Abstract
This article offers an understanding of organizational ethics as embodied and pre-reflective in origin and socio-political in practice. We explore ethics as being founded in openness and generosity towards the other, and consider the organizational implications of a ‘corporeal ethics’ grounded in the body before the mind. Shifting focus away from how managers might rationally pursue organizational ethics, we elaborate on how corporeal ethics can manifest in practical and political acts that seek to defy the negation of alterity within organizations. This leads us to consider how people’s conduct in organizations might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Such an ethics manifests in resisting those forms of organizing that close down difference and enact oppression; a practice we refer to as an ethico-politics of resistance.
Ethics is enjoying a renaissance in the study of organizations (e.g. Gordon et al., 2009; Helin and Sandstrom, 2010; Kornberger and Brown, 2007; Parker, 2003; Wray-Bliss, 2009). Often fuelled by a sense of moral outrage over the corporate scandals that elevated the ethics of business to the centre of the public stage, researchers have claimed that whatever is currently being done about ethics in organizations is not working (Clegg et al., 2007). There have been various demands for a new and different type of ethics that might better serve organizations in contemporary global capitalism (Jones et al., 2005). The issues at stake in what has been called the ‘ethics of organization’ (Hancock, 2008; Phillips and Margolis, 1999) or ‘organizational ethics’ (Barker, 2002; Sims, 1991) are less focussed on the ethics of business per se, attending instead to how ethics can be brought to bear on the complex institutional contexts in which members of organizations find themselves. The concern is with the ethics of the social and inter-personal relationships between people in organizations. Whereas organizations are characterized by ‘dynamic social processes that defy attempts to apply traditional moral theory and detached philosophical wisdom’ (Barker, 2002: 1099), it is with organizational ethics that a more organizationally relevant moral theory is sought.
Organizational ethics draws attention to what organizations might do to develop ‘objectives and practices which are morally legitimate’ (Wicks and Freeman, 1998:128). Key concerns centre on how organizations can achieve improved levels of ethicality (e.g. Hancock, 2008; Phillips and Margolis, 1999), as well as on criticizing organizations for their ethical inadequacies and failures (e.g. Jones, 2003; Roberts, 2001). Much less attention has been placed on the ethics at play in organizations in spite of, rather than because of, an organization’s managerially sanctioned or administered ethical arrangements. Further, whilst there has been a significant amount of research concerned with resistance to organizational power and control (e.g. Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Jermier et al., 1994; Westwood and Johnston, 2012) if and how ethics can be played out in the form of such resistance has been left largely implicit (cf. McMurray et al., 2011; Parker, 2003). In light of this our article focuses not on how organizations can secure ethical legitimacy, but instead on how people’s conduct in organizations might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves.
We follow the philosopher Rosalyn Diprose (2002) in understanding ethics as emerging from an openness and generosity towards the other; a form of hospitality in which the other person is given priority over the self as one is called to responsibility to that other person. Such an ethics is not about the institutionalization of a set of conditions that promote or ensure ethical behaviour amongst members of an organization (Weber, 1993). Instead, it is an ethics that originates from an emergent and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it; an experience that ‘constitutes social relations […] and communal existence’ (Diprose, 2002: 5). To develop an understanding of this affectively charged ethics we consider ‘corporeal generosity’ (Diprose, 2002) and its potential for organizations (cf. Hancock, 2008; Roberts, 2001). We explore the ethical relations that are marked affectively by generosity; a generosity based on acceptance and welcome of other people’s difference. Such generosity, we argue, can materialize in political acts that interrupt and disturb those practices of organizational power that work to close down difference. We propose that this political actualization is realized in the form of an ethico-politics of resistance that is not so much about passing judgements as it is about disrupting the taken for granted means through which judgement is violently imposed.
The central contribution of this article is the articulation of an organizational ethics that is embodied and pre-reflective in origin and socio-political in practice. Such an ethics manifests in resisting those forms of organizing that close down difference and enact oppression; a practice we refer to as an ethico-politics of resistance. We show how the uptake of ethical openness and generosity is a matter of resisting those practices of organizing that deny or oppress difference and/or privilege certain modes of identity; examples of this being sexism, racism, violence and the inequitable distribution of wealth (Dunne et al., 2008). We discuss how corporeal ethics is an especially valuable approach to understanding and informing ethics in organizations when it results in the contestation of such practices.
The article begins by considering existing approaches to ‘organizational ethics’ and ‘the ethics of organization’, arguing that to date the main focus has been on how organizations themselves might pursue or achieve ethics, most especially as this might be promoted by managers. In the second section we introduce Diprose’s (2002) notion of corporeal ethics; an ethics grounded in embodied experience. We suggest that this provides a counterpoint to existing discussions of organizational ethics by focussing on an ethics that resists the establishment of dominant norms and values. Having described the relation between generosity and ethics, we next turn to ethics and resistance in organizations. This begins, in the third section, with a discussion of how resistance has been studied in the organization studies literature especially in terms of its privileging of politics, with ethics remaining largely implicit. In the fourth section we bring together our discussions of ethics and resistance to develop a perspective on ethics in organizations that is not based on organizational ethical agency but rather, extending from Diprose (2002), can be realized in a ethico-politics of resistance that destabilizes the reproduction of systems of the negation of difference in organizations as the normal states of affairs. The implications of corporeal generosity for organizations that we draw out reflect an on-going project of resistance and critique that contests organizational power and privilege. On this basis we present how ethics in organizations can be understood as generosity grounded in embodied affect that is materialized in ethico-political acts of resistance.
Organizational ethics and the ethics of organizations
The question of organizational ethics has been the subject of much discussion since the late 1970s. In its inception the focus was on the institutionalization of ethics within organizations through employee commitment to norms understood as ethical (Sims, 1991). It was argued that ethicality could be achieved through leadership, corporate culture, top management support (Jose and Thibodeaux, 1999), creating formal positions responsible for ethics and implementing codes of ethics (Vitell and Singhapakdi, 2008). Commitment to ethical norms was to be ensured through the transformational capacities of organizational leaders (Carlson and Perrewe, 1995) that would enable value systems to be embedded in an organization’s culture (Nicotera and Cushman, 1992). Countering the possibility that socialization into organizations, environmental influences and hierarchal modes of organizing might actually inhibit organizational ethics, researchers examined the ways that organizations could arrange themselves so as to yield ‘higher levels of ethical behaviour’ (Smith and Carroll, 1984: 95; see also Metzger et al., 1993).
The normative position was stated unambiguously by Boling (1978) as: ‘[a]n organization should establish its own conduct standards, systematize its ethical obligations into clear, concise statements, and socialize its members toward understanding and conformity’ (p. 360). The three explicit bases of organizational ethics as expounded by Boling were that: 1) organizations should establish explicit ethical premises; 2) individual moral judgements in organizations should be based on the norms of the group, and 3) ethics must be realized through cooperative social relations. This focus on the responsibility of management to develop and implement mechanisms that direct and control the ethical behaviour of employees became somewhat of a default position in organizational ethics. This is indicative of a strong and established trend that focuses on how managers have responsibility for ‘sustaining ethics in their organizations’ (McDaniel, 2001: 1) with ‘individual employees and groups of employees hav[ing] a responsibility to behave according to the norms and values of the organization’ (Verkerk et al., 2001: 354).
Although interest in organizational ethics was growing within the business ethics literature, only more recently have these concerns been brought to bear on mainstream organization studies. As recently as 1998 Wicks and Freeman claimed that ‘organization studies needs to be fundamentally reshaped […] to provide room for ethics’ (p. 123). They argued that discussions of ethics were relatively absent in organization studies at that time. This, they protested, had led to an ethical naiveté amongst organizational researchers who were operating through a set of non explicit and under-developed ethical positions. They argued that when ethics did come into play it was something ‘tacked on’ to research post-hoc and not centrally incorporated into the research. Since the publication of Wicks and Freeman’s article there has been substantial growth in research and theorizing into organizational ethics, both within the business ethics and organizations studies literature.
Responding to the fact that ‘business ethics as a field [had] only partially grasped the significance of organizations’ (Philips and Margolis, 1999: 620) more recent contributions have moved beyond straightforward managerial normativism of earlier approaches (e.g. Boling, 1978; Sims, 1991; Smith and Carrol, 1984) towards developing unique models and theories of ethics that are specific to the context of organizations. Organization studies scholars have worked towards various conceptions of ‘an ethics of organization’ (Hancock, 2008; Phillips and Margolis, 1999) or an ‘organizational ethics’ (Barker, 2002; Sims, 1991) that is ‘tailored to the defining problems of corporate morality’ (Wempe, 2008: 1337). The idea of an organizational ethics responds to the question of how ethics is practiced between people in organizations in terms of how organizations might guide, influence or control such practice. On this basis it has been argued that ‘organizations need an ethics of their own’ (Philips and Margolis, 1999: 619) and the development of this would ‘put ethicists in the business of specifying and justifying substantive aims for organizations, their owners, and their managers to pursue’ (p. 630). Such an ethics attends to ‘determining the justifiability of organizational arrangements’ (Phillips and Margolis, 1999: 631) while at the same time ensuring that ethics can be ‘kept alive in organizations’ (p. 633).
As much as an ethics of organization might promise a means by which managers can effectively manage ethics, studies of ethics in organizations have also concerned themselves with the way such forms of management might actually inhibit ethical behaviour. In their study of the ethics of organizational downsizing Rhodes et al. (2010) suggest that dominant cultural norms in organizations diminish ‘the capacity for organizations to scrutinize the ethics of their actions’ (p. 535); in their case when downsizing comes to be viewed a normal business practice. This is so because ethics requires a questioning of preconceived ideas and institutionalized norms and that strong cultures where such ideas and norms are taken for granted prevent this questioning from occurring. In another study Helin and Sandstrom (2010) examined the implementation of a code of conduct ostensibly designed for the purpose of securing organizational ethics. What they found, however, was that even though the members of the organization felt compelled to formally sign up to the code, they largely rejected it both morally and practically. This case demonstrated how, ironically, the implementation of organizational ethics ‘had a rather negative impact on the ethical climate in the organization’ (p. 599). Such approaches contrast the ethics that are embedded in the micro-practices of everyday organizational life with those that focus on macro-institutional forces that are thought to guide ethics (Gordon et al., 2009). Gordon et al. (2009) explore this in a study of the police force in the Australian state of New South Wales. What they found was that public and organizational pressure for reform to address corruption in the force actually served to ‘undermine the objective of a more ethically sound organization’ (p. 93) by inadvertently reinforcing already established power relations.
These studies suggest that the practice of ethics is situated in organizational discourse, most especially the rules and norms within or against which ethics is enacted individually (Clegg et al., 2007), such that ethics cannot be determined by managerial will, fiat or program. This situatedness infers that although normalizing discourse that posit what it means to be an ‘ideal type’ of employee can be found in organizations, this does not determine the subjectivity of each employee; it acts a strong force, but one that can nevertheless be relativized or resisted through alternatives and micro-discourses (Meriläinen et al., 2004). Individual identity in organizations is thus a site of struggle (Thomas and Linstead, 2002); one where at least some emancipation from the dominating force of an organization remains always possible (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Such studies share a mistrust of organizational ethics understood as being beholden to a legislative, authoritative (Wray-Bliss, 2009) and calculative impetus (Jones, 2003) that exerts pressure ‘against moral agency’ (Nielson, 2006: 317), as well as sharing an advocacy of the possibilities of how people might creatively respond to such pressure.
As we have seen above discussions of organizational ethics vary not only in the theoretical approach and ethical theories employed, but also in relation to whether they are advocating a particular means through which organizations can seek ethicality or whether they are providing a critique of how those means are implemented or responded to. Common to these advocacy and critical approaches, however, is a focus on what organizations should do or actually do to manage ethics. This demonstrates that the main attention of organization ethics has been on the ethical agency of organizations themselves. Whilst this can be regarded as a significant development in a field not so long ago noted for the absence of ethical theorizing (Wicks and Freeman, 1998), it also indicates that how ethics might emerge from outside the managerial sub-class in organizations has not been addressed in any substantive way. There is a danger here that the direction in which organizational ethics has developed infers that non-managerial members of organizations are inadvertently regarded only as the targets of organizational programs, with the possibilities for their own active ethics left unaddressed.
Corporeal generosity and ethics in organizations
Even though studies of organizational ethics alert us to the possibilities and limitations of ethical programs and practices developed for organizations, this does not provide a limit for how ethics in organizations can be understood. As Roberts (2001) has argued, the dominant practice of organizational ethics is one that seeks the appearance of ethics without grappling with the lived, sensed and felt experience of inter-personal ethical engagement. A rationalized and instrumental approach, Roberts evinces, fails to recognize that ‘within and beyond the imaginary surface of the corporate body, lie sensible and vulnerable bodies’ (p.125) and it is through such sensibility that we can begin to extend our understanding of how ethics might play out in organizations. Roberts concludes that the ethical challenge ‘is to break the mirror in which we mistakenly conceive of interests as internal to the self or corporation, and allow us to make use of the real corporeal sensibility that knows interests to be always inter-esse’ (p. 125); that is to be ‘in between’ and relational. Taking the lead from this conclusion, it is how this sensibility might be at play in organizations that we explore. To do so we are inspired by the work of Rosalyn Diprose, most especially her 2002 book Corporeal Generosity as it explicitly develops an approach to ethics grounded in embodied lived experience as it is conceived before the organization of ethics. This is an ethics that is ‘at the foundation of social existence’ (p. 14) rather than one that emerges from social organization and its deliberate management.
By way of introduction, Diprose is an Australian philosopher influenced by contemporary continental philosophy. Most prominently she works with the philosophies and traditions of Friedrich Nietzsche (e.g. Diprose, 1989, 2008), Emmanuel Levinas (e.g. Diprose, 2000, 2003), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (e.g. Diprose, 2006b) and Jacques Derrida (e.g. Diprose, 1991, 2006a, 2009). Diprose has contributed centrally to debates in feminist philosophy (Diprose, 1997, 1999, 2000) most notably in relation to the philosophy of the body and sexual difference (Diprose, 1994, 1997, 2012). Her work has also extended to theorizing ethics as it relates to responsibility, justice and bio-ethics. In Corporeal Generosity, many of Diprose’s concerns come together to develop an ethics and politics based on an ontology of giving (see also Diprose, 1998).
Diprose has an explicitly political project; a politics of radical difference that seeks to dispel the forms of violent categorization and hierarchization that privilege those few who are able to conform to the power of that which is institutionalized as normal. Her ethically informed politics invites us to work against the conventions of culture that establish ‘privileged ways of being, including one’s own, thereby reducing sexed or cultural identity to isolate, corporeal units, singled out for exchange, usury, judgement, correction, condemnation or ridicule’ (2002: 194). Approaching such discriminatory acts becomes possible by locating the origin of ethics in living breathing bodies. Following Merleau-Ponty, Diprose considers the body as the primary site of perception; ‘perceptual faith is guaranteed by the flesh’ (2006b: 36). It is the sensate body, a body both in and of the world, that experiences and lives in that world.
For Diprose the body, and its interaction with and dependence on, other bodies makes for the ‘system of intercorporeality’ (2002: 90) where ethics begins. This pre-reflective embodied interaction is one where to be ethical is to respond to the other with generosity before thinking about one’s own advantage and before imposing organizational schemes. Such giving is not a matter of a sovereign subject donating his or her possessions to others; generosity, in Diprose’s account of it, is not about giving over a ‘calculable commodity’ (p. 2) but is ‘an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness’ (p. 4). This generosity is corporeal to the extent that it is pre-reflective, affective and embodied, and is ethical to the extent that it is an ‘other-directed sensibility’ (p. 14) that is not only virtuous but is a condition of human existence. Further, considering ethics ‘as a prereflective corporeal openness to otherness’ (p. 5) does not mean that it is just some sort of reflex physical reaction, but rather that it originates in an embodied relationship with other people that in turn constitutes who we are individually and communally.
Following Diprose ethics comes to bear on the intercorporeal relations between people and prior to their categorization, normalization and regulation as subjects, as it might be achieved, for example, through the organization of ethics. This contrasts to research in organization studies where although ‘the body’ has long been recognized (see Dale, 2001; Hassard et al., 2000) its implications for ethics in organizations has barely begun to be explored. Additionally, even when ethics is considered as being located in human interaction it is still conceived of as disembodied, rational, decision based and/or cognitively deliberate (e.g. Clegg et al., 2007). This aligns with Roberts’ (2001) critique of business ethics more generally as having denied the ethical centrality of the body in favour of considerations of rational and self-interested uses of the ethical to pursue corporate interests. To similar effect Diprose’s thinking has been accounted for in the study of organizations, most especially in the work of Hancock (2008). For Hancock, Diprose’s idea of corporeal generosity forms the basis for his articulation of an ‘ethics of organization’. Hancock argues that the implication of this generosity is that organizational ethics that are represented in formal and codified models ‘does violence to the alterity of the other’ and in place puts forward an ‘embodied ethics of generosity’ (p. 1368). This enables Hancock to demonstrate a model of how organizations might embrace corporeal generosity, most especially by relinquishing ‘power and privilege to facilitate in real material terms the conditions required for such simultaneous openness and inclusiveness to arise’ (p. 1371).
Hancock is aware that Diprose’s corporeal generosity does not manifest in pre-supposing particular institutionalized patterns that would count as being ethical. That would be tantamount to ‘moralizing that fails its body by finishing itself through vampirism of other’ (Diprose, 2002: 195). This vampirism meaning that the other is consumed into one’s own systems of (ethical) knowledge rather than being welcomed in an always emerging set of relations. Diprose’s corporeal ethics arises by encountering and responding to the ‘other’. This notion of otherness is, importantly, taken to mean particular embodied others to whom we relate in everyday interactions. This is not a generalized other representing the community but a concrete other; an actual other person (cf. Benhabib, 1992; Hegel, 1971). Ethical primacy is given to the concrete and embodied other in self-other relations as opposed to obscuring particular individual relationships through generalization and the organization of people into comparable categories.
Diprose’s generosity is taken up by ‘promoting ways to foster social relations that generate rather than close off sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences’ (2002: 15). For Hancock this can be pursued at an organizational level. But Hancock is not naïve; he realizes that ‘any attempt to establish the body as the basis for an open, organizational ethic is guilty of ignoring what is a somewhat unimpressive legacy’ (p. 1369) of bodily exploitation, coercion and control by organizations. Whilst Hancock moves from this position to consider the possibilities of an ‘ethics of organization’ we diverge to explore the other side of this coin; that is how organizational relations might rely on openness to difference based on a ‘welcoming of the alterity of the ethical relation’ (Diprose, 2002: 140) in spite of those managerial and ethical programs that are deployed at an organizational level. These relations arise not in a ‘meeting of minds’ but from intercorporeal encounters that problematize the relationship between self/other and identity/body. Ethically, this becomes ‘a means of redressing social discrimination and normalization’ (p. 11); the normalization that takes the form of institutionalization that many business and organizational ethicists have actually advocated as the means to ethicality (e.g. Jose and Thibodeux, 1999; Sims, 1991; Vitell and Singhapakdi, 2008; Weber, 1993; see also Roberts, 2001). Our attention becomes drawn towards a politics based on corporeal generosity that is not so much about such forms of institutionalization as it is about disrupting the taken for granted means through which moral judgement is imposed; the disruption marks the ethico-politics of resistance to normalization as well as a resistance to the social inequalities that these (re)produce.
The corporeality of generosity that informs Diprose’s ethico-politics stems from an understanding of bodily practice that precedes rationality and intellect (and hence precedes also organization) in an affective dimension where bodies move and respond to other bodies whilst recognizing them as unassimilable. This generosity does not proceed from a calculation of one’s own advantage in giving; if it was it would negate itself as true generosity and become only a mode of exchange. With corporeal ethics it is not the management and organization of ethics that is privileged; the focus is on the politically engaged affective body that responds openly to others without always considering the self first.
Diprose accounts for how the meaning of an ethics of hospitality and generosity might inform everyday life. Exploring ‘ethico-politics’ as that arena where ethics is mobilized into action creates a politics directed by ethics. Diprose’s ethico-politics is concerned with forms of resistance and critique of ‘familiar ideas’; that is those ideas that close down an openness to alterity by constraining the unknowability of the other with rigid categories and preconceived notions. For Diprose, corporeal ethics enacts a generosity that is an overflowing ‘life force’ which resists and ‘defies the culturally informed habits of perception and judgement that would perpetuate injustice by shoring up body integrity, singular identity, and their distinction between inside and outside, culture and nature, self and other’ (Diprose, 2002: 190). This is an ethically grounded resistance to those forms of moral discipline and regulation that seek to bring people into line with pre-designed norms and values. In some cases this would include the norms discussed earlier in relation to designs for an ethics of organization. Instead of telling people what they ought to do or who they ought to be so as to be judged as ethical, corporeal generosity disrupts the self because it is a ‘prereflective activity mediated by the cultural-historical that haunts my perception, but an activity that surpasses that perception and the modes of being that it supports’ (Diprose, 2002: 193). For Diprose ethico-politics involves resisting the shoring up of norms and values that coagulate the self rendering it unable to openly welcome the other in generosity.
The politics of organizational resistance
The forms of resistance that Diprose alerts us to have not gone unnoticed in the study of organizations although, as we shall see, they are not explicitly connected to ethics (cf. Foster and Wiebe, 2010). Over the past three decades there has been much said about resistance in organizations beginning in particular from an engagement with workplace resistance in the labour process (e.g. Burawoy, 1979; Thompson, 1989). In the early 1990s, however, the dangers of conceptualizing resistance as a general theory was questioned, most especially in the pages of Jermier and colleagues’ (1994) edited collection Resistance and Power in Organizations. This book problematized the nature of resistance by describing and theorizing specific forms of resistant practice in diverse organizational contexts. Emphasizing ‘localized forms of resistance and subjectivity’ (1994: 8) key issues raised concerned power relations in organization and how they can be enacted in specific settings and in specific ways.
A key distinction was advanced by Collinson (1994) who contrasted ‘resistance through persistence’ with ‘resistance at a distance’. With the latter Collinson was able to discern how less direct (and less observable) forms of resistance against managerial control are performed in relation to the varied subjectivities at play and at stake in workplace resistance. Collinson questioned the belief that newer forms of managerial control had outflanked the potential for resistance amongst employees (cf. Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995) by examining resistance as it emerged through particular types of relations between organizations and employees. It is this focus on relations, and power relations in particular (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994), that marks a central trend in theorizing resistance to date (Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Mumby, 2005).
Since the mid 1990s research into the forms of resistance theorized by Collinson has developed significantly, surfacing the ways that resistance can be covert and subversive (Fleming, 2005; Fleming and Sewell, 2002; see also Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999) while at the same time problematizing the power-resistance dichotomy (Iedema et al., 2006; Nentwich and Hoyer, 2012; see also Burrell, 1992). Particular attention has been paid to the ways in which resistance can be cynical such that what is observable as compliant is not necessarily so (Fleming and Spicer, 2003). Such resistance is ‘inconspicuous, subjective, subtle and unorganized’ (Fleming and Sewell, 2002: 859). What this has shown is that resistance takes place through the relationships between organizational members even when it is not observable or explicit. Further, this resistance comes in a form where employees perceive ‘that the organization requires the mere performance of “appropriate behaviour” in conformance with politically correct, managerially fashionable and legalistically expedient expectations’, such that resistance can be enacted both through and outside that performance (Westwood and Johnston, 2012: 787).
In attending to modes of resistance that were ‘widespread but under-appreciated’ (Jermier et al., 1994: x) there became a greater level of appreciation of ‘the ways that employees oppose new managerial regimes, invariably harbouring feelings of resentment and discontent and sometimes even reverse employer initiatives’ (Fleming and Sewell, 2002: 658). This shift relies on a critique of the easily assumed binary relationship between resistance and power; a critique that asserts that resistance and power are not dichotomous: … the ubiquitous nature of power does not deny space for resistance since power is neither exhaustive of social relations nor totalizing with respect to subjectivity. There are discontinuities, and gaps that leave considerable space for resistance. (Jermier et al., 1994: 16; see also Townley, 2005)
It is within this frame that the power relationships of organizations members, especially at the level of ethical subjectivity between self and others in organizations can be located (McMurray et al, 2011). Yet in exploring earlier contributions surrounding the relationship between power and resistance, we wish to move beyond Burrell’s (1992) argument that ‘resistance might become a visible target, enabling the intensification of discipline and control’ (cited in Collinson, 2002: 743) towards the conceptualization of resistance as productive (see Fleming, 2007; Knights and McCabe, 2000) and ethically informed (McMurray et al., 2011). We note here that although the privileging of resistance as an area of study has undermined the assumptions that organizations can necessarily direct and control employees at the levels of behaviour and subjectivity (Townley, 2005) this by and large does not explicitly consider resistance as being ethically based (Ball, 2005; cf. Parker, 1999). Where an implicit ethics can be discerned it takes the form of the way that organizational power (that which is to be resisted) might restrict the freedom of employees in their self-formation; a self-righteous struggle against the ‘hegemony of management’ (Spicer and Böhm, 2007). Restricting ethics to matters of freedom and self-formation, however, results in a self-focused approach that does not adequately consider the ethical relations with others (Critchley, 2007).
What is implicitly present in these accounts of resistance is an ethics grounded in the freedom of the individual to engage in alternatives to that which they are dominated by; an excursion into the ‘undecided space’ where subjectivity is not beholden to normalizing discourse (Bevir, 1999; Iedema and Rhodes, 2010). It is such a form of resistance that we seek to identify and theorize specifically as an ethico-political practice in organizations; an ethics that seeks to undermine and transform dominant norms. We are reminded of Collinson’s (2005) observation that ‘[r]esistance itself can […] be subject to disciplinary responses and power may not only produce, but also shape dissent’ (p. 743). Indeed, what Collinson shows is that where resistance is merely a matter of pushing back on account of not wanting to be pushed, then the consequences can, ironically, be to play into the palm of the pushing hand. Accordingly, Thomas and Davies (2005) suggest that change is about making a difference which ‘refutes the “romanticized” view of power’ (p. 720). From the perspective of our argument this differentiation calls for the engagement of resistance within broader political concerns and as they are informed by ethics. In this light whereas the emphasis on acts of resistance (Fleming and Sewell, 2002), discursive resistance (Fleming and Spicer, 2003) or micro-political resistance (Thomas and Davies, 2005) are important, they can be further elaborated by explicitly accounting for a resistance that is born of the desire of an ethical engagement in the socio-political context organizations.
An ethico-politics of resistance
The discussions of resistance in organizations canvassed above share the idea that unequal power relations are questionable on account of their direction and confinement of subjectivity and freedom, especially as they relate to employees. The way that such resistance might be founded in a prior ethics, however remains at best implicit. It is in seeking to make this explicit that Diprose’s thought can be productively extended to the study of ethics and organizations. What it produces is an understanding of the relationship between ethics and politics based on corporeal ethics. Moreover, this further develops our understanding of both ethics and resistance in organizations by placing resistance centre stage in how ethical practice in organizations is conceived.
Diprose’s ethico-politics is a political practice founded in an ethics of radical generosity that is manifest neither in the ‘self serving collection of debts nor in an expectation of unconditional self-sacrifice in the service of the other but in the indeterminacy of generous acts that lie somewhere in between’ (2002: 187). It is with this political position, we believe, that the potential for connecting ethics, politics and resistance in organization studies is possible. This is political in the sense that it relies on understanding power as diffuse and affective such that what is to be resisted is power’s proliferation through normalization and institutionalization that serve to ‘limit the other through familiar ideas’ (p. 137). Diprose calls for generosity and openness as the basis of actual political action; to be meaningful ethics must be mobilized in practical situations, most especially through resistance.
As noted earlier, dominant approaches to organizational ethics locate ethics within organizational practice and managerial behaviour. What ethico-politics adds is a focus on those ethics that are not formulated by an organization, but rather emerge in response to it. This focuses attention to ethically informed political action that resists oppression by organizations. To date this issue of oppression has been outside the purview of organizational ethics, despite clear evidence of its presence empirically and elaboration theoretically. Matters of oppression as they concern sex, gender, heterosexism, class, race, nation are central to what goes on in organizations (Holvino, 2010) and moreover these are distinctly ethico-political matters. Even though it may be the case that even in critically oriented scholarship of organizations it has been noted that ‘there is a dearth of theory and research that has systematically addressed issues of race, sexuality, able-bodiedness, and so forth’ (Mumby, 2008: 27) it is a theorization of ethico-politics that points to the ethical criticality of such research. As we elaborated, the translation of ethical generosity into political resistance is made by seeking practical action that helps realize social conditions that do not close down, negate, suppress or normalize difference it resists oppression. This is not to say that organizations are always or necessarily oppressively normalizing, but rather that it is the condition of the normalization of difference that gives rise to a politically motivated ethical response of resistance.
If it is the case that organizations are ‘dominated by a rationality that eschews […] generosity as at best, utopian, and at worst economically and culturally subversive’ (Hancock, 2008: 1371) how then might this generosity come to bear on organizations? There are no codes of exchange or solid organizational arrangements that can regulate the generosity of the affective body. The ethics Diprose evinces is not about the collective management of ethics, it consists instead of affectively resisting those organizational norms and practices that perpetuate systems of oppression. Such an ethics ‘does not aspire to a neutral position transcending power and embodiment, provided for instance by normative criteria, but rather articulates the difficult role of responsibility and freedom in democratic struggles’ (Ziarek, 2001: 4).
The point we have been labouring over is that an ethico-politics arising from corporeal generosity can never be organizational in the sense that it can be subject to rational control; indeed such control is antithetical to the origin of such ethics. Such forms of organization as they exist in contemporary capitalism are built on systems of contract, exchange and reciprocity (Diprose, 2002: 10); economies of calculated self advantage (Jones, 2003). This is, of course, not to say that real organizations are or can be entirely rational, but rather that they are informed by a desire for such rationality (Clegg, 2005). As Diprose argues these systems dominate the Western imaginary in their reach and power such that it is seen as quite ‘normal’ that ‘social relations are subject to calculation and expectation of return in terms of values that favour the bodies that already dominate the socio-political sphere’ (p.171); that is, by and large, able-bodied, heterosexual, white male, well manicured, and well dressed bodies. Furthermore, even though critiques of such social relations are present in the study of organizations (see Adler et al., 2007) what Diprose’s thinking offers is an ethical basis on which such critique and resistance can be founded; an ethics of radical alterity and radical generosity.
It is its position as prereflective that marks generosity’s corporeality; its affective operation spontaneously originating through the body before reflection. Such generosity ‘eschews the calculation characteristic of an economy of exchange’ (Diprose, 2002: 5); the very forms of reciprocity that reduce organizational ethics to a mode of self-interested instrumentality (Hancock, 2001; Jones, 2003). Given the non-organizability of corporeal ethics, it is less the ‘groundwork for an ethics of organization’ (Hancock, 2008: 1371), instead working to destabilize any such ground through acts of ethico-political resistance. Throughout Corporeal Generosity, Diprose blends her considerable theoretical labours with analyses of different political practices practices; whether such practices are related to the activities of political parties, the legal dimensions of surrogate parenthood, the clinical encounter between doctor and patient or the colonial concentration of indigenous Australians. It is towards the end of Corporeal Generosity, however, that Diprose specifically addresses how her thinking might inform practice in the form of an ethico-politics. As Diprose suggests there can be no ‘particular program of political practice that could better regulate unconditional generosity’ (p. 186) and points clearly to the ways that corporeal generosity might inform political action. Diprose offers a politics that would resist ‘those discourses that totalize and normalize bodies, that hide their own morality […] behind claims to objectivity and detachment’ (p. 194).
Diprose’s promotion of a politics of radical difference is not far from the forms of resistance to organizations discussed earlier. But what Diprose’s work does is provide the possibility for an ethical appreciation of that resistance. Diprose’s politics of radical difference is especially relevant to organizations given the ‘increasingly powerful individualizing and normalizing processes shaping the life worlds of worker-citizens in a globalizing risk society’ (Kelly et al., 2007: 267) as well as ‘the massive inequalities of status and power that corporations routinely create and reproduce’ (Parker, 2003: 195). Akin to Diprose’s work, this attests to a long established political tradition that seeks to achieve social justice through the removal of discrimination and the celebration of difference by placing intercorporeal generosity centre stage. Diprose prompts an invitation for people in organizations to be open to, and moved by, intercorporeal relations with others. And we are invited too. But there are no guarantees, only possibilities whose outcomes cannot be pre-determined; ethics is something that we can do, but not something that ever gets finally done.
Concluding comments
Dominant approaches to the study of ethics and organizations have sought to pursue ethicality within the bounds of that which can be organized and managed. These approaches put the responsibility for ethics in the hands of those who are charged with the task of organizing. In contrast to this, in this article we have discussed corporeal ethics as it relates to resistance so as to suggest how ethics in organizations can occur when power is put at the mercy of ethics. We have suggested that ethics, understood in relation to corporeal generosity and the pre-reflexive exposure to the other, is that which provides the foundation for and justification of ethical action; action realized through the exercise of resistance. Arguing that an ‘ethics of organization’ has not yet considered ethics from a non-managerial standpoint, our claim has been that the openness of corporeal generosity demands that ethics is always an unfinished project that cannot rely upon or be firmly lodged within administrative arrangements. That is not to say that corporeal generosity cannot be present in organizations; of course it can, most especially through the bodies of people striving towards an openness to the other that does not seek final refuge in managerially imposed organizational schemes.
Our article is not a call to arms, identifying means through which ethics in organizations might finally be achieved. Indeed, the notion of corporeal ethics is not one that supports the idea that such ‘achievement’ is possible. More modestly we have highlighted a different location where ethically informed practice might be found as it arises from corporeal ethics. Clearly much goes on in the name of ethically informed resistance to organizations, be it in the form of resisting gendered and racial discrimination, resisting exploitative organizational practice, resisting managerial bullying and so forth. We have suggested in this article that it is with such acts that ethics in organizations might be located. Countering the rational and managerial approach that characterizes much of the research in organizational ethics, we have sought to articulate an ethics that is pre-reflective in origin, embodied in character and political in practice. In this frame ethics in organization manifests politically through resistance that seeks to defy categorization and normalization and the forms of discrimination they invoke. This is a resistance borne out of affective and corporeal encounters with others; encounters marked by generosity and welcome. Corporeal ethics informs an ethico-politics, that is a ‘politics of generosity [that] begins with all of us, it begins and remains in trouble, and it begins with the act’ (Diprose, 2002: 188), a ‘passionate politics that would work through generosity for a justice that is yet to arrive’ (p. 194). This is a project of ethico-political resistance and critique that works against forms of coercion, inequity, and discrimination that organizations so frequently and easily reproduce.