Morality, Ethics and Responsibility in Organization and Management

Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000068122
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, and regular corporate scandals, there has been a growing concern with the moral and ethical foundations of business. Often these concerns are limited to narrow accounts of governance codes, regulatory procedures or behaviour incentives, which are often characterized by neoliberal bias underpinned by western masculine logics. This book challenges these limited accounts of ethics and responsibility.

It looks at the writing of Gayatri C. Spivak who takes globally networked markets, people and ideas and provides tools to rethink subjectivity, ethics and corporate governance. Eschewing strict hierarchical notions of authority and identity, Spivak's work invites us to consider who speaks for whom and for what in organizational contexts. Relationality is also to be found in the radical politics and feminist ethics of Judith Butler who continues to draw on and develop her account of performativity to interpret contemporary organizations, management and work.

While popular accounts of corporate ethics often concern themselves with the aims and actions of those at the top of organizations, Lauren Berlant focuses on the struggles of those at the bottom of the new social structures created by contemporary forms of capital. Finally, the book also considers ecological challenges through the work of Val Plumwood, who spent a lifetime considering the threats and responsibilities we face in environmental terms, and developed a feminist ecological philosophy for understanding social and species differences.

This book will be relevant to students and researchers across business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology.

1 Introduction

Morality, ethics and responsibility in organization and management

Robert McMurray and Alison Pullen

Concern with the moral and ethical foundations of business have long remained a social and political question. Ethics is often positioned as some sort of antidote to the reckless and self-interested behaviour that too often characterizes business activity. Ethical attention is thus directed towards the complex and rampant profiteering that led to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, as well as myriad corporate scandals ranging from the Union Carbide Bhopal gas leak disaster in 1984, the Enron accounting scandal in 2001, British Petroleum’s culpability on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2009, the News International phone hacking fiasco in 2011 and the Volkswagen emissions scandal in 2015. Often responsibility for ethics in business is limited to practice such as corporate social responsibility reporting, ethical codes, regulatory procedures or behavioural incentives. Even where well meant, it is evident that such approaches speak to particular western masculine logics of a neo-liberal variety – logics that often fail to account for the interconnected and interdependent nature of businesses, peoples, species and environments, or for the growing social, political and economic power of corporations. While the Global Financial Crisis saw banks fail, homes repossessed and entire countries brought to their knees, its aftermath brought an austerity-based fiscal policy and a populist political ideology to the fore in too many countries. In this dire context, the need of alternative thinking when it comes to business and management ethics is palpable.

In this, the fifth book in the Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series, a range of different approaches to understanding the place and responsibilities of organizations and their actors are offered. Underpinning much of what follows is a nuanced consideration of how (and by whom) our knowledge and associated histories are constructed. This is important in so far as it determines who is heard, who is acknowledged, who is attended to and whose needs are prioritized. The result is a series of chapters that point to the rejection of Cartesian mind–body split while eschewing the normative prescriptions associated with codes and procedures. In its place there is an emphasis on the value of inter-disciplinarity, recognizing our connections, accounting for context, giving voice to those who are unheard or silenced and recognizing that managing and organizing are part of the wider world rather than detached, external and neutral.

Together, the writers of the chapters featured in this book take us beyond what others see as the greenwash of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and the platitudes of ethical codes so as to think more deeply about the nature of morality, ethics and responsibility in organization studies. On that basis, this is a book for students, managers and citizens who have observed that traditional corporate approaches to ethics are not working and want to understand why and what might be done otherwise.

We open with Barbara Czarniawska’s chapter on the life and work of Maria Ossowska. As with other contributions to this series, the chapter invites us to reconsider our taken-for-granted assumptions on the nature of reality, knowledge and morality and, in particular, a strongly western masculine tendency to see progress as a linear journey driven by intellectual giants. Czarniawska’s chapter draws on a process of re-remembering in relation to the life and work of Maria Ossowska. This personal account invites us to consider what it means to take part in the ‘conversation of science’. Specifically, the idea that science reflects a linear progress, based on the brilliance of intellectual giants who proclaim their own worth, is quietly unpicked as we trace the course of Ossowka’s academic development. A wide-ranging career is described as informing contemporary themes in organization studies including morality, studies of science and technology (SST), feminism, philosophy, method and popular culture. It is notable that Maria Ossowka’s work was not limited to or by disciplinary strictures but, quite the reverse, sought to move across such boundaries so as to avoid unreflective reasoning. Maria Ossowska offers texts that are readable and questioning. Barbara Czarniawska concludes that Ossowska offers students of organization studies two key lessons. First, a transdisciplinary approach is essential to understanding the complex phenomenon that is organizing. Second, the style of our writing is important if it is to be read. There is then no moral prescription or ethical formula offered here for the reader. Rather, we are sensitized to the possibility that knowing, acknowledging, relating and reflecting are themselves ethical acts.

In Chapter 3 Agnes Bolsø takes up the baton of considering the relationship between science, morals and organizing, this time in respect of the environment. While there is a broad scientific consensus that global warming is real and threatening, the political debate that surrounds the science is one of contestation, tension and unwelcomed disruption. Such terms could be applied to the life and work of Val Plumwood. Often working as an independent scholar, Plumwood is described as assertive, controversial, provocative and radical in her challenges to established intellectual, political and institutional norms. Central to the challenges she poses are the refutation of dualisms that separated human from non-human or, as Agnes Bolsø puts it, the false division of ‘reason, mind and consciousness on one side, and the body, the animal and the pre-human inferiors on the other’. Val Plumwood rejects the portrait of humans as ‘disembodied, disembedded and discontinuous’ on the basis that it is precisely such positioning that has separated us from our environment and led to the exploitation of the latter. The response, as Agnes notes, is to position humans as part of a differentiated yet interconnected cycle in which organizing recognizes both difference and interdependencies. There are to be no universal solutions or quick organizational fixes. Instead, managers, workers, consumers and policy makers are required to attend to and organize around the particularities of specific contexts and their wider relations.

Underpinning the accounts of Maria Ossowska and of Val Plumwood is a need to challenge how knowledge is constructed and applied if we are to better account for our place in the world. Banu Özkazanç-Pan develops this theme in respect of the transdisciplinary work of Gayatri C. Spivak. Chapter 4 describes a writer whose contributions to literature, feminist theories and postcolonial studies have challenged what we think we know about the world and its politics. Developing the concept of the subaltern, Spivak encourages us look in new ways at people(s) we have previously ignored. Her work is important in ethical terms because it challenges our taken-for-granted assumptions about the neutrality of history, including historical methods for accounting for the self and other. It recognizes that, depending on who has the power to write our histories and shape our nation-states, certain ‘others’ will be ignored, marginalized and suppressed. The argument in this chapter is that this is precisely what is at stake in respect of South East Asia (and the global south and ‘Third World’ more broadly) when faced with the colonizing power of western thought that renders other forms of knowing and being inferior. Such inferiority arises because of the insistence that the ‘other’ engage with the West according to the latter’s epistemic rules, thus ensuring that the ‘other’ is always placed at a disadvantage. Banu Özkazanç-Pan argues that Spivak’s scholarship offers an alternative. There is an emphasis on the ethicality of breaking the rules that bind people, of focusing on agency and engaging with others rather than adherence to abstract rules. This, in turn, points to the need to think differently if business schools and their alumni are going to be part of rather than separate from the wider world. Overall, Banu draws our attention to the ways in which Gayatri C. Spivak’s writing offers a broader and more nuanced understanding of globalization that disrupts the more entrenched concerns of masculinized western thinking and in so doing gives hope to more inclusive futures, while informing subjectivity, ethics and corporate governance.

As we hope is clear by now, one of the joys of organizational studies is its inter-disciplinarity: its willingness to take and learn from other subject areas and fields. Kate Kenny’s chapter exemplifies all that is best in this tendency as she introduces us to Lauren Berlant. The chapter focuses our attention on what it is like to live and cope with precarity and, relatedly, the burden of cruel optimism. The latter is defined as desiring that prevents us flourishing due to a predilection to pursue dreams that are precarious and even harmful. Specifically, the object(s) of our repeated desires cause us future harm despite our belief that this time it will be different. It is as desire that perhaps explains the UK exit from European Union – a divorce predicated on a recurrent nostalgia for a dream of independence in the face of mounting evidence of, and dissimilation over, the future harms of separatism. Or, as Berlant might have summarized it ‘a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming’ (Berlant, 2011: 2). In organizational terms, we are shown how such cruelty resides in the Fordist myth that hard work and mass consumption will offer up a good life. Putting aside the problems associated with consumption and well-being, Kate Kenny invites us to consider the cruelty of such a promise when placed in front of the many who struggle to survive in a low pay, low trust, making-ends-meet economy. In this way, Lauren Berlant’s writing reminds us to look at the bottom of our increasingly unequal societal pyramid rather than at the executives and professions that have for so long preoccupied management studies – no matter how uncomfortable the study of collective precarity may be. Lauren Berlant’s methods also make it clear that we can and should utilize literature, film, TV and newspapers to assess societal developments and organization functioning. In short, she challenges us to look again at what we think we know and, as Kate Kenny goes on to discuss, invites us on a different kind of ‘ethical noticing’.

In considering the work of Judith Butler, the final chapter invites us to look to the future of organizing and managing. Judith Butler is introduced by Nancy Harding as a controversial thinker whose writing spans philosophy, literature, gender, feminism, queer theory and organization studies. More importantly, she is a writer described by Nancy Harding as ‘mind-expanding’ if complex. Directed at both understanding the constitution of ourselves, while also calling for an active political process aimed at changing the wider world, Butler’s work is most closely associated with the notion of performativity. Nancy Harding leads us through the development of the concept as it pertains to the construction of gender binaries; the formation, enactment and sedimentation of identities; and the recursive reinforcement of apparent ‘natural’ orders. We learn that performativity is not just about words but also the embodied meanings that precede us, are worked through us and flow from us in everyday activities. Nancy Harding draws our attention to the ways in which Butler’s work can be used to critique the persistence of established binaries (especially around gender) in management and organization studies, arguing instead for a more nuanced account of organized relations and the power inherent in those embodied, spatial and discursive encounters. The value of Butler’s work in ethical and moral terms is implicit in the writing as we consider the injurious nature of words and the casting of certain others as inhuman. This links to what is described as an ethical relation to others predicated on the desire for recognition and an understanding of the ways in which those whose identities disrupt our well-established binaries may be cast-out and unheard.

The women writers writing about women’s philosophy and practice lead us to engage with ethics differently to the ways in which we may do so in mainstream accounts. These writers show us how to embody their new possibilities, the body being a site of responsibility, morality and ethics. This in itself is a way to transgress the very nature of dominant understandings of organization and management especially those that situate ethics at the site of the individual. Instead, we are offered conceptualisations and practices that progress ethics more broadly at the levels of society, community and relationships.

References

1. Berlant, L.G., 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.
2. Ford, J., Harding, N. and Learmonth, M., 2008. Leadership as identity: Constructions and deconstructions. New York: Springer.
3. Harding, N. and Palfrey, C., 1997. The social construction of dementia: Confused professionals?. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
4. Harding, N., 2004. The social construction of management. London: Routledge.
5. Harding, N., 2013. On being at work: The social construction of the employee. London: Routledge.

2 Forgetting to remember

Maria Ossowska, the giant on whose shoulders I stand

Barbara Czarniawska

Re-discovering the giant

In his book On the Shoulders of Giants, Robert Merton (1965/1985) declared that although a received picture of progress in science consists of that idea (attributed to Isaac Newton), in (historical) reality, it is the appointed giants who stand on a pyramid of midgets. But it is a demand of the narrative convention that big discoveries must be made by big heroes; a story about ant-like workers would be dull (Czarniawska, 2009a).

I would like to suggest yet another possibility: that of a midget (myself), who believes to be standing alone, not on the top, but at least in a place with a view, and suddenly discovers that she was, in fact, all the time standing on somebody’s shoulders. Was the reason for invisibility that the shoulders belonged to a woman?

This discovery happened in connection with a text I was asked to contribute to a Festschrift for Lars Engwall (Sahlin et al., 2009). I had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series note
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: morality, ethics and responsibility in organization and management
• 2 Forgetting to remember: Maria Ossowska, the giant on whose shoulders I stand
• 3 Val Plumwood: organizing for the future
• 4 Contributions from Gayatri C. Spivak to organizational thinking: rethinking identity, ethics and responsibility in a global context
• 5 Lauren Berlant: cruel organizations
• 6 Judith Butler: theorist and political activist
• Index