Abstract
Pullen and Rhodes’ book on corporeal ethics offers a refreshing and provocative account of ethics in organizing life. In conceptualizing corporeal ethics as a much needed alternative to the more dominant account of ethics in organizing life, Pullen and Rhodes present a compelling critical account of corporate ethics. While their scope somewhat extends beyond corporate ethics, it is their critique of corporate ethics and what corporeal ethics offers in its place that interests me most about this book. Through their critique, corporeal ethics advances a number of possibilities for scholars in organization studies interested in ethics, gender, or leadership.
The preface of the book provides a reflective contextualization of the authors’ crafting of this work. They acknowledge that the book was written, and subsequently published, during a time when the chaos and isolation of a global pandemic enveloped our lives. In part the book also responds to urgent calls for us to do more around diversity, inclusion, and equity as those who represent equity deserving groups continue to face extreme marginalization, exclusion, divisiveness, and violence. The book comes at a time when we desperately need to un-know, re-think, and re-do how we understand ethics in organizations.
Pullen and Rhodes describe corporeal ethics as a “communal and affectively charged ethics” (p. 4). It is an ethics that is relational, locally situated, embodied, feminine, collective, intersectional, and inclusive. They imply that corporeal ethics is both a kinder and a more courageous ethics in that it is an ethics “dedicated to liberating difference” (p. 49). Corporeal ethics could also be described as rebellious in its defiance of an ethics premised on rationality, and blindness to gender, intersectionality, and inequity.
There are two themes which particularly piqued my interest as I read the book. The first is that corporeal ethics is in many ways, at least by my interpretation, a feminist and gendered critique of organizational ethics. The second is the notion that corporeal ethics is one marked by generosity.
Pullen and Rhodes note that while gender is central to corporeal ethics, it is not the only basis of difference for which corporeal ethics accounts. I suggest, however, that their feminist and gendered critique of mainstream ethics in organizing is the golden thread throughout the book. This is in large part why I like the book so much. This feminist and gendered critique is evident throughout the book.
In Chapter 1 The Ethics of Organizations they ground their critique of the ethics of organizations within Acker’s (1990, 2006) work on gendered organizations where rationality (read: the masculine norm) is privileged, and emotion and embodiment (read: femininity) are suppressed. In that context ethics is “subject to an un-named masculinity” (p. 2) and gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized bodies are suppressed, neglected, and marginalized. Pullen and Rhodes offer corporeal ethics as an alternative to this dominant ethics of organizing. In Chapter 2 Corporeal Ethics and Organizations, the authors take this line of thinking on hegemonic masculinity in ethics further and juxtapose the privileging of rationality over emotion, the objective over the subjective, and the mind over the body (see p. 23). They offer corporeal ethics as an alternative aligned with embodied solidarity, the material and sexed body via corporeal feminism, and generosity. I return to this notion of generosity later in my review. In Chapter 3 Ethics Beyond Organizational Patriarchy the authors contend that problematizing the masculine foundation of organizations is central to their development of corporeal ethics. In this somewhat contentious chapter they discuss corporate ethics as a form of power relations wielding moral authority via self-interest and homosocial masculinity. They argue that it is less about the rejection or absence of the feminine in corporate ethics. Rather, they suggest it is more that the feminine is internal to patriarchy and thereby servile to the masculine in corporate ethics. In contrast, corporeal ethics offers potentialities for resistance, something explored further in Chapter 4. In Chapter 4 An Ethico-Politics of Resistance, the authors turn their attention to how corporeal ethics serves to liberate difference. In this chapter the authors more fully tease out the relationship between intersectionalities and embodiment and how through corporeal ethics there is recognition, respect, and celebration of difference. In this chapter they once again turn to a feminist critique to “place bodies at the centre of an ethically informed resistance” (p. 52). Overall, the corporeal ethics presented by Pullen and Rhodes is a refreshing feminist and gendered critique of corporate ethics which opens up new avenues for theorizing and doing ethics.
The second theme that really resonated with me was Pullen and Rhodes’ use of generosity. They draw from Diprose’s (2002) work on generosity to conceptualize corporeal ethics as an “other-directed sensibility” (Diprose, 2002: 14, as cited in Pullen and Rhodes, 2022: 26) where embodied others are prioritized over the self in self-other relations. This notion of generosity accounts for a more inclusive and equitable ethics which serves to challenge the politics of embodied difference and categorization. It is an ethics of care and compassion, absence of moral judgment. As I reflected on the authors’ weaving of generosity in corporeal ethics, my mind went to the work of Levinas (1998) on the ethics of responsibility and Gilligan (1982) on the ethics of care. Throughout the book the authors do reference the work of Levinas. Given Rhodes’ other published work there is no doubt Levinas work has influenced their thinking here on a generosity which is not tied to reciprocity. Gilligan’s work on the ethics of care is concerned with moral development and in that way is distinct from Pullen and Rhodes’ agenda. At the same time, her feminist critique takes into account self, other, and situation and would prove to be a fruitful avenue for future theorizing around corporeal ethics. Gilligan’s work would be an interesting avenue to extend Pullen and Rhodes’ development of corporeal ethics through the concept of generosity, as well as their feminist and gendered critique of ethics in organizational life.
The book left me pondering other areas ripe for future research on corporeal ethics as well. Particularly salient for me was how one might fuse corporeal ethics with ethical and moral leadership. My own work on contemplative leadership (Grandy and Śliwa, 2017) seems to align well with corporeal ethics in that we describe contemplative leadership as virtuous activity. It is a type of ethical leadership which is both relational and embodied practice and it is grounded in an ethics of care. Does corporeal ethics as conceptualized by Pullen and Rhodes allow for such a reconciliation with contemplative leadership? Exploring how corporeal ethics informs leadership theory and practice opens up a number of new avenues for future research. In a related vein, I am left eager to unpack further the material effects of corporeal ethics. What does and can corporeal ethics mean for the embodiment of living ethics through the practice of leadership and in the context of organizing where a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is espoused and enacted? Finally, as I read the book I began to ponder how corporeal ethics might serve to unsettle the gender binary through liberating embodied difference, building upon the discussion in Chapter 4.
This book was an enjoyable read. It left me wanting more and in doing so it opens up possibilities for further debate and discovery on the (gendered) ethics of care and corporeal ethics, on leadership and corporeal ethics, and on intersectionality, embodiment, and corporeal ethics.
