Abstract
Noting that ethics and responsibility in business are well established fields of research and practice, we suggest that the limits of dominant approaches lie in their privileging of rationality, penchant for codification, tendency to self-congratulation, predilection to control, affinity to masculinity, blindness to social injustice, and subsumption under corporate goals. We observe that such lines of thought are blind to affectual relations, care, compassion or any forms of feeling experienced pre-reflexively through the body. We argue that this begs the rethinking of ethics in organizations from an embodied perspective. On this basis, and on the basis on the work herein, we retain the hope that our interaction with each other and with the world, might foster ways of organizational life that resist domination and oppression in favour of the enactment of care and respect for difference as it is lived and experienced.
Ethics, as a branch of Anglophone philosophy, has tended to focus on the nature of moral judgement (to secure its rational basis) or on the nature of the moral principles which do or should govern social relations (to secure their universal status). Behind this inquiry lies the conviction that a moral code can and should maintain our social order, protecting it against transgression and disintegration.
The quotation above is taken from the Australian philosopher Rosalyn Diprose’s (1994) book The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. While Diprose was commenting on the state of ethics and philosophy more than 20 years ago, the very same sentiment can be expressed with conviction about ethics in business and organizations today. Advocates for business ethics and corporate social responsibility have long proclaimed the value of establishing processes for ethical decision making (see Ferrell et al., 2014; O’Fallon and Butterfield, 2005) and codes and frameworks for ethical behaviour (cf. Roberts, 2003). We have been told by the experts that if organizations were to follow the right processes and precepts, then ethicality could be ensured and responsibility achieved. Moreover, in these current times such renderings of ethics and responsibility have become institutionalized expectations; they simply cannot be avoided by the socially valid corporation (Brammer et al., 2012). Organizations are proud of themselves! Not only are they ‘doing’ ethics, but they are busy making public proclamations about just how good they really are (Fleming et al., 2013) and measuring their ethicality with all sorts of tools, metrics and audits.
Diprose goes on to argue that while the need for morality might be accepted, its instantiation through rational judgement and codification too often results in oppressive practices and are blind to injustices that do not affect or concern the powerful. Again there is a strange sense of familiarity when it comes to contemporary organizations, with ethics and responsibility seen as serving to ‘legitimate the power of large corporations’ and ‘regulate the behaviour of stakeholders’ (Banerjee, 2008: 52–53). Indeed, when organizations seek to define the interests of others in their own terms so that they can be controlled for the benefit of the corporation itself, then an ethics of genuine concern and respect for other people lies in tatters. In place, we have what has been called a ‘market for virtue’ such that ethics is engaged in because it makes business sense to do so (Vogel, 2008). What is more, even though ethics and responsibility might be all the rage among global corporate elites, this is concurrent with and supportive of an era of rampant corporate power, greed, violence, scandal and mistrust.
Criticisms that practices of ethics and responsibility in organizations are rationalized and self-serving are well established. The basis of this critique is that the calculation of one’s advantage as a result of ethical acts is the very limit of the possibility for organizational ethics (Jones, 2003). Such an approach has been argued to be in no way at all ethical on account of its narcissism (Roberts, 2003) and primary focus on enhancing corporate legitimacy and power (Shamir, 2008). There is a growing concern too that the focus on a self-interested organizational ethics is limited precisely because of its privileging of reason over emotion (Ten Bos and Willmott, 2001), rules over relationships (Loacker and Muhr, 2009), a priori judgement over contextualized experience (Borgerson, 2007) and the mind over the body (Bevan and Corvellec, 2007; Hancock, 2008). An approach to ethics that privileges planning, predictability, control and measurement seems to forget the value of affectual relations, care, compassion or any other forms of feeling that are experienced pre-reflexively through the body (Pullen and Rhodes, 2010, 2013, 2015 in press-a). Instead, ethics is reduced to a matter of impersonal dealings within a masculine ‘economy of contract and exchange’ (Diprose, 2002: 6) where corporations act on behalf of their putative selves.
Critique of the rationalization of ethics as has taken place in theorganization studies literature was both predated and informed by Diprose (see Hancock, 2008; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013) who develops the idea that a universal, rational or codifiable model for ethics is a result of thinking is both masculine and disembodied. Having said that, although Diprose is directly concerned with developing a feminist ethics that accounts for women’s embodiment (Diprose, 1994), her thinking concerns ethics (and its rendering through gendered discourse) on a more general level as well (Diprose, 2002). The point made is that ethics can be approached through an ongoing questioning of ‘conventional notions of moral agency, autonomy, justice, and freedom and the concept of the individual upon which they depend: the self who governs and owns property in their body’ (Diprose, 1994: ix). We pick up here too that a similar questioning is relevant to organizations, those institutions that have always been dominated by men and masculinity both materially and symbolically (Acker, 1990; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015 in press-a). Shouldn’t we expect that if organizations are masculine that their ethics would also be masculine, in the sense of being dominated by desires for control, rationality and order? This would be an ethics developed by and for the ‘man of reason’ who privileges the mind over the body and equates masculinity with universality (Lloyd, 1993).
The critique of a rational ethics of control and the rethinking of ethics from an embodied perspective as it has occurred in feminist theory and philosophy (e.g. Diprose, 1994; Gatens, 1996; Hamington, 2004; Shildrick, 1997) has deeply informed our own perspective on organizational ethics. Indeed, it is on the basis of this provenance that we came to imagine the themes of this Special Issue in relation to an exploration of the nexus between the embodied character of both ethics and organizations. We were interested in what might happen when an ethics founded in and through the human body encounters the rationalized and routinized character of organizations (Pullen and Rhodes, 2010, 2013). Amidst what has been dubbed an ‘ethical turn’ in social theory (Garber et al., 2000), our focus was on the corporeal character of ethics as manifest in an ‘ethico-political’ practice (Diprose, 2002; Parker, 2003; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015 in press-b). Calling into question the controlling and rational nature of traditional ethical theorizing as an ‘ethics that is out of touch with the body’ (Shildrick, 1997: 172), the embodied ethics we imagined was one that arises from the interaction between people, the embodied effects and affects of that interaction and the indissoluble relation between thinking and feeling.
In organization studies and critical management studies, there has been a parallel growth in interest in studying both the body (see Gärtner, 2013) and ethics (see Rhodes and Wray-Bliss, 2013), yet the lines of inquiry almost never cross with attention to the corporeal nature of such ethics having been relatively neglected (see Hancock, 2008 and Fotaki et al., 2014 for notable exceptions). The opportunity this opens is for a ‘reversal of the traditional principle on which Morality [that] was founded as an enterprise of domination of the passions by consciousness’ (Deleuze, 1988: 18) to be brought to bear on the study of organizations through connecting the body with ethics. As we have already suggested, a rational, cognitive, ordered and self-focussed form of morality is dominant in informing discussions of ethics in organizations. For organizations, the ‘man of reason’ (Lloyd, 1993) has not yet receded from his privileged place in how we understand the structured, ordered and relatively permanent organizations in which we live our lives.
It was on the basis of such ideas that we, together with Sheena Vachaani and Paul White, organized a workshop at Swansea University in Wales, United Kingdom, in May 2011. The workshop was hosted by the now defunct People, Organizations and Work Research Group (which at the time we were all members of) and was jointly funded by Organization. The workshop deliberately explored the connections between ethics, embodiment and organizations and included the presentation of papers from Caroline Gatrell, Joanna Latimer, René ten Bos, Torkild Thanem and the late Heather Höpfl. On the grounds of the success of those papers and the interest and enthusiasm of the response to them, we decided to propose an edited Special Issue to Organization. It was accepted and the call for papers came out in 2012. We hoped that this Special Issue would build on the success of the workshop so as to attract contributions that theorized, problematized and extended what corporeal ethics means for life in organizations and for the diverse ethical engagements which are prompted and possibly governed by bodily experiences with social and cultural forms of organizing.
The call for papers yielded a wealth of manuscripts that, each in different ways, works through the possibilities of what the relation between ethics and embodiment in organizations might mean and how it might be practised. Furthermore, this plays out through different sources of theoretical inheritance and political sensibility. In some cases, this relates to the feminist theory that we commented on above, but more broadly contemporary theory and its antecedents in, inter alia, phenomenology, ontology, epistemology, structuralism and psychoanalysis are consulted. Broadly critical in nature the six papersboth affirm and question the possibilities of how working from and through the body enables a more engaged, compassionate, resistant and pluralistic ethics that counters strong organizational tendencies towards control, homogeneity, discrimination and domination. There is no universal solution provided here, and neither is there a desire for one. In place, we have the possibilities of an ethics which is social, relational and embedded in its local contexts and situational particularities. And, of course, these are possibilities that remain open and fecund through the way they might be read and responded to.
A concern with an ethics of the body is clearly one that engages with materiality, the fleshy substance of the human body as well as its relation to the material of the world and of non-human bodies. It can confidently be said, however, that to date the focus on theories of ethics in organizations have been almost entirely humanist in nature in the sense that they have privileged human beings as the locus of ethical reflection and action. In the first paper of this Special Issue, ‘Ethics and Entangled Embodiments: Bodies-Materialities-Organization’, Karen Dale and Yvonne Latham upset and transgress these assumptions to consider ethics from a very different basis; one that regards the firm conceptual distinction between being and things as being spuriously conceived, albeit admittedly dominant. Drawing centrally on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, Dale and Latham work through their research in an organization that supports the social integration of people with disabilities to develop what they call an ‘ethics of entangled embodiment’. This ethics is one that accepts the intertwined character of human beings, non-human beings and objects, and accepts too that different modes of embodiment as they relate for example to race, sex, physical ability and age are the most common sources of oppression and discrimination. Offerred is an ethics based on one’s responsibility to others in a manner that overcomes the inequality producing boundaries born out of hard distinctions between us-and-them. It is organizations themselves, Dale and Latham suggest, that is a prime mover in producing these boundaries, and it is in organizations too that these might be contested and disturbed in the local and particular encounters that defy the distinction between humanity and materiality.
The relation between ethics, embodiment and otherness continues in our second paper, Kate Kenny and Marianna Fotaki’s ‘From Gendered Organizations to Compassionate Borderspaces: Reading Corporeal Ethics With Bracha Ettinger’. Kenny and Fotaki locate their work explicitly within feminist ethics, that, as that they rightly acknowledge, has been almost entirely neglected in the field of organization studies. They focus especially on Ettinger’s idea of ‘matrixial trans-subjectivity’; in contrast to the psychoanalytical domination of the phallus as a symbol of power, the matrixial references the uterus as the symbol of the encounter with the other as well as the opening up of the boundaries between self and other. Considering subjectivity in this way reimagines the ethical relation as one beginning with the self being granted subjectivity through its generosity to the other. This is an ethics where the uterus is the symbolic site of subjectivity; a subjectivity grounded in maternity and compassion. Kenny and Fotaki build on these ideas to theorize an intercorporeal organizational ethics that relies on an embodied relational subject that is always in connection with others to whom one is responsible. This draws attention also to how this inter-subjective vulnerability can be denied through the subjection of others for example on account of their sexed, gendered or racialized bodies. In place, Kenny and Fotaki propose fascination and awe as affectively primary in ethical organizational relations that oppose domination.
David Knights, in his paper ‘Binaries need to Shatter for Bodies to Matter: Do Disembodied Masculinities Undermine Organizational Ethics?’, is centrally concerned with the ways that masculine binary thinking constrains the emergence of embodied ethics in organizations. Knights’ starting point is that organizations have long been dominated by what he calls ‘binary fundamentalism’; a way of thinking that privileges the mind over the body, the objective over the subjective, the rational over the emotional and pivotally the masculine over the feminine. He argues that disembodied masculinity has been associated with a domineering form of discriminatory organizational authority that, in neo-liberal times, has eschewed ethics in the name of performance, functionality and instrumentalism. The ethical task that Knights elaborates is the deconstruction and dissolution of these dominating binaries as a means of disturbing the foundations of discrimination in organizations, and in so doing opening the possibilities for considering a more dynamic and fluid conception of subjectivity at work. Usurping masculine symbolic dominance by dissolving the binaries on which it is based is central to this project, and Knights draws on contemporary feminist theory to both imagine and theorize a non-dualistic and embodied way of thinking and being. He uses this to consider what it might mean to live ethically in organizations; a form of life that identifies and challenges (masculine) domination so as to acknowledge the interweaving of self and other and replace assumedly fixed identities with dynamic and fluid inter-relations. It is the idea of entwined subjectivity that can open the self to difference and enable engaged and embodied relations at work. Knights concludes that while dominant masculine discourses in organizations inhibit embodied ethical engagement, this can be countered by an ethically informed politics that opens organizations up to difference.
Mar Pérezts, Sébastien Picard and Eric Faÿ’s paper, ‘Ethics, Embodiment and Esprit de Corps’, draws on the philosophical work of Michel Henry to consider business ethics as a form of practice that is endogenous and embodied. This is an ethics of the ‘subjective body’ that is a part of life as it is experienced, rather than guided by abstract external models. Pérezts, Sébastien and Faÿ argue that the viscerality of this ethics is social as much as it is individual; it is this collective ethics that they refer to as an esprit de corps, literally the spirit of the body. Such an ethics, they demonstrate, is especially relevant and valuable to organizations in that it is conceived as a shared and embodied ‘co-praxis’ of resistance to hostility. These ideas are explored and developed by considering the findings of an ethnographic study conducted in an investment bank in France. This novel study concerned the implementation of new procedures for anti-money laundering compliance. Focussing on the day-to-day enactment of these procedures and their implementation, the study explores and exemplifies how shared work experience in and through the subjective body can lead to ethical practice, even when an organization might be hostile to it. The paper shows how this collective embodied experience—this co-praxis—gives rise to ethical practice in situ. Moreover, Pérezts, Sébastien and Faÿ claim, it is the esprit de corps generated by co-praxis that constitutes the possibility of both a collective embodied ethics and an ethically resistant subjectivity.
In the penultimate paper, ‘Reading Spinoza for an Affective Ethics of Organizational Life’, Torkild Thanem and Louise Wallenberg begin their discussion by positioning themselves in relation to recent work that has drawn on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to reconsider organizational ethics. Regarding this Levinasian inspired work as a point of departure and critique for their own thinking, they turn to the work of Benedict de Spinoza (both affirmatively and critically) to develop a more sustainable and less idealistic conception of ethics in organizations; one that operates in the nexus of ethics, politics and ontology. The paper turns to Spinoza’s work specifically because of how it conceives of the embodiment of power relations and ethics through affect. Consulting Spinoza’s ethical and political writings allows Thanem and Wallenberg to theorize a practical and non-utopian ethics for organizing that strives towards joyfulness and seeks to limit the abuse of people and of power through ‘domination, exploitation and exclusion’. Organizationally, this points to a collective ethical responsibility for enhancing the affective power of ourselves and others through embodied interaction; a direction away from the commonplace preoccupation in organizations with personal achievement, individual freedom and self-sovereignty. The result of this thinking is not so much a normative ethics as it is a means through which ethical possibilities in organizations can be conceived and realized; a conception rested on human sociality as being the context within which people’s embodied interaction can yield an enhancement of both joy and power.
The first five papers of this Special Issue all point, albeit in different ways, to the affirmative possibilities of embodied ethics in organizations. In the final paper, Kaspar Villadsen and Bent Meier Sørensen take a different approach by problematizing what happens when the body is actively and deliberately deployed in management practice. They approach this by considering the case of Peter Aelbæk, the Managing Director of the Danish film company Zentropa, and the way he brings his body to bear on his professional activities; activities they access empirically through documentary video produced by this company featuring Aelbæk at work. Aelbæk is taken as an exemplification of what happens when a manager’s body is actually used to portray a particular organizational ethos. In the context of post-bureaucratic modes of organizing, Villadsen and Sørensen argue, managerial ethics are already embodied in the sense that the manager’s body is yet another means through which managerial ideals can be communicated and inculcated. Like Thanem and Wallenberg in the previous paper, Villadsen and Sørensen also consider ethics from a Spinozist position, but in their case show how embodied interactions at work, while framed as supporting creativity, expression and transgression, in practice can bolster an imbalance of power and impinge on the possibilities of joyous encounters at work. Specifically, what the analysis shows is how a particular mode of embodied ethics enacted by a manager served to impose social meanings in potentially malevolent ways. Here, the body of the manager becomes a new and insidious vehicle for reshaping and enhancing managerial power. The paper offers a cautionary tale in that it demonstrates that the deliberate connection between ethics, politics and the body might not be a necessary antidote to managerial power.
The papers collected in this Special Issue address the connection between organizations, ethics and embodiment in a variety of ways; ways which differ, sometimes radically, in theoretical inspiration and political commitment. Collectively, however, they all point to the productive and as yet largely unrealized possibilities of attending to embodied ethics in researching practice in and of organizations. We hope that these papers might inspire others to continue in the development of such an approach to ethics; one that is grounded in our lived experiences with each other in all their complexity, materiality and ambiguity.
Care needs to be taken to acknowledge that an embodied ethics is not one that demands a priori agreement ahead of the ethical encounter or experience being entered into; that is precisely the rational, normative and totalizing ethical tendency that an embodied approach can contest and counter. Would ethics exist if we all agreed precisely on what it was and how it might be achieved? We think not, given the radical particularity of the embodied experience that might demand ethical engagement or response. Against the possibility of a powerful socially imposed ethical false consensus, we retain the hope that through our interaction with each other and with the world, we might foster ways of oganizational life that resist domination and oppression in favour of the enactment of care and respect for difference as it is lived and experienced.