlight the struggles that exist in relation to the multiplicity of people, perspectives and subjectivities that are contained within and emerge from organizations and the power relations that this entails. There is an assumption here that the world of work is characterized by difference and that the ethical ‘task’ for individuals is to negotiate their own and others’ difference in response to organizational pressures for conformity. Such matters work across, inter alia, racial, cultural, sexual, gender and age differences, as well as concerning differences in politics, power and authority. This focus on subjectivity however is not just a matter of concern for an individualized self—as if ethics is merely the pursuit of a liberal ideal of individualism, the cherishing of the right to be ‘different’, ‘unique’ or entirely ‘self-determined’. It is also, perhaps foremost, about the nature of the self in their interaction with others (Jones, 2003). Overlaying the other onto the self raises then the question of how the valorization and examination of ethical difference relates also to togetherness. This begs a common ethical question that can be inferred from the work published in Organization: how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference?
An ethics of difference/an ethics of consensus
Articles published in this Journal have considered the question of difference from what can be discerned as two key ethical positions. We refer to these positions as an ethics of difference and an ethics of consensus. An ethics of difference refers to those forms of ethical thinking that engage in a critique of a politics of oppression where power privileges certain groups or individuals at the expense of others. In its place is proposed an ethics based on a primary respect for and co-existence of difference and diversity. In general terms what is at stake with such an ethics is ‘an elaboration of the nonappropriative relation to the Other that is based on responsibility and accountability rather than power and knowledge’ (Ziarek, 2001: 5, see also Lash, 1996). This focus on an ethics of difference has been developed in the humanities and social sciences in the context of poststructuralism and feminist ethics; both of which, either together or apart, have drawn attention to ethics in terms of openness to difference and resistance to its oppression.
While not explicit in discussing ethics, such issues are reflected in Thomas and Davies’ (2005) exploration of feminist theory to problematize a totalizing emancipatory project through a prizing of ‘difference’, ‘multiple subjectivities’, ‘fragmented identities’ and ‘multiple voices’ within organizations. 2 A similar prizing of difference (although not specifically gender difference) is found in Chan and Garrick’s (2002) advocacy of a Foucauldian ethics. Difference is here conceived in relation to the ethical possibilities of individual subjects at work being liberated from discursive subjectification. Similar to Thomas and Davies, the ethical task they evince is to use critique to lay bare ‘the arbitrariness, contingency and precariousness of present practices that affect the ways we come to recognize our own subjectivity’ (p. 696) such that individuals can ‘become themselves’ outside of the conformist confines of organizational culture. It is indeed this resistance to oppression, marginalization and subjectification, as a means through which difference can be liberated, that is the leitmotif of the ethics of difference.
The issue of the closing down of difference is taken up by ten Bos (2003) who takes business ethics itself to task. He argues that dominant approaches to the ways organizations’ practice business ethics serves to ‘block off certain experiences that are, for various reasons, deemed to be unwelcome’ to management and organizations (p. 267). Organizations, for ten Bos, ‘presuppose a conformity of experience’ (p. 269) such that the real moral task for the individual is to resist that conformity as well as to resist compliance with regulatory regimes of ethics. Similarly taking issue with dominant approaches to business ethics Jones (2003) suggests that organizations deploy the category of the ethical as a means to pursue self interest rather than in the name of alterity and difference. Following Derrida and Levinas, Jones understands ethics as ‘a relation of openness to the other’ (p. 236) who is ‘totally different from me’ (p. 227); it is acknowledging the narcissistic failure to recognize this difference that challenges the ethical pretensions of business ethics as a discipline and practice. Such matters are not just concerned with intra-organizational phenomena, and as Dussell and Ibarra-Colado (2006) evince the dominant Eurocentricism of the global economy has lead to victimization and exclusion for ‘millions of human beings who live unemployed, in poverty in ignorance and excluded’ (p. 500). The utopian ethical aim put forward as an antidote is ‘to build a pluriverse (not a universe) in which every culture can conserve its own identity and, at the same time, assimilate the developments of this globalizing modernity’. In such a world order ‘the modern individual who has been freed from his or her Eurocentrism will reencounter the non-modern ‘Other’ emancipated from the colonizers’. (p. 505)
The contributions discussed above illustrate, in a variety of ways, how ethics emerges through the recognition of and openness to difference at both an organizational and global level; difference that can be closed down through oppression, conformity, hegemony and self-privileging. However, as Dunne et al. (2008) demonstrate the political neutrality of organization and management studies more generally has meant that scholars ‘are not paying any sustained attention to war and violence, racism and sexism, population movements and displacement, mal-distribution of wealth, accidents and ill-health in the workplace or gender and sexuality’ (p. 273). Such matters are conveniently sidelined from the central pursuit of our discipline no matter how central they are to the political and ethical question of how we live and work together in a world of difference. Clearly there is more work to be done.
While a valorization of difference is one way that critical organizational scholars have responded to a subjectivity deemed under threat of compulsory conformity and rationalization by organization, other contributions to the Journal evoke an alternative ethical position. This is the favouring of an ethics of consensus, especially as it might be achieved through dialogue. Still acknowledging and respecting difference, an ethics of consensus attends to the ways through which difference can be bridged so as to enable a harmonious yet pluralist community. 3 Works which invoke openness, the explicit articulation of values, and talk and dialogue as cherished ends are for us examples of this position. Such works in this Journal include Smith’s (2001) reappraisal of Elias, which has ‘rational and civilized dialogue’ (p. 539) as its purpose; Gergen’s (1995) ethical aspiration for the achievement of a ‘communal’ (p. 529) or ‘broadly shared’ (p. 522) sense of the good; Caldwell’s (2007) invoking of ‘participative dialogue […] leading to reasoned causes and agreed outcomes within the discourses of knowledge and power’ (p. 780); and Parker’s (2000) privileging of public ‘reflection on values’ (2000: 521) and explicit communication of one’s ‘ideological commitments loudly and clearly’ (2003: 190) as ethical goods. In some texts a Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ is invoked as means through which management power might be more democratized (e.g. Fryer, 2012), in others ‘a dialogue across the corporate boundary’ including not only those ‘who can threaten the corporate reputation’ but also ‘those different others who are themselves most vulnerable to corporate conduct’ (Roberts, 2003: 261) is the means for the establishment of some rapprochement with alterity.
Notably, the idea of an ethics of consensus is not one that seeks to homogenize difference, but rather one that creates dialogue across difference such that organizational hegemony can be challenged by the possibility of broader social inclusion and working consensus. It has thus been noted that dominant managerial approaches to ethics (especially Corporate Social Responsibility) have failed in their attempts for organizations ‘to responsibly use whatever autonomy and discretion they possessed to produce fair and generous outcomes for their various stakeholder groups’ (Marens, 2010: 761). In a post-colonial context of indigenous struggles, one response to this has been to invoke the need to recognize ‘the value of collective spaces of articulation and consensus building’ and ‘preserving identities and differences’ (Misoczky, 2011: 359); the overarching goal being ‘to share common grounds for cosmopolitan dialogue’ (p. 360) that moves beyond the self interest and internal focus of prevalent in dominant approaches to ethics and responsibility in organizations (Roberts, 2003).
The distinction between an ethics of difference and an ethics of consensus provides not just a set of two binarised alternatives, but also marks the space of a particular aporia between contrasting conceptions of the ‘good’ and how it might be pursued. For example, dialogue or talk can hardly be taken to be incontrovertible goods for either a community of citizens or a critical community of scholars. Dialogical ideas of the ethical need, still, to critically account for the ways that ‘the process of debate […] is itself a medium and outcome of power relations’ (Willmott, 1997: 259, referencing Jackson, 1995: 572) that can recreate prejudicial forms of difference. Similarly, difference [or ‘acting otherwise’, as Caldwell (2007) phrases it in his re-evaluation of Foucault’s legacy] cannot easily be considered a coherent or convincing ethical position in and of itself, especially if some level of collectivity and institutional identification are implied by the very idea of their being an organization in the first place. Difference and consensus is not simply an either-or choice, but rather they are co-extensive questions and conditions that provide ethical tension in organizations.
There have however been only a (strikingly) small number of articles in Organization that have sought to engage theoretically with the tensions and relations between difference and consensus based ethical positions. Only Hancock and Tyler (2001), ten Bos (2002) and Du Gay (1994) have done so in a sustained and theoretically involved manner to date. 4 For Hancock and Tyler (2001) it is a critical humanist reading of the works of Hegel which provides us with an understanding of, and possibility of synthesis between, difference and community. According to their reading, the desire to have oneself affirmed and recognized by another involves a perpetual struggle to destroy the other’s difference so as to assert the perceived sovereignty of the self. However, the value of the other’s affirmation of self resides only in such recognition being given by another self-conscious subject. The conflict between the other’s difference and the self’s desire for convergence around the same is irresolvable as an individual intellectual or spiritual exercise. It is only resolvable in the historical development of an ethical community, within which mutual antagonism and misrecognition is replaced with social relations that encode shared commitment to each other within the social totality. Drawing upon this conceptual position, the authors demonstrate how flawed are managerial attempts to construct such a community through the false ethics of a manufactured corporate culture.
Widening the object of analysis from the organizational to the political, ten Bos (2002) and Du Gay’s (1994) works consider the political philosophy of liberalism in their exploration of tension and reconciliation between difference and community. Though the articles differ in several important respects both explore a liberalist response to the complexity of relations between the ethics of difference and community. In these works it is the existence of a liberal pluralist community that affords its members the right and protection to hold differing ethical positions. But it is, at the same time, only through the limitation and constraint of ethical difference (through the cultivation of ironic aloofness and dividedness from one’s own ethical position for ten Bos, and in the ethos, subjectivity and legal-rational practices of bureaucratic office for Du Gay) that a liberal, democratic pluralist community can exist. Du Gay is, by far, the more strident of the two on these issues, stressing that it would be a (postmodern) absurdity to be for a ‘total pluralism’. He argues that it is quite ‘necessary to discriminate between differences that exist but should not and differences that do not exist but should’, with ‘allegiance to the political principles of modern liberal democracy and the commitment to defend its key institutions’ (p. 127) as shared ethical positions. In case we are in doubt as to what Du Gay is implying here as the unquestionable basis of our modern social being, he argues that ‘the defence of pluralism and of difference is not antithetical to but in certain circumstances presupposes hierarchy, inequality, domination and subordination’ (Du Gay, 1994: 129).
Useful and insightful though each of these three articles are in speaking to conceptual, organizational and political attempts at a synthesis between difference and consensus, their limited number invariably means that they present a very partial consideration of these issues. The ethical positions of difference and consensus in Organization’s scholarship remain, therefore, still largely submerged and still in need of thorough theoretical and empirical examination.
Final remarks
Our intent in this article was to review how contributions over the last 20 years have responded to what was articulated as a central task in the very first article of Organization: to debate ‘some of the most pressing ethical and practical dilemmas that confront organization members’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 11). What was compelling for us when rereading this initial call to ethics was the tone that was set. A tone, and indeed agenda, that was less about yielding to the temptation for moralizing, for negative critique or elucidating others’ wretched ethical shortcomings and more about a critical, productive response to construct ‘new ethical discourses that speak to the radically changed structural, theoretical and ideological realities that we now face’ (Burrell et al., 1994: 6). We have considered this in relation to what we have identified as the central thematic of ethics and difference—a matter we read as running across much of the writing on ethics that has been published in Organization. Contrasting the approach of contributions to Organization with those of the wider business ethics academy, we have suggested that scholars publishing in this Journal may be seen to have coalesced around the issue of difference, and in response have conceptualized ethics in a manner that foregrounds how organizations may be politically contested in the name of ethics. The central question that reflects this approach is, we have suggested, ‘how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference? We highlighted, in this regard, work that has examined and highlighted the possibilities of expressing ethical subjectivity as a crucial practice of difference within overarching organizational contexts which push towards homogeneity and conformity. We also focussed on political responses based on ethical positions focussed on difference and consensus.
In sum we can infer that focussing on ethics as a valorization of and response to difference has enabled a non-managerialist and critical approach to the study of organizations that is less about establishing criteria or practices for ethicality and more about exploring the difficult possibilities of ethics. Such possibilities draw connections between the collective and structural dimensions of organizations and the modes of subjectivity that intersect with them at the level of practice. These connections work to fold ethics and politics in against one another practically (Parker, 2003) as well as folding together ethics and critique theoretically. This serves to question dominant, taken for granted and dogmatic organizational discourse and practice in the name of difference. What we have been discussing is not far from the more general concerns of critical management studies, even when ethical discourse or terminology is not specifically mentioned. The current editors of this Journal have attested to a desire for contributions to perform an ‘impatient politics’ aimed at de-institutionalization of what is ‘known’ about organizations (Parker and Thomas, 2011: 426). This aligns with the project of ‘critique’ of management that ‘questions the wisdom of taking the neutrality or virtue of management as self-evident or unproblematic’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992: 1). Critique in this sense is always already concerned with ethics even though the term ‘ethics’ might not be used. This critique can be understood as a mode of interrogation that seeks to question the ‘goodness’ of management practices, practices that are problematically naturalized in the name of efficiency (Fournier and Grey, 2000).
While the Journal’s articles do not advance a singular ethical position it is their collective contribution to have drawn explicit attention to those ethics that humanize politics, if not only by defying it or questioning it with alterity. Renewed engagement with ethics, understood in a number of distinct ways—as an explicit theoretical standpoint, as a particular, humanized and localized empirical focus, and as an ethics or ethos of critical scholarship—continues to be necessary for the political practice of critical scholarship so as to avoid losing sight of the faces of individual others in the rush to articulate a political critique of organization. Such scholarship, if it does not strive to be defined in terms only of that which it is against, is also necessarily driven by and implies its own conceptualizations of ‘goodness’. Though still seldom explicitly theorized and developed in contributions to Organization, we have argued that such conceptualizations can yet be identified. Specifically, we have argued that an implied ethics of difference and an ethics of consensus are woven through contributions to this Journal. While such positions have been explicitly addressed and conceptualized in the Journal only to a limited degree we suggest that they nevertheless animate those critiques offered in this Journal—they form an implied or evoked ethical foundation that helps enable the writings in these pages to engage productively with the positive possibility of ethics in organizations.
In conclusion, writings on and implying ethics in Organization can be read to suggest that ethics is not merely some discrete phenomena to be studied nor even a sectional interest within a broader academic field. Instead ethics is central to the practice of critique. Seeking to make this ethics explicit, to explore and develop it, serves to strengthen and make more reflexive that critique. The need to ‘develop positive visions and ethico-political strategies to challenge social domination’ (Fergusson, 1996: 578), visions which are relevant to all forms of critical practice, remains pressing still for this Journal.