Ethics, embodiment and organizations
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.
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Biographies
Alison Pullen is Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. Alison is interested in the ways in which feminism enables ethico-political critique as it relates to organization.
Carl Rhodes is Professor of Management and Organization Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. His research concerns the meanings of ethics, justice and responsibility in organizations.
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Article first published online: December 5, 2014
Issue published: March 2015
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