The Ethics of Organizational Ethics

Abstract

This Perspectives article reviews research on organizational ethics presented in a select group of articles from Organization Studies, each of which draws inspiration, directly or indirectly, from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. This work is commended for how it has wrestled the locus of ethicality away from organizational authority and instead examined ethics in relation to the actions and interactions of those subject to that authority. Collectively, these articles articulate organizational ethics as an affective, relational and embodied response to the needs of others. Such ethics motivates political engagement in resistance to oppression and domination meted out by organizational authority. Acknowledging the significance of this contribution, the present article examines how the research reviewed is remiss for its latent humanism and the attendant risk of assuming that the actions of individual ethical subjects are morally superior to organized forms of ethics. The source of this ethical privileging of individual subjects comes from a failure to distinguish between the practice of ethics in organizations and the originary ethics of ethics. Following Levinas, the latter is understood as the passive and pre-subjective call to responsibility for the other with whom one is organized and that precedes any concrete proposal for an organizational ethics. By acknowledging the ethics of ethics, we see that affective, interpersonal ethics and more formally organized ethics can both be translations of the ethics of ethics, each being necessarily imperfect. The tension between authoritative and interpersonal forms of ethics in organizations is not a problem for ethics, but rather a condition of the possibility of organizational ethics itself.