Corporeal ethics and the politics of resistance in organizations

Abstract

This article offers an understanding of organizational ethics as embodied and pre-reflective in origin and socio-political in practice. We explore ethics as being founded in openness and generosity towards the other, and consider the organizational implications of a ‘corporeal ethics’ grounded in the body before the mind. Shifting focus away from how managers might rationally pursue organizational ethics, we elaborate on how corporeal ethics can manifest in practical and political acts that seek to defy the negation of alterity within organizations. This leads us to consider how people’s conduct in organizations might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Such an 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.