Organizing Corporeal Ethics

A Research Overview

Alison Pullen, Carl Rhodes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367898816
• eBook ISBN: 9781000514957
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book explores the meaning and practice of corporeal ethics in organized life. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied, and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it.

Pullen and Rhodes show how corporeal ethics is fundamentally based in embodied affect, yet practically materialized in ethico-political acts of positive resistance and networked solidarity. Considering ethics in this way turns our attention to how people's conduct and interactions might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Pullen and Rhodes outline the ways in which ethically grounded resistance and critique can and do challenge self-interested organizational power and privilege. They account for how corporeal ethics serves to destabilize the ways that organizations reproduce practices that negate difference and result in oppression, discrimination, and inequality.

The book is suitable for students, scholars, and citizens who want to learn more about the radical possibilities of how political actions arising from corporeal ethics can strive for equality and justice.

1 The ethics of organization

DOI: 10.4324/9781003031048-1

Over the past 20 years, ethics has become a central theme in the study of organizations, widely recognized as a ‘growing and important field of study’ (McLeod et al., 2016: 430). Often fuelled by a sense of moral outrage over the corporate scandals that elevated the ethics of business to the centre of the public stage, researchers have questioned the morality of business, especially as it relates to the exercise of increasingly vast corporate power on an international scale (Pullen and Rhodes, 2015a). In response, there have been various demands for a new and different type of ethics that might better respond to the inequalities produced by contemporary global capitalism (Rhodes, 2019) in a manner that enacts non-violent ethics of relations between people at work (Tyler, 2019).

In terms of these interpersonal relations, the ‘ethics of organization’ (Phillips and Margolis, 1999; Hancock, 2008) or ‘organizational ethics’ (Sims, 1991; Barker, 2002) attends to how ethics can be brought to bear on the complex institutional contexts in which members of organizations find themselves. This reflects a distinction between the general remit of business ethics, and the specific organizational focus of an ethics of organizations. As a field of study and practice, business ethics corals a wide set of concerns as related to ‘the morals of commercial and corporate conduct’ (Heath et al., 2018: 1). On the basis of such encompassing definitions, phenomena researched in business ethics include, inter alia, corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, economic crises, modern slavery, globalization, corporate governance, marketing, accounting, and finance.

When it comes to an ethics of organization, the focus is directed explicitly at how ethics relates to the management and organization of work as manifest in the political, social, and interpersonal relationships between people in organizations, as well as their institutionalization. Of concern is the way that people might collectively mobilize and organize to realize ethically motivated political projects. Consequently, the study of the ethics of organization has been dominated by the question of what form of ethics, either normative or descriptive, might be appropriate for the characteristics of organizational life that are distinct from other ethical domains. This begins with a doubt that ethical theory developed in relation to other substantive spheres of life can simply be ‘applied’ to organizations without 7.

The ethics of organization has drawn attention to what organizations might do to develop ‘objectives and practices which are morally legitimate’ (Wicks and Freeman, 1998: 128). Established concerns centre on how organizations can achieve improved levels of ethicality (e.g. Phillips and Margolis, 1999; Hancock, 2008; Constantinescu and Kaptein, 2020), as well as on criticizing organizations for their ethical inadequacies and failures (e.g. Roberts, 2001; Jones, 2003; Rhodes, 2016). More recent writing has directed attention to the ethics at play in organizations despite, rather than because of, an organization’s managerially sanctioned or administered ethical arrangements (e.g. Munro, 2014; Rhodes, 2016). Further, while resistance to organizational power and control has been a long-standing topic of study (e.g. Jermier et al., 1994; Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Westwood and Johnston, 2012; McCabe, 2019) if and how ethics can be played out in the form of such resistance has also begun to be explored (e.g. Helin and Sandström, 2010; McMurray et al., 2011; Knights, 2015; Rhodes et al., 2020).

With this book, we follow the trajectory of the approach to the ethics of organization that does not privilege management and managerialism as the locus of power or central point of inquiry. Indeed, such a privileging is part of a long-established practice of gendered organizations that privilege masculine organizational norm (Acker, 1990; Knights and Pullen, 2019) as characterized by instrumental rationality, hierarchy, and sovereignty. Thirty years ago, Joan Acker elaborated that organizations are structured around gender differences that privilege the masculine in a way that suppresses femininity as being emotional and outside of the realm of rational organization. In such organizational contexts, ethics too can be subject to an un-named masculinity based on reciprocity of exchange, calculation of self-advantage, and rationalization. What Acker called the gendered organization is not simply a matter of structures, plans, and representational hierarchies. It is a context in which people live their lives, and through which those lives can be affected by the gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized structures (Acker, 2006; Britton and Logan, 2008) as they are experienced in affective intercorporeal interaction with others (Pullen et al., 2017). Feminist research has been the location of much critique of gendered inequality in organizations, offering insight into how resistance manifests and how ethics emerge from resistance (Fotaki et al., 2014; Kenny and Fotaki, 2015; Vachhani and Pullen, 2019).

The corporeal ethics of organization we address in this book seeks to redress rationalization of ethics through an ethics that is:

crucially concerned with the specificity of one’s embodiment […and…] is prior to the conceptualization of ethics as reducible to a set of universal principles dictated by reason (whose reason?). It is opposed to any system of ethics which elevates itself from a contingent form of life to the pretension of being the one necessary form of life.

(Grosz, 1994: 26)

Rather than being universal, corporeal ethics is the domain of the ‘embodied ethical human being-in-the-world’, suffused by affect, intimacy, and the non-rational (McCarthy, 2010: 3). That by Western standards these categories are culturally feminine is part and parcel of their neglect in the masculine gendered organization. This critique has issued a call that:

a new ethico-political ideal is required to contest the adequacy of dominant understandings of social interaction as matters of choice and rational decision-making and in contesting these understandings encourage us to imagine social alternatives.

(Beasley and Bacchi, 2007: 1464)

For us, corporeal ethics offers such an alternative, in particular an alternative to the commonly rationalized ethics that we find dominant in both the theory and practice of organizations. Corporeal ethics turns our attention to how people’s conduct and interaction in organizations might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. This includes power relations that would seek to render ethics itself in a rational-masculine form.

Although gender is central to corporeal ethics, it is by far not the sole basis of difference that matters. Indeed, it calls ‘calls attention to the causal forces marking, empowering, or depleting some bodies’ (Sharp, 2019: 799), whether that force is applied idiosyncratically, or on account of the, among other things, sexed, racialized, gendered, classed nature of those bodies. Ethics comes to the fore in resistance to forms of oppression to which some bodies are subjected. However, this is not a form of resistance that is born simply out of an antipathy towards authority as a matter of principle or a negative oppositional desire. It is resistance motivated by care and concern arising when the well-being of others is damaged by the way that work is organized.

In articulating corporeal ethics, we are centrally informed by how feminist scholars have approached and theorized embodiment and ethics (Grosz, 1994; Gatens, 1996; Diprose, 2002; Shildrick, 2015). Reflecting on the ethics that emerge intercorporeally, we consider ethics as emerging from openness and generosity towards other people as it occurs in organizations. This is a form of hospitality in which the other person is given priority over the self as one is called to responsibility for that other person (Diprose, 1994, 2002, 2013). Relating this ethics to organizational life is not about the institutionalization of a set of conditions that aver that they can promote or ensure ethical behaviour among members of an organization (Weber, 1993). To do so would conflate ethics with the rational imposition of one person’s will over another. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it; an experience that ‘constitutes social relations […] and communal existence’ (Diprose, 2002: 5).

To think of generosity this way positions it:

not as a regulative ideal, but as a constitutive practice of sociality, community, and being together. It is in this sense […] that generosity be thought of as a modality of power […] is a practice through which people ordinarily act in concert to sustain relationships over time and space, relationships that enact their own normative principles and which depend upon non-sovereign modes of selfhood […] generosity is not a ‘moral’ concept at all, in so far as this is meant to imply a regulative ideal of some sort against which the actualities of practice can be judged and evaluated from the position of an impartial observer.

(Barnett and Land, 2007: 1073)

To develop an understanding of this communal and affectively charged ethics, the book examines ‘embodied ethics’ (Gatens, 1996) and ‘corporeal generosity’ (Diprose, 2002), considering how a specifically relational and embodied approach might inform an ethics of organization (cf. Roberts, 2001; Hancock, 2008). We explore the ethical relations that are marked affectively by generosity; a generosity based on acceptance and welcome of other people’s difference. Such generosity can materialize in political acts that interrupt and disturb those practices of organizational power that work to close down difference. This political actualization is realized in the form of an ethico-politics of resistance that is not so much about passing judgements as it is about disrupting the taken-for-granted means through which judgement is violently and rationally imposed.

Our central purpose is to articulate an ethics of organization that is embodied and pre-reflective in origin, and socio-political in practice. Such ethics manifests in resisting those forms of organizing that close down difference and enact oppression; a practice we refer to as an ethico-politics of resistance. Through the course of the book, we show how the uptake of ethical openness and generosity is a matter of resisting those practices of organizing that deny or oppress difference and/or privilege certain modes of identity; examples of this being sexism, racism, violence, and the inequitable distribution of wealth (Dunne et al., 2008; Vachhani and Pullen, 2019). Corporeal ethics is an especially valuable approach to understanding and informing ethics in organizations when it results in contesting such practices. This approach avers the power and poten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The ethics of organization
• 5 The affective organization of corporeal ethics
• Index