Abstract
It was with particular pleasure that I received the invitation to review Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes’ latest book, Organizing Corporeal Ethics: A Research Overview, given my genuine research interest in critical and feminist investigations on questions of ethics, embodiment and affect as well as the politics of difference, diversity, and inclusion in organizations and the broader society. For the needs of this review, which develops in dialog with other reviewers and the authors themselves, I will focus on the concept of corporeal ethics that the authors put forward, in this book. This is mainly developed and discussed across chapters 1, 2, and 5 through connections with feminist philosophy and related organizational literature on embodied ethics and inter-corporeality.
Overall, I find the intuition driving the authors’ conceptualization and theorization of corporeal ethics thought and sense-provoking complementing beautifully much of their past work (e.g. Pullen and Rhodes, 2015a, 2015b; Rhodes et al., 2020; Vachhani and Pullen, 2019) as well as burgeoning critical debates on the embodied ethics of organizing, in organizational studies (e.g. Hancock, 2008; Kenny and Fotaki, 2015; Mandalaki and Fotaki, 2020; Tyler, 2019; Vachhani, 2020). Before I review the parts of the book which particularly spoke to my heart, I would like to stress that I profoundly appreciated the insights that the authors offer, at the start of the book, in relation to their own positionality and bias in writing this text, as researchers, writers, and immigrants living in a foreign country. I see this as a reflexive stance on their part, unfortunately so widely absent from academic texts in organization and management studies, but so desperately needed to allow the researcher to develop a critical posture towards their own practice and to perform an ethics of care toward the other talked about, involved in and/or affected by their research and writing. By doing so, the authors here, in my view, walk the talk of what they theorize by paying their respects and enacting their care, generosity, and openness towards the diverse social, professional, and political communities within which they are located and which host and nurture their reflections and academic practices.
In the authors’ own words, this book is concerned with shedding light into “the ways knowing and unknowing, body and mind, ethics and justice, and self and other become intertwined in the pursuit of ethics in organizations” (:ix), without claiming however that, as authors, they possess this knowledge. They review related literature, with feminist inspirations, on ethics and embodiment to offer an alternative conception of ethics that manifests in social relations resisting power and domination in organizations. With this focus, this book can be of interest to diverse readerships, from academic audiences, teachers, and researchers, across different career stages, to the wider public and citizens curious, interested in and willing to question taken for granted assumptions in a collective effort to reimagine creative political alternatives that can transform life meaningfully in organizations and the broader society.
To develop their proposition of a corporeal ethics, the authors situate the field of business ethics theoretically and historically and draw on philosophical perspectives on corporeal feminism. They are particularly inspired by the work of feminist thinkers, theorists, and writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Moira Gatens as well as recent work in organizational studies that draws on related perspectives to problematize normative ethical practices that marginalize forms of difference in organizations. Drawing on such perspectives, the authors propose a humanly possible relational and embodied ethics that has the capacity to move beyond identity politics of self-interest, in organizations, toward a politics of the collective. They do so by turning attention to the potential of the affective material body to nurture and give rise to contextually situated “caring and generous relations between embodied human beings” (:xi). They discuss how this ethics emerges from pre-reflective, affective, generous and socially engaged relationships as well as embodied affects and effects grounded on intercorporeality. This relational, affective process, the authors argue, enables an ethico-political stance that develops in the connection of the actual bodies of people unequally treated by managerial practices to unsettle normative conceptions and top-down directives of organizational morality.
In putting this conception forward, the authors extend a critique to normative ethical understandings that view the body as the irrational object dominated by the abstract intellect, putting forward rather a conception of ethics based on care, generosity, responsibility, and respect that preserves the well-being or others. Pullen and Rhodes’s proposition departs from masculine perspectives that prioritize dominance and supremacy of certain ideas over others to rather offer a proposition of the ethics of organizing and organization that is “additive and engaged” (:5). At the same time, the authors move beyond the gender debate or universal and “familiar ideas” around ethics that ignore the alterity and the irreducibility of the unknowable other. They rather place emphasis on the context in which ethical relationships evolve and locate the affective body at the center of social, political, and ethical interactions between all forms of human and non-human bodies and their differences in the social world. In so doing, the authors join and echo organizational studies debates stressing the need to move from normative, rationalistic, and masculine conceptions of ethics toward an organizational ethics that considers the contextualized and the embodied experiences of people’s everyday lives in organizations (Hancock, 2008; Mandalaki and Fotaki, 2020; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015a).
Pullen and Rhodes develop the relational and collective aspects of this ethics, stressing that even though corporeal ethics emerges from the individual body’s openness to the other’s difference, it cannot be made viable without relationality and connectedness with the vulnerable body of the other. To develop this proposition, the authors draw on Butler’s theory of assembly stressing that corporeal ethics requires a “collective appearing,” an assembly grounded on openness “to the needs, struggles [and vulnerabilities] of other people, for the benefit of all” (:69). Corporeal ethical interactions, the authors argue, have the potential to hold organizations accountable of their oppressive actions and forms of domination that marginalize difference and otherness and to inspire collective forms of embodied action promising change and transformation. Such corporeal ethical relationships oppose the rational, patriarchal codes of conduct that underlie organizational life traditionally, enabling rather a democratic ethics that embraces a creative reconciliation of long sustained dichotomies between the mind and body, the private and the public, the objective and the subjective as well as between reason and emotions. Drawing on actual examples, such as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, the authors also discuss how such an ethics motivates forms of solidarity intended to reinstate social justice. Such solidarity structures, the authors argue are not conditional upon personal identification with a specific cause, but upon affective relations that surpass individual interests to embrace all forms of difference and bring under-expressed voices from the margins back to the center. In the authors’ own words: “Corporeal ethics is dedicated to liberating difference. It includes the freedom to be and become oneself and live a life infused with individual and collective empowerment.” (p. 49).
The authors argue, and I second them, that such an ethical proposition becomes even more relevant during the pandemic outbreak. The pandemic emphasized the care necessary for the survival of the material body, and made us reflect differently and become aware of the ways in which the body can be mobilized as an emancipatory and agentic political instrument to fight against various forms of injustice and oppression in the social and organizational sphere.
If there is one aspect, in the theoretical proposition of corporeal ethics put forward, which I would have loved to see some further elaboration upon, this is the positivity implied in the kinds of intercorporeal relationships argued to set the basis for a corporeal ethics with political potential. Even though, the authors recognize the dissensus that can exist in the collective actions motivated by a corporeal ethics (Vachhani, 2020), some further connections with discussions on affective solidarity discussing how negative affects, misalignments, dissent and critic can be constitutive of political action (Hemmings, 2012) against normative principles disqualifying differences and otherness it the neoliberal world, might have been useful.
It would have also been useful to add some further clarity on how the notions of masculine and feminine are used, especially in the front end of the book. By this, I mean, it would have been nice to clarify whether by masculinity the authors refer to the western institution and its normative codes across social, ethical, and epistemic practices or to biology. In some parts of the text, masculinity seems to associate to biology, as a performance mainly associated to male bodies. Yet, masculinity can also be performed by women in different ways (Fotaki and Harding, 2017). Such a clarification might have been important for readers not well acquainted with this literature but also for addressing experiences of people not identifying with the gender binary, and thus maybe link this theoretical proposition with perspectives on queer ethics. Lastly, I feel that the text would have been beautifully complemented by some further connections with decolonial theories and new feminist materialist approaches to offer a reflection on how such an ethics could provide a meaningful response to colonizing social and epistemic structures and tendencies as well as to the need to de-center the human subject from social and epistemic discourses.
Overall, I am convinced that the authors offer a desperately needed and meaningful proposition to the normative ethical orders disqualifying otherness and difference in society and organizations. This ethical alternative serves as an antidote to traditional conceptions of ethics grounded on dominant Western philosophies and epistemologies, opening a window towards envisaging alternative ethical futures able to meaningfully respond to normative practices purely driven by profit maximization and power sustenance of the financial elites. An understanding of the ethics as intercorporeal and affective creatively destabilizes such masculine privilege making an ethics grounded on love and care for one another possible to dream of. As the authors mention:
“corporeal ethics is not a matter of theoretical abstraction. It is the means through which life becomes worth living.” “Ethics is something that we can do, but not something that ever gets finally done.” (. . .) ethics is always an unfinished project that cannot rely upon . . . administrative arrangements (p. 59-60).” (emphasis added)
It emerges directly from affective embodied relations with one another.
