Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization 9780367142872

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Disturbing Business Ethics

Twenty-first century Western neoliberalism has seen the transformation of self-interest from an economic imperative to a centrally constitutive part of dominant modes of subjective existence. Against this celebration of competitive individualism, Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy stands as a haunting reminder of an ethics that passively disturbs the self from its egoistic slumber, awakening it to the incessant demands of the other. Ethics stands as an anxious affective state of being where one is held to account by others, each one demanding care, attention and respect. Focusing on business activities and organizations, this book explores how this ethical demand of being-for-the-other becomes translated, in a necessarily impure way, into political action, contestation and resistance. Such a response to ethics invokes a disturbance of organizational order, including an order that might itself be labelled ‘ethical’. On these grounds, the book offers an explication of an ethics for organizations which disturbs the selfishness of neoliberal morality and can inform a democratic politics rested on a genuine concern for the other and for justice. Disturbing Business Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization offers an unconventional and enlightening approach to ethical thinking and practice in politics and organizations, and will be of interest to students of business, management, leadership, political science and organizational theory. Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney Business School. Carl’s research investigates the ethical and political condition in which contemporary organizations operate and its relationship with their behaviour. Current projects focus on cultural and gender diversity and discrimination in leadership, and business practice’s vexed association with democracy and justice. This work draws extensively on post-structuralist ethical traditions, most especially as they relate to the work of Emmanuel Levinas and his interlocutors. Carl’s most recent books are CEO Society: The Corporate Takeover of Everyday Life (Zed, 2018 with Peter Bloom) and The Companion to Ethics and Politics in Organizations (Routledge, 2015 with Alison Pullen). Carl’s academic work can also be found in journals such as Organization Studies, Human Relations, The Business Ethics Quarterly The Journal of Business Ethics, and Gender, Work and Organization. He regularly contributes to the media with articles and commentary on issues related to ethics, politics and business.

Routledge Studies in Business Ethics

Business ethics is a site of contestation, both in theory and practice. For some it serves as a salve for the worst effects of capitalism, giving businesses the means self-regulate away from entrenched tendencies of malfeasance and exploitation. For others business ethics is a more personal matter, concerning the way that individuals can effectively wade through the moral quagmires that characterise so many dimensions of business life. Business ethics has also been conceived of as a fig leaf designed to allow business-as-usual to continue while covering over the less savoury practices so as to create an appearance of righteousness. Across these and other approaches, what remains critical is to ensure that the ethics of business is the subject of incisive questioning, critical research, and diverse theoretical development. It is through such scholarly inquiry that the increasingly powerful purview of corporations and business activity can be interrogated, understood and, ultimately, reformulated. This series contributes to that goal by publishing the latest research and thinking across the broad terrain that characterised business ethics. The series welcomes contributions in areas including: corporate social responsibility; critical approaches to business ethics; ethics and corporate governance; ethics and diversity; feminist ethics; globalization and business ethics; philosophical traditions of business ethics; postcolonialism and the ethics of business; production and supply chain ethics; resistance, political activism and ethics; sustainability, environmentalism and climate change; the ethics of corporate misconduct; the politics of business ethics; and worker’s rights 16 Business Ethics After the Global Financial Crisis Lessons from The Crash Edited by Christopher Cowton, James Dempsey, and Tom Sorell 17 Disturbing Business Ethics Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization Carl Rhodes For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Disturbing Business Ethics Emmanuel Levinas and the Politics of Organization

Carl Rhodes

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Carl Rhodes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-14287-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-03115-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

1 Organizational disturbance and the politics of a passive ethics 1 2 Anarchic ethics, dissent and the deinstitutionalization of market morality 19 3 Affectivity and the unanswerable question of just leadership 41 4 Justice, politics and workplace diversity beyond a pure ethics 68 5 Radical democracy, ethics and the disruption of corporate sovereignty 89 6 Difficult freedom and the saying of a critical business ethics 113 Index

137

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of work conducted over the past 20 years, a time in which my own research into the ethics and politics of business and organizations came to be centrally informed by the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The results of this work were honoured in 2017 when I had the privilege of being awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Technology Sydney for a thesis entitled ‘Disturbing ethics: politics, resistance and contestation in organizational life’. The present volume is a distillation of that thesis. The book includes revised material from the following original works: ‘After reflexivity: ethics, freedom and the writing of organization studies’. Organization Studies, 30: 653–672 (2009); ‘Ethics, alterity and the rationality of leadership justice’. Human Relations, 65: 1311–1331 (2012); ‘Ethical anarchism, business ethics and the politics of disturbance’. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 14: 725–737 (2014); ‘Democratic business ethics: Volkswagen’s emissions scandal and the disruption of corporate sovereignty’. Organization Studies, 37: 1501–1518 (2016); and ‘Ethical praxis and the business case for LGBT diversity: political insights from Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas’s. Gender, Work & Organization, 24: 533–546 (2017). I thank editors and publishers of the journals in which these papers appear for their permission to further develop them into this volume. A special acknowledgement goes to Alison Pullen, my greatest collaborator, my greatest friend, and my greatest critic. Without Alison the directions that my work has taken would have been far less ambitious, far less adventurous and, indeed, far less rewarding. Alison has taught me, more than she knows, the value of scholarship and the love of thinking. And of course, so much else.

1 Organizational disturbance and the politics of a passive ethics

In a conversation with Philippe Nemo in 1982, Emmanuel Levinas summed up the meaning of his ethical philosophy as an extended description of the phrase “after you, sir” (Levinas, 1982/1985: 89). With this simple statement Levinas alludes carefully to the depth of reflection that characterizes his inquiry into the foundation of ethics, as well as to some of its inevitable, yet necessary, limitations. The phrase suggests that ethics is, fundamentally, concerned with greeting and responding to the other ahead of oneself. Such an ethics is a liberation from ­egoism  – an insatiable desire to be for the other that is put before a selfish obsession with the “insular sufficiency” of one’s own enjoyment (Levinas, 1961/1969: 216). Levinas evinces an ethics that does not pit good against evil, or right against wrong – nor is it one that lays out a set of rules, a scheme, or a template as to how one might pursue or achieve righteousness. For Levinas, ethics arises out of the disturbance of selfishness and egoism – a disturbance that would put the other person ahead of me such that I might be commanded by the other’s ethical demand. This means not just placing the other’s interests over and above my own but recognizing the very primacy of the other in the formation of a self prior to that self having constructed any set of interests. This is the other to whom I owe myself and from whom I expect nothing in return. The other that Levinas writes of is not one that is considered in relation my knowledge of him or her. The other is not that person who can be characterized and thematized through any system of knowledge that one might use to make one’s way through the world. Nor is this a person who one can apprehend through a comparison either with one’s self or with the multitude of other others who might demand one’s attention. The relationship with the other, for Levinas, is pre-personal and spiritual: void of comparison to, or inclusion within, any representational symbolism or imagery and prior to reflection and contemplation. The ethical encounter with the other by which I am, in my own passivity, disturbed exceeds and precedes any self-ordained principle that I might apply so as to ‘know’ him or her (Levinas, 1986/1998). It is this connection between ethics and disturbance that has inspired the title of this book. The book emerges from research into the

2  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics relationships between ethics and organizations that I have been undertaking since the early 2000s. Throughout this period Levinas’s philosophy has been my most reliable, steadfast, as well as challenging inspiration and influence. This influence, insofar as I can identify it in my thinking and writing, is explicitly and implicitly concerned with this idea of ‘disturbance’, the meaning of which I will return to shortly. I first came to Levinas through reading Zygmunt Bauman and Jacques Derrida, each of whom, in their different ways, owes a considerable debt to Levinas for their own thinking. This was not a predetermined path but one that I only discovered I was on after it had begun. I was educated as a doctoral student in the 1990s, a time when post-structuralism (at the time often conflated with ‘postmodernism’) was a significant and challenging influence on the social sciences. Bauman and Derrida were key figures. Bauman, especially in his books Postmodern Ethics (1993) and Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (1995), opened the possibility, for me and others, for a way of understanding social and organizational life that acknowledged what he calls the ‘moral impulse’. Bauman’s teaching was that caring for others in social (especially bureaucratic) situations was always at the risk of ‘adiaphorization’ – a condition where moral criteria for action are swept away by blind adherence to procedural rationality and its outcomes. Against this, Bauman highlighted an ethics that defied rationality through a moral impulse that was somehow a definitive and pre-cognitive feature of our engagement with the world. Through reading Derrida, most especially The Gift of Death (1995), ‘The Force of Law’ (1992) and The Politics of Friendship (1997), I was opened up to the similar possibility of a lived ethics that moved beyond and before the rational calculation of rules, codes and procedures. Responsibility, by Derrida’s account, was to be found in the slippage of time where a decision was to be made, but no volume of knowledge or science could justify it. Responsibility could only manifest in a definite interruption of the ‘ordeal of the undecidable’, such that to embrace ethics was to make a leap of faith into a future unknown – a ‘moment of madness’. The figure of Emmanuel Levinas, in letter and in spirit, was heavily present on the pages of both Bauman and Derrida’s books, insistently attesting to how responsibility is not at first responsibility of myself or for myself, that the sameness of myself is derived from the other, as if it were second to the other, coming to itself as responsible and mortal from the position of my responsibility before the other, for the other’s death and in my face of it. In the first place it is because the other is mortal that my responsibility is singular and ‘inalienable’. (Derrida, 1995: 46, italics in original)

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  3 I read Levinas after Bauman and Derrida, a reading I was called to by the pressure of their interlocution and to its promise of an ethics that might operate without self-righteousness or moralizations, instead being located in the very meaning of being before being. The concerns of the chapters in this book have emerged from a consideration of such an ethics in specific relation to work organizations, as well as to the practical and political actions that it might inspire. What Bauman and Derrida showed me was the inherently practical possibilities that Levinas’s thinking could lead to in terms of bringing ethics to bear on understanding organizational matters insofar as they involved human interaction, sociality, politics and (possibly) justice. Levinas offered, more than anyone else, a way of approaching that task, and being sentient to it, as a matter of lived and embodied reality. This spoke directly to the necessity of, and contradictions embedded in, an ethics relevant to the embodied realties of existence.

‘After you, sir’ For Levinas (1974/1998), rationality, language and knowledge are disturbed by the intrusion of the other into one’s own solipsism, rendering the self into question and opening one up to the demands of the other’s presence in face-to-face relation. It is perhaps commonplace to think of ethics as manifesting in personal action in the form of the doing of good deeds and the making of responsible personal choices. Before any of that, Levinas insists on the apparently counter-intuitive position that our relation to ethics is one of passivity. Levinas tells us that our responsibility to the other occurs before our own freedom, purely by being exposed to other. He does not underestimate this, calling responsibility to be a “passivity more passive than all passivity” (1974/1996: 121). The point is that ethics and responsibility arrive at us, calling us to respond to the other in a manner that renders us captive to their mercy. This relationship is one where “the self is not only responsible for the other, but is also the hostage of all the others, much like the image of maternity where the mother is the hostage of the child that she is carrying and nourishing” (Abensour, 2002: 14). This is not about the exercise of an “altruistic will” (Levinas, 1974/1995: 112) that one is in charge of, but begins with an obligation pressed upon us irrespective of our consciousness or power. It is in this sense that ethics is a disturbance in that it unsettles the arrogance of the ego’s assumed freedom so as to recognize the other ahead of one’s self. ‘After you, sir’ sums up this passive disturbance unequivocally. A seemingly everyday statement of politeness and generosity, with Levinas these three words take on the meaning of placing the other before oneself in an act of hospitality without concern for reciprocity or payment.

4  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics That is not the only meaning at play, however, and the addressee of this statement, ‘sir’, points to the very problem that arises in the inevitably necessary use of language as a means to express the idea of ethics, especially as the ethical relation is conceived in a way that conflates humanity with fraternity (Levinas, 1961/1969). For Levinas ethics is intimately wrapped up in infinity insofar as the other who calls me to ethics by disturbing my solitude is wholly other and not reducible to my self, or to that self’s systems of knowledge. This is the very alterity to which I am passively responsible and hostage – it renders me helpless and vulnerable. The other cannot be encapsulated in language and its inevitability as a system of comparison with other others, lest the conscious ego takes over to capture the other in one’s own terms. The other is always unique and irreplaceable. As Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, “the idea of infinity alone maintains the exteriority of the other” – moreover, this idea “exceeds my powers […] it does not come from our prior depths” (1961/1969: 196). Language, then, is a poor tool through which to account for the passive responsibility of ethics, as Levinas well knows. There is an unresolvable contradiction at play. Any attempt to describe the ethical relation with the other, practically or philosophically, always already relies on representation and language. Notwithstanding this reliance, the primary difference with which ethics begins “cannot be synchronized in representation” (Levinas, 1974/1998: 193). “After you, sir”! With his identification of the other as ‘sir’, Levinas elevates the other ethically to a position of respect and superiority that addresses one from on high. But, simultaneously the ethical other is addressed, linguistically, as a man. Gender, as a most basic mode of thematization through which the other is synchronized with one’s own categories, is implored in a description of ethics that attests to the infinity of the other while at the same time defying it. It is the case that “Levinas is not always Levinasian” (Bernasconi, 1995: 84) – a matter for which he has been criticized not only for his gendering of alterity but also for his identification of Palestinians as both other and enemy, and his failure to condemn their murder in Israeli war camps. The act of language becomes a practice, perhaps a choice, whereby the knowing ego arrogantly surpasses the passivity of ethics through the ignorance of its own self-confidence. Levinas himself is not immune. The other, so titled as ‘sir’, is not before rationality, nor are the other’s demands received passively. Instead, with ‘after you sir’ the other is encased in a linguistic assumption of masculinity that is both anachronistic and telling. With this statement Levinas, apparently unwittingly, shows the limits of what is possible with ethics. These limits refer to an inevitable human finitude and fallibility. Any rational attestation to an ethics of the other will always defy an ethics which, as ‘first philosophy’, exists prior to a lagging and necessarily inadequate knowledge of it. Levinas (1984/1989) writes, “Knowledge is re-presentation, a return to presence, and nothing

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  5 may remain other to it” (p. 77, emphasis in original). The question of the gender of the ethically singular and unknowable other (see Pullen and Rhodes, 2010) is further confused by Levinas’s more common association of ethics with the “epiphany of the feminine” (Levinas, 1961/1969: 245). Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir (1949) long ago criticized Levinas’s ethics as emanating from an implicit masculine perspective bolstered by an explicit reverence for a mysterious and unknowable femininity (see also Anderson, 2019). Fundamentally, it is the very representational nature of knowledge, more precisely knowledge of the other, that is disturbed by the passive ethical relation with the other. On account of this, one cannot expect human lives to be pure and righteous. Instead, My responsibility demands more of me than I want or know, more than I can think or choose – but it does not ask me to exist as an angel, in some eternal mode without a body. Transcendence cannot transport me to some other kind of place and time but must disrupt me here and now, commanding me to transcend myself and remain here and now. (Gibbs, 1995: 13, italics added) Levinas (1974/1998) characterizes the two opposing relations of knowledge and ethics as ‘synchrony’ and ‘diachrony’. Synchrony, literally meaning together at the same time, rests on the assumption that language can without fault perform representation such that the difference between the sign and that which is signified is nullified as the two merge in a synchronous co-temporal unity. A corollary is that with synchrony the meaning of ethics and the meaning of the other are at the mercy of language’s claims to signification. The other “becomes a phenomenon, is fixed, assembled in a tale, is synchronized, presented, lends itself to a noun, receives a title” (p. 42). ‘Sir’ is such a title. Ethics defies synchrony and the human hubris that it harbours. It is with ethics that the other is appreciated and approached as being both before representation and ‘outside the subject’ in the sense that it is “prior to knowledge […and…] beyond any kinship and any commonality of kind” (Levinas, 1987/1993: 123). This is a relationship where the other is unknowable, irreducible to rational language replete with nouns and adjectives and irreducible to the machinations of the logos. It is the very pretence of knowledge’s claim to ‘know’ that is disturbed by the arrival of an ethics to which I am a passive recipient. Also disturbed is the pretence of knowledge about ethics itself. Living with ethics is fraught with anxiety and contradiction. Although ethics may leave its trace in language, it can never be reduced to it. The diachrony of ethics rests in its refusal to be captured in the present through representations. Ethics’ diachrony is the very temporal

6  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics slippage between the other who faces me and calls me to be responsible as totally other, and my violating and futile attempts to incarcerate the meaning of that other in the feebleness of words. Diachrony, for Levinas, is a ‘disturbance’ that arouses one’s responsibility for the other, where difference is the past that cannot be caught up with, an unimaginable future, the non-representable status of the neighbor behind which I am late and obsessed with the neighbor. This difference is my non-indifference to the other. (1974/1998: 89) The temporal disruption that ethics inaugurates is also a disruption of the self and a disruption of that self’s pretentious rationality – such is the experience of embodied life. To be called passively to an ethics of responsibility by the other is to enter an operation in “the entrails of the self, rendering its inwardness, putting its identity out of phase and disrupting its recurrence” (Levinas, 1974/1998: 196).

Ethics and politics The motif of disruption, as it can be read in and into Levinas’s work, is a one that has infused my own more modest attempts to research ethics as it relates to both the practice and the study of organizations. This research has been concerned very much with practical matters, considering, as it does, how ethics manifests organizationally through modes of political action, contestation and resistance, as well as demands for justice that arise when an ethics inspired by a responsibility to the other meets the practical and social limitations of having to be somehow distributed also to the ‘third party’ and all of the other others. This passage from ethics to politics, however, is one that is neither straightforward nor reconcilable, yet in organizational settings it is one that is necessary if ethics is somehow to inform practice. Ethics and politics are, following Levinas’s articulation of them, of an entirely different order with the affective exposure of ethics not translatable into the rational comparisons of politics and justice. Simply stated, it is the case that “a morally legitimated politics [is] structurally impossible” (Drabinski, 2000: 50) because the affective intensity of the ethical relationship of the one to the unique and unpresentable other is not something that can be captured in the language of rules, laws and compromises required by politics. It is thus the case that to have any practical organizational import, ethics requires politics, while at the same time resisting its comparative logic. Hence, Between politics and ethics, there is a gap and the necessity of relation. The gap is manifest in the opposed logics. The necessity is

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  7 manifest in something like the facticity of my sociality. There are many others and they command me to be a political animal. (Drabinski, 2000: 53) The problem that arises in sociopolitical relations such as those infused in organizations is that no matter how ethically committed one might be, any political action inspired by that ethics is inevitably diluted and compromised. As Levinas himself elucidates, In the measure that the face of the Other relates us with the third party, the metaphysical relation of the I with the Other moves into the form of a We, aspires to a State, institutions, laws, which are the source of universality. But politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other who gave rise to it for it judges them according to universal rules, and this in absentia. (Levinas, 1961/1969: 300) This points to the heart of the overwhelming aporia at the heart of any form of organized ethics. The affective upsurge of ethics in the form of hospitality, generosity, mercy and selflessness gives way to the fact that the existence of more than one other (in the form of the third party and the other others) always means that the resources which one has to welcome the other must be divided between the indivisible according to some measure, preference or calculation. The other whose infinite exteriority has awakened me to ethics must then be rendered finite insofar as their demands upon me can be compared and compromised with the demands of the other others. This is the case not just for politics proper but also for human relationships in and with work organizations insofar as we might enact “a conception of organizational justice grounded on the promise of a mode of organizing that does not violate the particularity of people” (Byers and Rhodes, 2007: 239) as well as how injustice in organizations might motivate an ethical demand that translates into political acts of resistance, contestation or even disobedience. As already indicated such a translation is not one that is replete with righteousness and good conscience. Instead, The translation of the moral impulse in to the political realities of resistance and intervention is such that while action is motivated by ethics, that action can never be considered wholly ethical. Indeed, it is the management of this tension between ethics and politics that can be considered to be the task of the ethical subject. (McMurray, Pullen and Rhodes, 2011: 555) The implication of this, as it is reflected in my own work, is that it is not possible to map out a route which might lead to righteousness or moral

8  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics certitude for either organizations or people at work. Instead of claiming an ethics that comes in the form of guidelines for righteousness, the impetus is, instead, an extended consideration of the meaning of ethics in relation to organizations, as well as the practical and political implication of that meaning. Especially pertinent is how ethics can inform a call to justice and the exercise of power so as to disturb not just personal subjectivity but also organizational order, or especially, when that order is proclaimed as being ‘ethical’. This second, organizational, disturbance is that which would ensure that “mercy and charity can breathe” (Levinas in Robbins, 2001: 230) in those arenas of life where human sociality is institutionalized.

Neoliberal morality It is perhaps no surprise that the research on which this book is based has been undertaken in the heyday of neoliberalism. It is in this period that the pursuit of self-interest praised so long ago by Adam Smith as the harbinger of economic prosperity has transmuted into the dominant ethos of our time. As Smith (1776/2014) proclaimed almost a quarter of a millennium ago, It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. (p. 10) Smith tears at the yoke that binds the practice of generosity and hospitality on the one hand with the material goods afforded to society on the other. He bequeaths the idea that, without any intention of goodwill or scent of magnanimity, those who enter into the relations of production and sale, and who do so for the purposes of a devotion to themselves and their own interests, can inadvertently produce good outcomes for others. Taken seriously Smith’s formulation is easily adopted as a reasoned moral justification for the pursuit of economic self-interest. Smith’s shadow may still loom large, but there is a vast difference between the 18th-century Britain and today’s globalized world. At very least these are differences that register in terms of the structure of capitalist economies and their political justification through the marriage of liberal democracy and market-based ideology. The reformulation of classic liberalism into contemporary neoliberalism has retained, yet amplified and extended, the moral justification of self-interest that Smith predicated. Neoliberalism is not, as Foucault (2008) argued in

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  9 his 1978–1979 lectures at College de France, simply “Adam Smith revived” (p. 130). The neoliberal ethos does maintain a self-justification reliant on the idea that collective economic interests are best achieved through the members of that collective pursuing their own economic ­interests – putting themselves first if you will. Added with neoliberalism is the conviction that rather than just bringing a self-interested ethos to the specific sphere of economic relations, this same ethos is projected onto “a general art of government” (p. 131). Let’s not forget that Smith believed the combination of self-interest market-based relations and the division of labour would yield a society characterized by cooperation and equality. This contrasts sharply with the neoliberal preoccupation with self-interest and competition as end-values in themselves (Gilbert, 2013). Moreover, while neoliberalism inherits from classical liberalism a privileging of the market, what is also new is that all dimensions of life are now subject to metaphorization as markets. With neoliberalism, self-interest’s moral jurisdiction is extended as an injunction about how to live such that “competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in society” (p. 145). Neoliberalism by this account means that self-­interest, limited strictly to economic affairs in its instantiation by Smith, now governs life in general. What Foucault lectured more than 40 years ago has been realised in extremis today in a manner that imbues his work with an almost soothsaying quality. Wendy Brown (2015) has elucidated how the entry of homo oeconomicus as the ever-present hero of humanity’s narrative is now jeopardizing any possible future for democratic society. Today, “the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life” is such that “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities” (p. 31). Beyond economics, neoliberalism “governs as a sophisticated common sense” (p. 35) in which self-interest is itself given a taken-for-granted morally righteous character. With contemporary neoliberalism, self-interest has fully transformed from being an economic imperative to being a centrally constitutive part of dominant modes of subjective existence. The effects of this on working life are significant, as self-interested, competitive and entrepreneurial norms and behaviours are largely normalized in business and workplace interactions, as well as the increasingly precarious ways that many people are employed (see Harvey, Rhodes, Vachhani and Williams, 2017). What is prized here is the active and self-interested subject who, by virtue of their own talents, skills and capacities, has the wherewithal to come out on top in the competitive game of life (Bloom and Rhodes, 2018). And if organizational subjects do not submit to this willingly, then the violent enforcement of excessive performance demands at the expense of personal well-being can become seen as legitimate managerial practice, morally justified on the grounds

10  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics of productivity, and institutionalized as ‘normal’ (Rhodes, Pullen, Vickers and Clegg, 2010). Neoliberalism is characterized by a particular morality that appears diametrically opposed to that offered to us by Levinas. The central moral motif within a dominant neoliberal frame is the market, understood as an ideal means through which both social and economic relations can be organized. The result is both the “the economization of morality” and the demand to “ground social relations in the economic rationality of markets” (Shamir, 2008: 3). With neoliberalism, self-interested action in competitive social and economic scenarios, with each person morally responsible for themselves and not others, is escalated to the level of a moral imperative and duty. Neoliberal morality is, then, a morality of the market that not only conceives of practices associated with rivalry, economic rationality and self-interest as features of economic markets but extends these as virtues for everyday life (Bloom, 2017). Understood in this historical context, ethics is less a matter of philosophical debate and scholarly intrigue and more a question that deserves to disturb and interrupt our political realities, and the inequities and oppressions they abet. Alphonso Lingis brings ethics down to earth when he explains how Levinas has So radicalized our understanding of the experience of our encounters with others and of the good we do to them and the malice in that good that [he dominates] ethical philosophy read today. But who can think of our interpersonal behaviors without thinking of the scandalous growing gap between obscenely rich countries and destitute countries, and between rich and poor in all countries? Without thinking of the global corporate powers that have been institutionalized in our societies and the massive weapons of state terror that guarantee them […] we urgently need an analysis of the imperative imposed on social and economic institutions and explanations of effective and institutionalized ways to make them responsible. (Lingis, 2009: 32) This is an enormous task, yet one to which I hope in this book I can make a modest contribution insofar as it relates to the power of business organizations.

The politics of ethical disruption In a neoliberal context, the idea, from Levinas, that ethics involves a certain disruption of self-interest and passivity might seem somewhat quaint and idealistic – naïve even. Levinas’s work is quite open to a certain ‘angelic’ reading (Critchley, 2004) whereby his is seen as a pure and non-earthly ethics quite apart from the messy, humdrum and political

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  11 realities of the empirical world of lived social interaction. Quite the contrary, in a historic context where the self-interested economic self is lionized, Levinas’s philosophy goes beyond the idea that ethics is a matter of personal reflection and contemplation and takes on a political character (see Bergo, 1999; Caygill, 2005; Morgan, 2016). Indeed, to neoliberalism, we might apply Levinas’s (1995/1999) warning that “the most dangerous of seducers is the one who carries you away with pious words to violence and contempt for the other” (p. 177). A politics that contests neoliberal piety is one where the disruption of ethics enters into the field of the social – that is the field in which neoliberalism operates. Such ethics invokes a radical questioning of the taken-for-granted self-interested ethos of our time and offers the means with which to build an ethically and politically informed interruption and critique of the neoliberal status quo. The chapters in this book share an overwhelming concern with the character and practice of such interruption and critique as it relates to work organizations. This is in direct contrast to the dominant approach to studies of business ethics and ethics in organizations whose purpose is to determine the ways and means by which organizations can justify the morality of their operations and pursue ethics as a concrete goal worthy of self-glorification and social accolade (Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). That my own research has deliberately disavowed that approach does not, however, mean to infer that ethics is not present in the machinations of organization life. Instead, a significant focus has been on contesting how organizations appropriate ethics for the purpose of enhancing their own self-interest, as well as considering how ethics might directly inform a politics of resistance and disturbance in and of organizations (see Pullen and Rhodes, 2015). We can consider, following Abensour (2002), that Levinas’s work can be regarded as a particular form of ‘metapolitics’. As already canvassed, Levinas maintains that politics comes after ethics – the latter positions as ‘first philosophy’. Moreover, the unpresentable other who affectively inspires the awe of ethical infinitude is always imperfectly and weakly translated into the direct actions and judgements solidified in the political. Whereas politics may be inspired by ethics such that “the abstraction of the ethical relation must be incarnated in the life of the political realm” (Critchley, 2004: 173), such a politics can never live up to the extremity of the ethical demand that inspired it (see also Critchley, 2007). It is this gap between an ethical metapolitics and the exercise of power in plural sociopolitical contexts that mark out the leap of faith (cf. Derrida, 1995) required for any political action inspired by ethics to be taken. Such action is marked always already as being both ethically imperfect and ethically necessary – necessary in that politics without ethics would be nothing less than tyranny. The imperfection, on the other hand, arises from the need to organize power, whether that be

12  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics in the form of the state or of the corporation. The relationship of ethics to organization is political in that ethics creates a disturbance of politics and provokes the disturbance of politics. For even if justice, with the sudden appearance of the third party, imposes its measurement upon that which is incommensurable, at no time can it cut itself from the source that inspired and inspires it. (Abensour, 2002: 16) This disturbance is indeed even more ethically necessary when justice is forgotten such that social relations become guided by self-interest at the expense of the other. Either way, ethics, in disturbing the self from its egoistic slumber, simultaneously both disturbs and enables politics. It is this dual character of ethical disturbance that animates the remainder of this book. This begins in Chapter 2, ‘Anarchic ethics, dissent and the deinstitutionalization of market morality’. Here, ethics is explored and situated in relation to contemporary organizations by considering in some detail Levinas’s conception of anarchy. Ethics, for Levinas, is an-archic in that it is not something we can organize or know in a conscious ­manner – as already introduced, it is that to which we are wholly passive and which cannot be controlled by our intention. Passivity, as a mode of non-­freedom, is not something over which the ego has power or that involves the exercise of will, but rather that with which the egocentric assumptions of the self are radically questioned. This question is ethics. The chapter explores this ethics as it relates to a reconsideration of political subjectivity and its institutionalization. Besides outlining Levinas’s an-archic ethics, its implications for corporations are investigated. This investigation leads to a position where an-archy forms the basis of justifying dissent as an ethically necessary engagement with the excesses of corporate ­freedom – excesses that, with neoliberalism, have pushed large corporations closer and closer to an ideal of sovereignty. The ethical disturbance that such a position leads to is considered in relation to the political tradition associated with radical democracy. The chapter concludes by describing how the ethical pursuit of a horizon of radical democracy can be enacted through critique, resistance and opposition to the self-interested sovereignty of business and to the pretence of corporate immutability in the name of capitalism. Chapter 3, ‘Affectivity and the unanswerable question of just leadership’, explores the central themes of the book as it relates to the practice of management and leadership within organizations. This begins with a critical review and re-evaluation of dominant approaches to leadership justice, arguing that they appropriate justice as a rational mechanism to achieve organizational effectiveness. It is shown that in the main streams

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  13 of contemporary management thinking justice is a formal rationality that renders justice as a means to a different end, rather than a substantive rationality that values justice in and of itself. This rationalization of justice belies its masculinization, and as a result human values such as love and care are sidelined. Levinas’s work is drawn on in particular to consider how pre-rational affective relations between people form the basis of ethically informed justice. It is proposed that justice is not a particular variety of leadership behaviour but rather that leadership is the practice of justice. Justice is not here regarded as something to be achieved through pre-designated leadership practices, but it is an ongoing condition – an unanswerable question whose response defines the ethical quality of leadership. This ethical quality, it is concluded, places people in leadership positions in a permanent state of quandary as they grapple with the multiple and contradictory ethical and political demands that are placed upon them. In Chapter 4, ‘Justice, politics and workplace diversity beyond a pure ethics’, concern turns to justice-based activism within organizations as it relates to diversity and inclusion, with specific reference to activism that opposes discrimination against people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT). The focus is on reconsidering debates about the business case for workplace diversity – debates that have long suggested that there is an oppositional distinction between justifying diversity on self-interested business grounds and justifying it on the grounds of ethics, equality and social justice. This has led to an impasse between ethically driven diversity theory and activism, and the dominant business case approach commonly deferred to in managerial practice. As a way of mediating this impasse, the chapter demonstrates how a ­L evinasian-inspired ‘ethical praxis’ can be deployed both despite and because of non-ethically motivated approaches to ethics in business. Drawing on Levinas’s considerations of the relationship between ethics and the practice of justice, and focusing on Judith Butler’s reading of Levinas, it is argued that critiques of the business case for diversity rely on a pure ethics that does not adequately recognize its connection to lived politics. Conversely, support for the business case evinces a politics that has failed to remember its origin in ethics. This is explored most specifically in relation to workplace activism for LGBT equality. Drawing on this, the chapter positions ethical praxis as a political intervention undertaken in the name of ethics and uses this to suggest that the business case, despite its intrinsic ethical poverty, holds practical potential to create real opportunities for justice in organizations. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Radical democracy, ethics and the disruption of corporate sovereignty’ builds on Levinas’s ethics to interrogate and critique the relationship between corporate power and corporate ethics and use this critique to develop the idea of ‘democratic business ethics’. Again, drawing connections between a Levinasian approach to ethics and

14  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics theories of radical democracy, the chapter develops the possibility of a business ethics based not on corporate self-regulation but on the democratic process through which a society, as represented by its institutions and by individual citizens, can hold corporations to account for their actions. While corporate forms of business ethics have been widely shown to be couched in ideas of self-interest and self-oriented reciprocity, Levinas alerts us to how ethics is passively thrust upon us as we encounter a world of other people whose needs interrupt the self, its interests and the egoistic following of one’s own desires. The idea of democratic business ethics locates corporations in the democratic sphere so as to defy their assumed ethical self-sufficiency and invulnerability and to hold them to public account for their actions. This is a business ethics that is about rendering corporations vulnerable through a politics that contests both their putative morality and the deleterious effects of the exercise of the increasingly sovereign power they have achieved through neoliberalism. The way that democratic business ethics can unfold in practice is illustrated in relation to the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal of 2015 and its aftermath. The final chapter, ‘Difficult freedom and the saying of a critical business ethics’, considers ethics as it relates to the practice of scholarship itself, especially forms of critical scholarship that are engaged in questioning and disturbing the ethics of business and organizations. As a closing to the book, the chapter thus turns its own critique on itself so as to articulate an ethically informed reflexive stance through which to engage with an interrogation of the ethics of organizations. Building on research on reflexivity in research practice, the chapter reappraises the concept of responsibility in relation to the ethics of critical and post-representational research methodology. This reappraisal is centrally informed by Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said as it can be brought to bear on the ethics of the discursive construction of research as a form of representing the other. The chapter argues that responding to reflexivity extends beyond textual practice and self-accounting towards a responsibility for the exercise of academic freedom. This is a ‘difficult freedom’ (Levinas, 1963/1990) that entails a radical openness that is operationalized in an ongoing reinvention that resists the institutionalization of the field of inquiry through a form of transformative knowledge. Moreover, while such knowledge emerges from a responsibility to others, its exercise reminds our responsibility and comes without any pre-established rules or procedures that might ensure it can be met. It is the legacy and promise of reflexivity that can invigorate the imagination in research, its poiesis, as an ongoing project of saying the ethical.

Moving on In a neoliberal age where self-interest has been lauded as a virtue, an ethics that derives its meaning from caring for others before a consideration

Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  15 of the self is out of step with both fashion and ‘reality’. Across personal, economic and political spheres, under the guidance of neoliberal doctrine we have been taught to put ourselves first, and that doing so is virtuous. Other people, by this account, whether they are individuals or just as those who are not like ‘us’, are considered at best rivals and at worst enemies. Organizations, especially corporations, have very much led the way in the promulgation of these ideals, particularly over the past 40 years of the neoliberal experiment. Ethics, as elucidated throughout this book, is that which would disturb the selfishness of neoliberal morality and its institutions. This is not, however, an angelic ethics that is removed from worldly experience in the purity of its own conception. Following Levinas, ethics is bestowed from the epiphany of the face of the other in a relationship in which “the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face” (Levinas, 1961/1969: 78). Such divinity is not, however, to be considered heavenly in the sense of being disconnected from the world. Faith, in this way, “is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without rewards is valuable” (Levinas, in Wright, Hughes and Ainley, 1988: 177). This is an ethics that, while manifesting through an affective response to the infinitude of the other’s difference, recognizes that infinity in a way that is ‘down-to-earth’. Ethics is experienced affectively by and through the body in the materiality of faces, and where the struggle of being-for-the-other is an embodied struggle of vulnerability and sacrifice (Altez-Albela, 2011). It is in the world comprising multiple others, society, that the corporeality of ethics (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014) comes to bear on how we engage with each other so as to use our power and resources in a way that is not driven by the assumed primacy of self-interest. As already discussed, this is the realm of politics – specifically a politics that is imperfectly translated from such an ethics where, no matter how difficult that passage is, it renders ethics in organizations a practical force. It is in this sense that Ethics has a twofold relation to politics: ethics is both the phenomenological ground of politics and, as the ground on which politics is built, is always capable of being called into question. Ethics holds an interruptive power in relation to politics, even as it grounds. This interruptive effect derives from its position in the order of priority. (Drabinski, 2000: 55) Such is the disruptive power of ethics: its origin in the disturbance of the egoistic self and its practice in the ethico-political disturbance of politics itself. This is a disturbing ethics that can too be brought to bear on how people in organizations treat each other, how people resist the exercise of organizational power, how people construe a collective organizational

16  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics ethics or even how we write about organizations. These politics share the ability to question and disturb the self-satisfaction and complacency of a self tempted to forget or ignore needs and interests other than its own, and in so doing forego ethics itself. Levinas teaches that ethics disturbs subjectivity, giving rise to a politics that seeks justice for the other. The demands of the other and the call to justice they invoke do not quit – they cannot be extinguished by the might of authority or by the complacency of self-awarded righteousness. All of that is passive to the force of ethics. Ethics, by this account, is always on the horizon, prompting one to walk towards it despite an awareness that it is a destination that can never be reached. It is my hope that this book marks a humble contribution to understanding how such an ethics might be taken up in relation to the dominance of organizations in contemporary society.

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Organizational disturbance & passive ethics  17 Derrida, J. (1992) Force of law: The ‘mystical foundation of authority’, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D. G. Carlson (Eds.) Deconstruction and the possibility of justice, pp. 3–67. New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1995) The gift of death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1997) Politics of friendship, London: Verso. Drabinski, J. (2000) The possibility of an ethical politics: From peace to liturgy. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 26(4), 49–73. Foucault, M. (2008) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Houndmills: Springer. Gibbs, R. (1995) Height and nearness: Jewish dimensions of radical ethics, in A. T. Peperzak (Ed.) Ethics as first philosophy: The significance of Emmanuel Levinas for philosophy, literature and religion, pp. 13–24. New York: Routledge. Gilbert, J. (2013) What kind of thing is ‘neoliberalism’? New Formations, 80(80), 7–22. Harvey, G., Rhodes, C., Vachhani, S. J., and Williams, K. (2017) Neo-villeiny and the service sector: The case of hyper flexible and precarious work in fitness centres. Work, Employment and Society, 31(1), 19–35. Levinas, E. (1961/1969) Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1963/1990) Difficult freedom: Essays on Judaism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Levinas, E. (1974/1996) Essence and disinterestedness, in A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Eds.) Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings, pp. 109–128. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. (1974/1998) Otherwise than being or beyond essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1982/1985) Ethics and infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1984/1989) Ethics as first philosophy, in S. Hand (Ed.) The Levinas reader, pp. 75–87. Oxford: Blackwell. Levinas, E. (1986/1998) Notes on meaning, in Of God who comes to mind, trans. B. Bergo, pp. 152–172. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Levinas, E. (1987/1993) Outside the subject, in Outside the subject, trans. M. B. Smith, pp. 118–123. London: Continuum. Levinas, E. (1995/1999) Alterity and transcendence, New York: Columbia University Press. Lingis, A. (2009) The malice of good deeds, in J. Stauffer and B. Bergo (Eds.) Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the death of a certain god”, pp. 23–32. New York: Columbia University Press. McMurray, R., Pullen, A., and Rhodes, C. (2011) Ethical subjectivity and politics in organizations: A case of health care tendering. Organization, 18(4), 541–561. Morgan, M. L. (2016) Levinas’s ethical politics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pullen, A., and Rhodes, C. (2010) Revelation and masquerade: Gender, ethics and the face. Concealing and revealing gender, in P. Lewis and R. Simpson (Eds.) Revealing and Concealing Gender, pp. 233–248. New York: Palgrave.

18  Organizational disturbance & passive ethics Pullen, A., and Rhodes, C. (2014) Corporeal ethics and the politics of resistance in organizations. Organization, 21(6), 782–796. Pullen, A., and Rhodes, C. (Eds.). (2015) The Routledge companion to ethics, politics and organizations, London: Routledge. Rhodes, C., and Pullen, A. (2018) Critical business ethics: From corporate self-interest to the glorification of the sovereign pater. International Journal of Management Reviews, 20(2), 483–499. Rhodes, C., Pullen, A., Vickers, M. H., Clegg, S. R., and Pitsis, A. (2010) Violence and workplace bullying: What are an organization’s ethical responsibilities? Administrative Theory & Praxis, 32(1), 96–115. Robbins, J. (Ed.) (2001) Is it righteous to be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shamir, R. (2008) The age of responsibilization: On market-embedded morality. Economy and Society, 37(1), 1–19. Smith, A. (1776/2014) An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, Middletown: Shine. Wright, T., Hughes, P., and Ainley, A. (1988) The paradox of morality: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas, in R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (Eds.) The provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the other, pp. 168–180. New York: Routledge.

2 Anarchic ethics, dissent and the deinstitutionalization of market morality

It was back in the early 1960s that Milton Friedman famously wrote that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” (1962: 133). This quote has all but become a clichéd catch cry in defence of a supposedly free market system where, under neoliberal conditions, the value of corporate freedom, the disdain for regulatory limitations on corporations, and the general advocacy of the capitalist ‘incentivization’ have extended across all walks of life (Bloom and Rhodes, 2018). Beyond just economic matters, what we have is a prizing of self-interest, with the business corporation as a role model for conducting life more generally. Profit maximization, in a neoliberal way of thinking, is an unquestioned motive that does and should drive human behaviour in all its myriad dimensions. Moreover, when the economic theory that informs neoliberalism does not effectively restrict itself to discrete domains of human life, then it is at risk of colonizing the whole of human experience, ensuring that human subjects understand themselves and one another as self-interested utility maximizers, even in those domains of human engagement most removed from the market transactions that economic theory first intended to describe. (Shearer, 2002: 549) When it comes to business, by Friedman’s account, the sole moral limit to the exercise of market freedom is for corporations and their executors to conform “to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and embodied in ethical custom” (1970: 32) and to do so “without deception or fraud” (1962: 133). While Friedman admits that corporate freedom should only be constrained by legislation, it can be added that this implies that such legislation should be kept to a minimum – limited to that which might enhance market competition and enable economic activity. Even more potently when the ‘basic rules of the game’ have been neoliberalized, that the moral limits of the market progressively dissipate as both economy and society become enthralled to market morality.

20  Anarchic ethics Friedman’s contribution and impact are not limited to that of being a scholarly commentary. His economics theory has become something as a doctrine “crystallized into a coherent and powerful message of political and economic reform” that has resulted today in the political and economic dominance of “a guileless faith in the efficiency of free markets and their virtues” (Jones, 2012: pp. 89 and 19) with less and less boundaries in either law or moral custom. This was not without intention, and Friedman was explicitly committed to the idea that properly persuaded, the public and politicians would follow the expert advice offered by the likes of him (Shammas, 2018). And they were, especially starting in the 1980s as world leaders, most especially Margaret Thatcher and R ­ onald Reagan, began to explicitly champion the twin neoliberal virtues of small government and the stimulation of enterprise through tax reduction. Growing out of this political embrace of a resuscitated and emboldened liberalism emerged the even more pernicious belief that “economic reasoning can be applied to all forms of human transaction, that market forces as the primary drivers of social advancement, and that the role of government should be limited” (Allan, 2017: 3). By today the normative tenets of neoliberal economic doctrine have been enshrined in a faith that promotes this expansion of market rationality to all spheres of social, political and economic life, as well as the establishment of an ethical position that configures “morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences” (Brown, 2003: 15). This is a market morality that sees the pursuit and enactment of market freedoms by individuals and corporations as something that is not just effective, but also morally righteous (Bloom and Rhodes, 2018). As Friedman proselytized, the expansion of corporate models of business, even monopolistic ones, was the harbinger of prosperity. Further, “he would also recommend the abolition of corporate tax and the privatization of state universities, and sing the virtues of the role of ‘wealthy individuals’ in funding movements to preserve political freedom” (Dean, 2014: 151). It would seem that the social, economic and political dominance of the billionaire class of Davos debating corporate aristocrats has seen this reasoning approach the apex of its logical possibility. The promise of trickle-down prosperity has failed on a global level. Riding the wave of more than 40 years of neoliberalism, inequality continues to expand unabated by any crisis or scandal that one might through would undermine it. As Oxfam reported in 2019, The number of billionaires has doubled since the financial crisis and their fortunes grow by $2.5bn a day, yet the super-rich and corporations are paying lower rates of tax than they have in decades. The human costs – children without teachers, clinics without ­medicines – are huge. Piecemeal private services punish poor people

Anarchic ethics  21 and privilege elites. Women suffer the most, and are left to fill the gaps in public services with many hours of unpaid care. (Oxfam, 2019: 2) Neoliberalism is, if anything, stubborn and the realities of its injustice have done little to destabilize its morality. Nowhere has the reality of neoliberal market morality been more starkly illustrated than in matters of corporate tax. Tax has always been a central dimension of neoliberal economic doctrine, as enshrined in what is referred to as the Washington Consensus. This was a neoliberal orthodoxy initially established in the 1990s and endorsed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as a set of policies required for economic development. Subsequently, it came to symbolize the central tenets of neoliberal economic practice more broadly. This consensus originally referred to a set of ten principles articulated in 1989 by economist John Williamson (1990) in support of market and trade liberalization, the privatization of state enterprises, the floating of foreign exchange markets, and low government borrowing (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2015). As the manifestation of neoliberal economic doctrine, the Washington Consensus insisted that the State should be deferential to the operation of liberated market on an international scale – an approach that in practice led to the expansion of corporate power, most especially in the hands of transnational corporations (Cowling and Tomlinson, 2011). The original consensus advocated for a reconfiguration of the tax base, a matter that, as far as corporate tax was concerned, came to be associated with the idea that corporate investment would increase if corporations were taxed less, in turn, leading the creation of a more robust economy. In short, the espoused formula was that lower taxes would lead to economic growth (Symoniak, 2010). Corporations were eagerly enamoured by such an approach, as were the newly neoliberalized governments that aided and abetted them. Corporation taxes fell steadily, and since 1980 the international average corporate statutory tax rate has declined from 39% to 23% (Jahnsen and Pomreleu, 2017). As well as plummeting tax rates we have, especially recently, seen heated political debates over corporate tax avoidance across the world as practiced by corporations themselves with the help of their accounting advisors the world over (Sikka, 2016). The point of contention is that not only have corporations enjoyed steadily falling tax rates, but they have also instituted increasingly complex taxation arrangements so as to pay even less. The extent of this is such that corporate tax avoidance has been described as “the most prominent accounting issue in contemporary politics […] that sparks widespread political debate and controversy” (Dallyn, 2017: 336). Central to this controversy has been the Google Corporation, a company so embroiled in fiscal scandals that any tax on profits diverted to other countries for tax avoidance purposes

22  Anarchic ethics is referred to almost universally as a Google Tax. One particular scandal that saw Google at the centre of public debate occurred in the United Kingdom in 2012 and 2013. It was discovered by an inquiry by the Public Accounts Committee that instead of paying the standard 20% corporation tax on the profits from its US$18 billion UK revenues between 2006 and 2011, Google paid just US$16 million (Public Accounts Committee, 2013). As the inquiry reported, this was because Google relies on the deeply unconvincing argument that its sales to UK clients take place in Ireland, despite clear evidence that the vast majority of sales activity takes place in the UK. […] Big accountancy firms sell tax advice which promotes artificial tax structures which serve to avoid UK taxes rather than to reflect the substance of the way business is actually conducted. (Public Accounts Committee, 2013, n.p.) The complexity and deviousness of Google’s tax avoidance practices uncovered by the Public Accounts Committee garnered widespread criticism in the press, in political circles and amongst the general public. ‘Immoral tax avoiders’, was the headline in the British newspaper The Daily Mail (Campbell, 2012). “When Google goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying its taxes, I think it’s wrong” said then British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband (in Kumar and Wright, 2012, italics added). Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s response to this criticism issued a catch cry for a quite different moral position. “I am very proud of the structure that we set up” he opined, “it’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this”. Echoing Friedman’s slogan of 50 years earlier he went on record as saying: “what we are doing is legal […] I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required” (in Topham, 2013, italics added). Schmidt’s was a moral defence, a statement that champions market morality as it translates into the valorization of corporate freedom as both economically prudent and morally righteous. This is a morality that attests to an unfettered corporate freedom where no person, community or state should intervene in what are assumed to be the natural and desirable drives that animate capitalism – here, as a matter of pride, no morality beyond that of the market should impinge on the exercise of corporate freedom. With this chapter I do not want to dwell too much on the specific goings on in Google (although I will return to it later), but rather on considering an ethics that would dispute and challenge the neoliberal market morality that this case illustrates. To do this I will consider in some detail Levinas’s conception of anarchy (1968/2003; 1968/1996; 1974/1998) as it relates to an ethics that involves disrupting order (Critchley, 2015) so

Anarchic ethics  23 as to open up “existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms” (Newman, 2010: 7). As well as outlining Levinas’s anarchic ethics, its implications for corporations will be investigated. This investigation leads to a position where anarchy serves to articulate ethics with politics by justifying dissent as an ethically necessary engagement with the excesses of corporate freedom. Such engagement forms a ‘politics of disturbance’ (Caygill, 2002) that pursues a horizon of radical democracy (Ziarek, 2001; Newman, 2011) through critique, resistance and opposition to the self-interested sovereignty of business and to the pretence of corporate immutability in the name of capitalism. This is a politics that would disrupt the neoliberal consensus that yokes the liberal democratic state to the interests of powerful corporations, while still retaining faith in democracy itself as a mode of politics grounded in always being able to question, critique, and ultimately seek to bring ethics to bear on power.

Ethical anarchy In his paper ‘Substitution’, Levinas (1968/1996) notes that our conscious apprehension of other people is organized in an idealized way. It is idealized in the sense that once we seek to understand others, we do so using the categories that we apply to them. In consciousness, other people are not individual or particular, but rather are imagined as they relate to the ‘types’ we use to compare and categorize them. Levinas writes that the unknowable particularity of the other, in one’s apprehension of it, becomes “cast in the mould of the known” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 80). Levinas refers to this assessment of others in relation to categories of knowledge as ‘thematization’ – it is the very basic and unavoidable act of consciously knowing another person. There is, however, more to other people than just appropriating them into one’s own terms, and the signification and recognition of the other “does not necessarily imply thematization” (Levinas, 1993/2000: 173). Levinas retains that exposure to the other person is not limited to consciousness, categorization and comparison. The other person can never be fully exposed through symbols, images and language. The spiritual dimension of the encounter with the other is, for Levinas, that which exceeds our ability to know them categorically – it exceeds any principle that we might nevertheless apply. To such a principle Levinas attributes the Greek word arche, in English meaning origin, beginning or foundation. Arche is thus a principal attached to assuming that humans have capacity to grasp the inherent meaning of world and of other people by tracing meaning back to an ultimate and unassailable substance. Moreover, for Levinas, arche is an ideal principle where we, as finite human beings, imagine in our own epistemic vanity that we are able to define experience prior to its occurrence while also having a

24  Anarchic ethics godlike capacity to know the world inconvertibly and on its own terms – terms to which we assume we have incontrovertible access. Applied to the relations between people, the archaic principle renders the other entirely knowable. Levinas rejects this possibility, in contrast taking the position that such knowledge is an anathema to ethics in that with it the other is always already cast in terms of the self. Ethics, on the contrary, emerges from a response to the excessive demands that arise from being confronted with the unknowable infinitude of the other. This is an other without knowable principle or origin, so as to dispense of the idea that the arche of the other can be captured within the limits of my own thinking. To be approached by another person without or prior to the imposition of a principle is to be engaged by them ethically and in proximity such that they are not reduced to being the same as anyone else – the other is not thematized. Such a proximous relation with the other is, in Levinas’s use of the word, an-archic – it lacks the application of principle. He describes this proximity as “a relationship with a singularity, without the mediation of any principle or ideality” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 81). The ethical anarchy that this entails is such that a relationship with the other cannot be fully contained by consciousness and reason. Proximity “suppresses the distance of consciousness” (Levinas, 1974/1998: 89) and serves to disturb knowledge and thematization by invoking both the mystery of infinity and the immediacy of alterity. Levinas makes clear that he is not using the term anarchy to refer to “disorder as opposed to order” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 81) but rather to that state of relations that is beyond and before thematization as well as beyond our own conscious intentions. Ethically anarchic relations are “prior to the Ego, prior to its freedom and non-freedom” (Levinas, 1968/2003: 51). Critically, for Levinas, this is the point where ethics arises through the reception of a “responsibility prior to all free engagement” – prior also to consciousness, thought, cognition, logic and symbolization (Levinas, 1968/2003: 52). Levinas points to an other that is not the same as that which is conceived of consciously and represented inn discourse – a singular alterity that defies thematization. Ethical anarchy is not something we can organize or know in a conscious manner – it is that, following from the discussion in Chapter 1, to which we are wholly passive and which cannot be controlled by our intentionality. This anarchy arises in us before we make any decisions and is before the beginning of the self (Levinas, 1993/2000). In ethical anarchy, the ego is stripped of “its self-conceit and its dominating imperialism” and returns to the “passivity of the self that came prior to it” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 88). Passivity, as a mode of non-freedom, is not that which the ego controls or takes action, but rather that with which “the ego can be put into question by Others” (Levinas, 1968/2003: 51). This question is ethics.

Anarchic ethics  25 The self as located in the “an-archy of passivity” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 89) is where responsibility arises in that our own subjectivity comes to us first from the other “without our choice” (Levinas, 1993/2000: 175). It is on that basis that Levinas describes the ethical position not as a choice having been made by a pre-existent subject, but as the very thing that determines the subject in the first place […and…] at the core of [this] idea of anarchy is a description of what it means to be human. (Stone, 2011: 105) We are thus ethically responsible to the other long before we ever know ourselves, and accordingly “to be a ‘self’ is to be responsible before having done anything” (p. 94). Responsibility is not a matter we decide on through the exercise of free will, but rather that which we receive passively “beneath consciousness and knowledge [and] prior to all free engagement” (Levinas, 1968/2003: 50 and 51). For Levinas this anarchy gives us “a responsibility without freedom” and prior to freedom. From ethical anarchy we get “the fact of human fellowship” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 91) before freedom or servitude, order or disorder, are even possible (Levinas, 1968/2003). It is from proximity that our knowledge of the other is relegated as ethically inadequate as we see a “trace of the Infinite” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 91) in the other person’s face such that “proximity is […] anarchically a relation with a singularity” (Levinas 1974/1998: 100, italics in original) without prior principle. This is a down-to-earth spirituality that shines through the other person who is before me and who I cannot adequately know in my own terms. Before knowledge lies exposure where one can feel “pity, compassion, pardon and proximity in the world” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 91) and where the other person “concerns me despite myself” (Levinas, 1968/2003: 57). It is because it is before language we cannot ‘know’ this ethical anarchy as if it can be satisfactorily thematized in language and cognition. Instead what we recognize is its trace in language such that ethical anarchy is necessarily ambiguous and ­enigmatic – it is “signalled in consciousness” through a language that both conveys and betrays it (Levinas, 1974/1998: 194).

The business of ethics and justice Why might this understanding of ethics and responsibility as passive and anarchic be of any relevance to business organizations, let alone their tax practices? To begin to consider this, we can go back to Levinas’s earlier work in Totality and Infinity (1961/1969) where he specifically addresses issues of labour, work and commerce as being both necessary for, and in tension with, ethics. Levinas understands labour as a mode

26  Anarchic ethics of accumulation that enables the self to sustain itself in relation to the uncertainty of the future. This sustenance is central to the self’s ability to engage in ethical acts of generosity to the other, lest there be nothing to give and nowhere to give it from. In Levinas’s words: “[n]o human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of economy: no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home” (1961/1969: 172). Indeed, engagement with economy is necessary such that we might actively respond to the ethical obligation that we passively receive (­Desmond, 2007; Tajalli and Segal, 2018). Labour, thus valorized, still gives way to the organization of work – the latter understood by Levinas as an engagement in the same ‘thematization’ which ethical anarchy precedes and disturbs. With work, the self’s particularity is undone as it enters into a system where labour is exchanged for money in relation to the work of the others. Commerce exacerbates this, as it constitutes a trading of selves through systems of exchange and reciprocity. Such trading is constituted in a “market orientation towards the other” – this is not, however, an ethical orientation in that “the market cannot replace ethics, that is, hospitality, and decency. The invitation of the market system to pursue one’s self interest must be submitted under a preceding attitude of setting the other before the self” (Aasland, 2004: 7). Levinas thus emphasizes that “the ethical relation can never be an exchange of goods and services with an intended profit or value as purpose” (Muhr, 2010: 77). The idea of business ethics appears at worst an oxymoron, and at best an aporia, given the Impossibility of goodness as a regime, an organized system, a social institution. Every attempt to organize humanity fails. The only thing that remain undying is the goodness of everyday, ongoing life […] once this goodness is organized it is extinguished. (Levinas, 1985/2001: 217–218) It is in this sense that work can be considered centrally as an activity connected to, and troubled by, ethics, while at the same time the organization of work through the market mechanism inserts distance in place of the proximous ethical relation by institutionalizing and normalizing the multiplicity of sociality. With work, labour and organization, we see the inevitable tension between ethical anarchy and the need for knowledge in and of the world. That such knowledge should be instituted in the practice of business, as with politics, its ethical evaluation and its critique must be “in terms of how well or how poorly they take seriously and facilitate our basic social normativity, our responsibilities to respect and act in behalf of the rights of others” (Morgan, 2016: 15). The tension between the anarchic origin of ethics and the practice of organized work has not gone unnoticed in the academic disciplines of organization studies and business ethics. On the one hand, the ethical

Anarchic ethics  27 necessity of work and its organization are acknowledged as a requirement for being to be sustained – it is a “necessary precondition for being able to be ‘for the Other’ in any material and effective way” (Byers and Rhodes, 2007: 239). But what Levinas (1961/1969) describes as the “anonymous field of economic life” (p. 176) is one that operates through “a humanity of interchangeable men [sic]” that does not acknowledge or respect the ethically anarchical basis of subjectivity, and as such “makes possible exploitation itself” (p. 298). Such a possibility emerges in that organization, in its very nature, involves the comparison of people – a comparison that requires ethics to be tempered by knowledge and thematization (Byers and Rhodes, 2007). This is so because decisions need to be made under conditions of “the impossibility of meeting the needs to everyone” (Aasland, 2005: 57). With this comparison, each individual cannot be approached as distinct and particular in their alterity – cannot be approached without the pretence of arche. Once thematized, compared and traded, the understanding of others is located in relation to categories, and inevitably “judgment relative to that category [… and …] through this move the ‘Otherness’ of the Other, the exceptional, is neatly bracketed and ‘covered over’” (Introna, 2003: 212). What was received passively as responsibility is now solidly cloaked by the instrumental functioning of the knowledgeable ego. Even if, in this organized scene, an other was received in proximity, the problems would not dissipate because “to put one other first is to put all others behind” (Aasland, 2005: 75). In organizations, ethics does not solve problems – rather, it creates them as the indissoluble tensions between the needs of the other and those of all of the other others pit reciprocity and justice against a generosity without limits (Rhodes and Westwood, 2016). In one sense, these considerations of ethical anarchy might lead us to promote ethically based justice in organizations (see Aasland, 2005, 2007; Rhodes, 2013; Staricco, 2016) in that organizations and those who manage them would become beholden to negotiating the demands of all the others in the spirit of recognizing the origin of ethics in the anarchic responsibility to the radically singular other. This is indeed the predominant response that has been made in relation to organizational and business ethics – one that builds on Levinasian ethical insights in order to develop a set of normative implications for how organizations might be managed such that they enable “continuous improvements towards always more justice” (Aasland, 2007: 220; see also Byers and Rhodes, 2007; Bruna and Bazin, 2017; see also Chapter 3). The approach is to envisage anarchy as a “a temporary state whose fate is to abolish itself in the face of the call to justice” (Abensour, 2002: 8), and, moreover, where this abolishment is to take place at the hands of a managerial elite. That is not to say that such approaches are managerial – on the contrary, the common thread is a critique of ethical instrumentalism so as

28  Anarchic ethics to suggest an approach to management and leadership that might be different to its current state. The focus is on what people who manage organizations might do, for example by pursuing a “Levinasian managerial ethics” that would “delimit alterity as the locus of the ethical and work on unfolding the practical conditions of managerial responsibility” (Bevan and Corvellec, 2007: 213). Managers are thus bound to take on personal responsibility in the context of organizational roles such that ethics might come to be enacted in organizations in ways that account for, yet exceed, the following of rules and regulations (Ibarra-Colado, Clegg, Rhodes and Kornberger, 2006; Muhr, 2008). The ‘ethical leadership’ that would follow is one that is argued to be “of value to corporate business if it is to establish a culture that is not inimical to the kind of management behaviour that has been associated with corporate scandal” (Knights and O’Leary, 2006: 135).

Ethical and political anarchism While attestations to the need to strive for ever more just modes of organizing is commendable, by itself it suffers from the problem of assigning potential agency only to those in formal positions of organizational authority – typically, managers understood somehow as being ‘inside’ an organization and representative of it (cf. Chapter 3). This is clearly limiting in that it sidesteps the possibility for ethically informed practice by those not in such positions to have any real organizational import. To work through the broader implications of Levinas’s ethical anarchism for non-managerially focused business and organizational ethics, we can consider its relationship with political anarchism. The conception of ethical anarchy that we learn from Levinas is not the same as the notion of anarchism in political discourse, even though it can be said that it “concerns and affects politics” (Abensour, 2002: 5) and has been drawn on in developing anarchist political positions (e.g. Newman, 2010; see also Levy and Adams, 2018). In one sense, Levinas positions ethical anarchism as being non-political in that “it refers to what precedes all arche – it is before all beginning and prior to all principles” (Abensour, 2002: 5). This contrasts with a politics that is immediate and empirical, involving the exercise of power over others. Railing against the suffering and injustice invoked by state rule and the rules of states, political anarchism works under a conviction that both collectively and individually people would be better off without such power-laden intrusions (Marshall, 2010). Levinas himself relates his own conception of ethical anarchy to this as follows: The notion of anarchy we are introducing here has a meaning prior to the political (or anti-political) meaning currently attributed to it. It would be self-contradictory to set it up as a principle (in the sense

Anarchic ethics  29 that anarchists understand it). Anarchy cannot be sovereign, like the arche. It can only disturb the state; but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation. The state then cannot set itself up as a Whole. But, on the other hand, anarchy can be stated. Yet disorder has an irreducible meaning, as refusal of synthesis. (Levinas, 1974/1998: 194n3) Underlining this we can take it that the implication of Levinas’s ethical anarchy can be formulated as a “politics of the trace, a politics of disturbance” (Caygill, 2002: 138, see also Abensour, 2002) that is prior to the constitution of an organized politics, including anarchist politics (Newman, 2010). More importantly, ethical anarchy disturbs the state by decentring its authority in favour of the authority of and responsibility to the other, to sociality (Abensour, 2002) and to the other’s freedom. The disturbance that reverberates from ethical anarchy is one that “involves the opening up of existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an other which is beyond their terms” (Newman, 2010: 7). Ethical anarchism is thus political not because it necessitates a particular political position (anarchist or otherwise) but rather because it undermines the authority of any such position by calling authority into question. The solid ground of one’s own pretence to such authority retreats in the name of the other person. While Levinas states that ethical anarchy is prior to the political meaning attributed to anarchism, that does not mean that anarchism cannot be reconsidered in connection with that prior relation – in other words, it is possible to read Levinas, as a non-anarchist, in an anarchist tradition (Jun, 2012). In particular, a ‘postanarchist’ appreciation of Levinas is one that is “thoroughly compatible with the anarchist ethos of permanent suspicion towards authority” (Newman, 2010: 53; see also el-Ojeili, 2014) and the insistence that “a program of resistance must be ongoing, fluid, and ever-vigilant” (Jun, 2012: 113). Translated organizationally, this means that what might be stimulated by ethical anarchism is not just about the internal re-organization of managerial action, but rather a disturbance of organizational order – of assumed organizational sovereignty – that arrives from the outside, from ethical anarchy. In the service of business ethics, the postanarchist drive for the “political disturbance of state sovereignty” (Newman, 2010: 89) can be translated as the ‘political disturbance of corporate sovereignty’. This disturbance, as a feature of the life of organizations, serves to contest the corporation through resistance and critique (Fleming and Spicer, 2007; Mumby, Thomas, Marti and Seidl, 2017). Indeed, while Levinas’s comments echo the anarchist distrust of state power, such distrust is to be extended to contemporary corporations whose power lends them the sovereignty to ride roughshod over individual rights and

30  Anarchic ethics state politics in the name of capitalism. Suggested is an ethically based demand to decentre assumed power through disturbance by bringing forth and responding politically to the trace of ethical anarchy. In the context of globalized capitalism, it is indeed the case that the power of corporations vies with that of states for political domination on a global scale, such that corporations can increasingly be seen as political rather than just economic institutions (Barkan, 2013) whose leaders are seduced to “sacrifice their identities in order to secure their jobs and become mercenary servants to their corporations” (Macintosh, Shearer and Riccaboni, 2009: 760). If there are ethical grounds that invoke the disturbance of political power, then corporate and managerial power cannot and should not be excluded. The ethical anarchy that might inform such disturbance comes before the freedom expressed by the ego while its trace disturbs that freedom in demanding responsibility to the other without recourse to any “authoritative structure” (Caygill, 2002: 149) and without recourse to organization. Ethics is engaged with in a “pre-conscious, non-intentional, state of affectivity in which the very distinction self-other is not yet ­established” – moreover, it is this relation that asserts and identifies the “weakness or defectiveness of the ego” (Diamantides, 2007: 2). Specifically, ethical anarchy is an “affective excess to the ego that opens it up to the dimension of ethics” (ibid.: 12) – an opening up that occurs through the disturbance of the ego’s self-assumed completeness. The idea of disturbance is key in that ethical anarchy as present in proximity to the other is that which interrupts the hubris of rational and conscious order reflected in and organized by the ego. Ethical anarchy tends to politics in the sense that it disturbs the politics and tyranny (Abensour, 2002) enabled by that organization through “the continual questioning from below of any attempt to establish order from above” (Critchley, 2007: 123) – the order of business organizations being a paradigm case. It’s called capitalism? It’s not good enough!

Ethical anarchy and dissent Having reached this point, we can say that the disturbance of ethical anarchy is not foreign to political anarchy. This is so because “political radicalism ultimately finds its origin in this anarchical responsibility to other people”, by standing up on behalf of other people and for the other’s justice (Verter, 2010: 80). Ethical anarchy ‘affects politics’ (Abensour, 2002) because it suggests the ethical necessity of resisting and subverting power and domination. In practical terms, this ethical anarchy infers a form of political activism where the anarchic moment of ethics is “the disturbance of the status quo” (Critchley, 2007: 13). By implication, activity inspired by ethical anarchism would be that which provokes a continuous questioning of and resistance to the awesome power of the

Anarchic ethics  31 contemporary corporation, as a practical mode of e­ thico-politics (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014). Anarchy here is in the form of ‘ideological dissent’ (Dunphy, 2004) that contests corporate sovereignty. This suggests the absolute ethical necessity of resistance to corporate power, anti-organizational protest, and political dissensus such that “politics consists in the manifestation of dissensus, a dissensus that disturbs the order by which government [and in our case also the powerful corporation] wishes to depoliticize society” (Critchley, 2004: 183). Such a politics is not to be based on an idea that we might be graced, deus-ex-machina, by a new form of self-management where all forms of oppression dissipate – no fantastical utopias. Instead, this politics involves a recognition that the space between sovereign organization and anarchic ethics must be maintained. Politically, this favours dissensus as a practical ethico-politics over utopianism in the form of a self-­ righteous impossible dream (cf. Rancière, 2015). Such an ethics is enacted through a “project of ethico-political resistance and critique that works against forms of coercion, inequity, and discrimination that organizations so frequently and easily reproduce” (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014: 793) … and so frequently justify in the name of competitive market capitalism. It may be the case that “corporate leaders also do not like anarchism” because “the familiar order of managerial control is lost” (Martin, 2013:  2) but there are even more compelling reasons that they would not like ethical anarchism. These reasons relate to how all organizational action would be under ethical scrutiny in a drive against both the actuality of and desire for corporate sovereignty (see also Chapter 5). This calls for an ethics for business that, rather than seeking to gain the consent of business to adopt it, is based on interruption and dissent from the outside. Recognized here is that In today’s world, the idea of an ethics divorced from politics seems more questionable than ever: politics does not trump ethics […] but to try to be ethical without paying attention to the political effects of one’s actions would be dismissed today as absurdly naïve […] Levinas was from the outset concerned not with ethics such that politics was an afterthought, but with the conjunction between ethics and politics – or, more precisely, the interruption of politics by ethics. (Bernasconi, 2008: 143) And we can add the interruption of business by ethics. This is what we can consider as an anarchic business ethics – an ethical position determined to interrupt the politics business without ever pretending that such an ethics can arise from within business itself (see also Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). Business ethics is not the responsibility of business, if indeed such an ethics was even possible (see Jones, 2003). Instead, it is the responsibility

32  Anarchic ethics of the societies in which business operates – in other words, it is ‘our’ responsibility. Such ethics is located in the democratic process especially as it relates to an understanding of radical democracy characterized by the non-violent expression of political differences and a preparedness to engage in political conflict (Mouffe, 2000). This “democracy is a ­forever-protean process, where resistance to the integral logics of sovereignty, law, and capitalism becomes a politics of gesture” whose pursuit does not cease (Springer, 2011: 531). Such radical democracy also serves to disrupt the false consensus on which state liberal democracies so often fall victim to, and the assumption that a ruling political elite is able to achieve true representation of the citizens under their political jurisdiction (see Mouffe, in Hansen and Sonnichsen, 2014). Indeed, although Levinas does not discuss radical democracy per se, we can follow him in appreciating that democracy’s value lies in its acknowledgement of its deep appreciation of it being an always unfinished project that is open to improvement. Democracy thus attests to an ethical excellence and its origin in kindness, from which however, it is distanced – always a bit less perhaps – by the necessary calculations imposed by a multiple sociality, calculations constantly starting over again. Thus, in the empirical life of the good under the freedom of revisions, there would be a progress of reason. The bad conscience of justice! (Levinas, 1991/1998: 199) This bad conscience arises because, at best, democracy can never live up to the ideals from which it was spawned, and at worst it forgets those ideals altogether, falling into a tyranny of unjust laws and self-­interested politics. In response to this bad conscience, radical democracy (as an extension and corrective force to the liberal democracy that Levinas himself advocated) has the potential to provide an ethical disruption of democratic practice itself, always remembering that justice has its origins in ethics. That is to say The virtue of democracy resides in the fact that it is ceaselessly remorseful about the failings of its justice and consequently capable of questioning itself […] The justice of democracy – to the extent that it remains a genuine democracy – therefore suffers from a bad conscience; it admits that it invariably falls short of its ideal […and…] when democracy suppresses its bad conscience – as present day neoliberal capitalist democracy could be argued to do – it risks sliding into totalitarianism. (Ruti, 2015: 14) Following this reasoning, we can surmise that business ethics does not need moralistic managers or do-gooding CEOs – it needs a civil society

Anarchic ethics  33 that will disturb corporate power in the name of ethical anarchism, that is, in opposition to the imposition of sovereign corporate power justified by neoliberalism: it’s called capitalism!

Ethical critiques and democracy While it is clearly the case that the focus of much recent politics is on consensus-based engagement, it is through political dissensus that democratic action can be realized (Mouffe, 2000; Rancière, 2015). In one manifestation, this is the role taken up by political activists and protestors against globalization, inequality and neoliberalism (Graeber, 2002; Parvu, 2017). But the seeds are present too in more general realms of civil society – ethical anarchism can emerge through both radical and liberal politics so long as we acknowledge that at the heart of democracy is the premise that “there is no human decree that cannot be revised” (Levinas, 1992/2001: 183). Democracy can thus be endorsed on the grounds of ethics, not because it is ethics’ guarantor, but rather because it allows for and endorses politics to be questioned on ethical terms. Insofar as ethics provides the grounds for social and political critique, Levinas takes the best form of government to be that in which such critique is possible. It is the form of state and government in which there can occur most productively the interplay of the ethical character of human existence and its sociality, on the one hand, and the everyday, political life in which ethical normativity expresses itself, on the other. (Morgan, 2016: 147) That is not to say that it is within the formal institutions of democracy itself that this ethical critique necessarily originates. Democracy’s promise also relies on the permissibility of those institutions themselves being able to be brought under critical scrutiny, and indeed, for any institutionalized form of power to be questioned in the name of the other. It is to these democratic functions that radical democracy attends, and in a neoliberal era characterized by the cosy relationships between liberal democratic government and powerful globally interconnected corporations, the need for this critical attention is increasingly stark. Coming back to the example used to introduce this chapter, response to Google’s tax avoidance is one example of civil dissent. So too are public debates over executive remuneration in the finance sector and questions over corporate funding of right-wing political parties. In each case what is disturbed is the normalization of corporate greed and the arrogance of corporate freedom afforded by neoliberalism. In terms of the example of tax avoidance, the ethical affront is to a corporation that believes it can rise above civil society, to a corporation that believes it can take what it wants without responsibility for contributing in the

34  Anarchic ethics ways that others have too, and to a corporation that thinks that shirking its responsibility for contributing financially to the public services on which its host country relies is absolutely fine so long as it is approved by the lawyers. The pursuit of the self-interest of the corporate self is the ethos that is to be contested. It’s called capitalism! Reassuringly, there have been important government responses to addressing corporate tax avoidance, with the world’s most respectable companies being castigated for tax avoidance and their antipathy to the corporate responsibility (Dowling, 2014). In the case of Google in particular, there are governments who have responded especially strongly to the counter tax avoidance practices. While it is far from the case that these actions have stemmed the rising tide of corporate sovereignty globally, they are not insignificant. In 2018 for example, in response to intense public criticism of tax-avoiding multinationals, the British government announced widespread tax reforms specifically designed to counter the effects of tech companies taking profits off shore in search of low tax jurisdictions. Estimated at being worth £400 million per annum, the new ‘digital services tax’ was designed to tax revenues generated in the UK by social media platforms and search engines at 2%. This includes Google itself, as well as Facebook, Amazon and eBay (Miller, 2018). Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond, explained: “[i]t is only right that these global giants, with profitable businesses in the U.K., pay their fair share towards supporting our public services.” (Hammond in Dickson, 2018: n.p.). There was a similar response in Australia in 2017 where tax losses due to diverted profits were estimated at $2 billion. The introduction of a Diverted Profits Tax, which came into action on 1 July 2017, taxed large corporations at 40% of profits (rather than the normal 30%) when those profits were diverted to low tax countries (Khadem, 2017). Again, it was widespread public outcry that prompted such a response from a government that was more generally supportive of tax reductions for corporations. The close relations between corporate power and the contemporary democratic state suggest that the capacity of the state to adequately disturb corporate power in any substantial way is limited, but as the examples above show there are states that have not yet completely succumbed to corporate control. Moreover, this is so because popular sovereignty, when exercised, still has sway on liberal democratic governments that require votes to retain power. What is important, and what no doubt attracts the attention of political parties, is that these are not matters just of minority or radical politics, but are of concern to many citizens. This is exemplified in government intervention in tax avoidance in that by the 2010s corporate tax had become a public issue, with offending companies frequently subjected to ‘tax shaming’ resulting in commercial risk for the corporations and political risk for governments who failed to respond.

Anarchic ethics  35 It is clear that if significant parts of the voting public are radically opposed to certain corporate activities, then political parties can be expected just that bit more to address those activities rather than others. Such matters make headlines in the press, and families discuss them after the evening news. It might even be seen that such matters become the subject of debate in University classrooms or on the pristine pages of academic journals and scholarly monographs. These are but a few brief examples, but they serve to illustrate that business ethics reaches its apogee in the public sphere, in democracy, and it is here that it can be best developed and potentially even radicalized. It is in this sphere that business ethics must be located as a form of disturbance of corporations. It is in this sphere that it should be practiced and researched.

Conclusion If we remove the normative dimensions, it seems that Milton Friedman was partly right – the primary responsibility that business accepts and pursues is to make profits. Having said that the question of whether this is done within ethical custom is radically questionable. It’s called capitalism! As Friedman’s credo is upheld with stated pride through the networks of globalized neoliberal capitalism, one might wonder what might be left for responsibilities to anything other than profit, or to anyone other than the mythical shareholder. One direction is to expect businesses themselves to embrace a broader set of social responsibilities and ethical demands as if moved by the goodness of their corporate hearts. The evidence that this might happen is wafer thin (see Fleming and Jones, 2013; Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). Outside of the clutching hands of business, business ethics can be conceived of as materializing in a politics of resistance to organizations (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014; Rhodes and Pullen, 2018) that is exercised in the context of a radical democracy formed through dissent (Ziarek, 2001; Posner and Weyl, 2018). This is a vision of radical democracy that attests to the ethical demand to disturb authoritarian and exploitative institutions without assuming that the state is the centre of democracy (Newman, 2010). As Levinas (1990/2001) outlines, By admitting its imperfection, by arranging for a recourse for the judged, justice is already questioning the State. This is why democracy is the necessary prolongation of the State. It is not one regime possible among others, but the only suitable one. This is because it safeguards the capacity to improve or to change the law by ­changing – unfortunate logic! – tyrants, those personalities necessary to the State despite everything. Once we choose another tyrant, we imagine, of course, that he [sic] will be better than his predecessor. (p. 194)

36  Anarchic ethics It is in civil society itself, in our collective relations, that ethical anarchism is to be found and hence where political action in response to it emerges in one way or another. This is a business ethics of the street, not of the boardroom – a business ethics of the citizen and not the executive – a business ethics that has not yet sacrificed democracy to neoliberalism. The ‘market fundamentalism’ that rang through Google’s Eric Schmidt’s pride in an inevitable capitalism is precisely the form of neoliberal ideologizing that an anarchic conceptualization of business ethics would seek to undermine in the name of a “democratization of democracy” (Sintomer, 2018: 337). In question is the ideology that neoliberal capitalism is the right and only “possible direction for human historical development” (Graeber, 2002: 3). It’s called capitalism! With blatant tax avoidance so justified in the words of Google’s Chairman, he could assert that his organization is proud of being capitalistic. In direct contention to such self-important hubris, it is in the spirit of human fellowship and respect that ethical anarchy teaches us we might have a healthy cynicism about the ethical possibilities of a single sovereign institution or organization. It teaches us too that business ethics is far too important to be left in the hands of business. Work and commerce are needed for ethics to be sure, but through their organization on a global level we encounter the inherent possibilities of oppression, exploitation, discrimination, deception, greed and selfishness on a huge scale – all justified so long as they can be conducted without contravention of the laws of the state. It is the trace of the ethically anarchical appreciation of the other person which Levinas’s work awakens us to that might lead us away from and against such possibilities – a primary respect for the unknowability of the other. This ethical anarchy prompts the needs to disturb and decentre corporate power, lest it continues to get carried away with its-self. It is this political disturbance that marks the space of an anarchical business ethics that practices political anarchism.

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40  Anarchic ethics Rhodes, C., and Westwood, R. (2016) The limits of generosity: Lessons on ethics, economy, and reciprocity in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Journal of Business Ethics, 133(2), 235–248. Ruti, M. (2015) Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, other, ethics, New York: Bloomsbury. Shammas, V. L. (2018. Burying Mont Pèlerin: Milton Friedman and neoliberal vanguardism. Constellations, 25(1), 117–132. Shearer, T. (2002) Ethics and accountability: From the for-itself to the for-theother. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 27(6), 541–573. Sikka, P. (2016) Big four accounting firms: Addicted to tax avoidance, in Haslam J. and Sikka P. (Eds.) Pioneers of Critical Accounting, pp. 259–274. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sintomer, Y. (2018) From deliberative to radical democracy? Sortition and politics in the twenty-first century. Politics & Society, 46(3), 337–357. Springer, S. (2011) Public space as emancipation: Meditations on anarchism, radical democracy, neoliberalism and violence. Antipode, 43(2), 525–562. Staricco, J. I. (2016) Fair trade and the fetishization of Levinasian ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 138(1), 1–16. Stone, M. (2011) Law, ethics and Levinas’s concept of anarchy. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 35(1), 89–105. Symoniak, J. D. (2010) The Washington consensus. New Voices in Public Policy, 5(1), 1–20. Tajalli, P., and Segal, S. (2018) Levinas, Weber, and a hybrid framework for business ethics. Philosophy of Management. doi:10.1007/s40926-018-0100–7 Topham, G. (2013) Google’s Eric Schmidt: Change British law and we’d pay more tax, The Guardian, 27 May 2013. Verter, M. (2010) The anarchism of the other person, in N. J. Jun and S. Wahl (Eds.) New perspectives on anarchism, pp. 67–84. Lanham: Lexington Books. Williamson, J. (1990) Latin American adjustment: How much has happened, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. Wright, O. (2013) Google boss Eric Schmidt hits back at Ed Miliband and vows to invest in UK even if it has to pay more tax, The Independent, 22 May, 2013. Ziarek, E. P. (2001) Postmodernity, feminism and the politics of radical democracy, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

3 Affectivity and the unanswerable question of just leadership

While we might consider business ethics as being present when self-­ interested organizational practice is disturbed in the name of the other, that disruption need not be only attributable to the acts of civil society and democratic agents perceived as being somehow ‘outside’ of organizations. In the everyday interactions that people encounter at work, alterity is of course present, and work relationships are political, especially when they involve disproportionate access to power. It is with an organization’s managers that this disproportion most commonly leans, and it is in authority relationships between those managers and the people they manage that questions of justice are especially pertinent. Such relevance stems from how any feeling of ethics and fellowship that arises at work is both limited and enabled by the care and resources available. Ethics and work infer the challenge of just distribution. Of course, such distribution can be decided on the basis of factors such as disparate as self-interest, nepotism, efficiency or exploitation, but should ethics come to play then justice raises it head. The relationship between leadership and the justice that befalls people in organizations is a significant area of research in management theory (Colquitt and Greenberg, 2003; Piccolo Buengeler and Judge, 2018). Central to this inquiry have been considerations of how a leaders’ just treatment of their followers is of critical importance to ethical leadership (Sendjaya, Sarros and Santora, 2008; Xu, Loi and Ngo, 2016). It has long been widely accepted that leaders are “important sources of fairness and unfairness in organizations” (van Knippenberg, de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2007: 131) and that achieving just outcomes is a key part of what leaders should do. This is said to operate such that perceptions of justice in organizations can improve leadership influence and effectiveness (Janson, Levy, Sitkin and Lind, 2008; Gruda, McCleskey and Berrios, 2018). In such a formulation, while couched in ethical terms, achieving justice is paramount to increasing the likelihood of achieving organizational outcomes (Colquitt, Conlon, Wessen, Porter and Ng, 2001) such as job performance (Walumbwa, Cropanzano and Hartnell, 2009) and ultimately business success (Den Hartog and De Hoogh, 2009).

42  Affectivity and leadership justice This chapter questions such approaches to leadership justice arguing that they embody an unquestioned neoliberal managerialism (Fortin and Fellenz, 2008; c.f. Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007) that while using the lexicon of ethics and justice actually considers justice largely from an instrumental perspective. Further, aligned with its neoliberal leanings, leadership justice research serves as an attempt to establish a particular set of pro-managerial relations between followers and leaders as being natural and desirable (Robinson and Kerr, 2009). The chapter analyses these relations in terms of the particular organizational rationalities that they are based on. This shows, using the Weberian (Weber, 1978) distinction, that dominant approaches understand leadership justice as a formal organizational rationality, yet one with no substantive ethical content. Further, these approaches to leadership justice embody an “ethics of manliness” (Bologh, 1990: 142; see also Rhodes and Pullen, 2018), that is, a masculine form of rationality that castigates values associated with love, care and affectual relationships as being feminine and irrelevant to life in organizations. On that basis, it is argued that the instrumental rationality of justice participates in a masculine “economy of contract and exchange” (Diprose, 2002: 10; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014) where justice is traded for organizational commitment and effectiveness. Turning to Levinas’s (1961/1969, 1974/1998) theorization of the relationship between ethics and justice, the chapter outlines the possibilities of justice for leadership based on a primary respect for the alterity of other people: their absolute particularity and difference from oneself. With this approach, rational reciprocation and exchange are supplanted by pre-rational affective relations between people as the very basis of ethically informed justice. Leadership is thus situated in relation to a ‘difficult justice’ (cf. Horowitz and Horowitz, 2006) where the demands of all of the others cannot be met. What follows is that ethics is necessary for leadership justice, but it is always compromised because the multiple ethical demands faced by leaders put them in a position where ethical attention is always divided. This justice is not so much a matter of the rational pursuit of ‘effectiveness’ but a relational demand that is endemic to the very nature of leadership: a dilemma not just of what to do, but of to whom one should turn one’s ethical attention. The implications of this for the everyday practice of leadership justice are considered, focusing especially on how pursuing justice involves grappling with ethical anxieties, dilemmas and contradictions in a way that denies any pretence to managerial righteousness. Justice is recast from being a leadership skill or behaviour, to ‘good’ leadership itself being the practice of justice.

The ends of leadership justice Research into justice and fairness perceptions in organizations gathered steam from the 1960s and 1970s to a point now where it is a mainstay

Affectivity and leadership justice  43 of management theory (Moliner, Martínez-Tur and Cropanzano, 2017). In that time theories of organizational justice were developed in relation to what are claimed to be its three distinct ‘dimensions’ (Byrne and Cropanzano, 2001; Colquitt, Greenberg and Zapata-Phelan, 2005). The first, distributive justice, refers to the ways in which resources are or are not perceived to be distributed fairly in organizations (Deutsch, 1985). The second, procedural justice, is the extent to which employees feel that the processes used for the distribution of resources are administered fairly (Thibaut and Walker, 1975). The third, interactional justice, is about how fairly people feel they are treated in interpersonal interactions in organizations (Bies and Moag, 1986). For each of these dimensions, justice has been predominantly researched in terms of the degree to which people perceive that they are treated fairly in and by their organizations and leaders (Cropanzano and Stein, 2009). Cropanzano and Stein (2009) confirm that “[o]rganizational justice research generally understands fairness [justice] as a subjective perception by a person or persons […and that…] a workplace event is ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ because an individual or individuals believes it to be so” (p. 195). What is explained explicitly in the leadership and organizational justice literature is the idea that justice is a ‘heuristic’ with which followers make judgements about whether they “can rely on a given leader to lead them to ends that are good for the collective, rather than just good for the leader” (Janson, Levy, Sitkin and Lind, 2008: 251). At first glance, this would seem to be making the claim that leaders interested in justice are genuinely other-focussed such that assuring collectively that the just treatment of followers is a goal in and of itself. This assumption, while often explicitly stated, is subject to contradiction in how it is presented. This becomes apparent when the relationship between what is understood as the collective good and what is understood as good for the leader is considered. It has been asserted that The main question in leadership research has always been what makes leaders influential and effective […] Inspired by research in organizational justice […] in recent years leadership research has increasingly engaged with the notion that to answer this question we need to understand the role of leader fairness. (van Knippenberg and De Cremer, 2008: 173; see also: Shin, Sung, Choi and Kim, 2015) There is a circular reasoning at play in that while on the one hand just leadership is stated as being about a concern for the good of others and the collective good, on the other hand what is claimed to be the value of enacting leadership justice is that it has a “substantial impact on the evaluation and effectiveness of leaders” (Janson, Levy, Sitkin and Lind, 2008: 252). However, in the performative nature of neoliberal

44  Affectivity and leadership justice organizations what might be closer to the heart of a leader’s own interests than his or her personal/organizational effectiveness? Indeed, a core research direction in the organizational justice literature has been the investigation of “the unique effects of justice dimensions on key outcomes” (Colquitt, Conlon, Wessen, Porter and Ng, 2001: 86). Justice is thus offered initially as a genuine concern for others, but this is subsequently revealed not as a goal to be valued in itself but a step towards a different set of subsequent outcomes. The kind of outcomes that perceptions of leadership justice are argued to result in “include greater trust and commitment, improved job performance, more helpful citizenship behaviors, improved customer satisfaction, and diminished conflict” (Cropanzano, Bowen and Gilliland, 2007: 34), all of which mean that followers “perform better, [and] are less likely to leave the company” (de Cremer, van Dijke and Bos, 2006: 555). Why are such things desirable? The prevailing logic is that it is because “in groups and organizations it is often crucial that members devote extra time, energy, and effort to interdependent tasks and actions that benefit the group or organization” (de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2003: 858). The managerialist logic of this approach to leadership justice is laid bar – beneath the veneer of claims that justice is undertaken for others, it is evident that justice is really valued because it makes people work harder in pursuing non-justice-related organizational imperatives. As a corollary, leaders should pursue justice not as a goal in its own right but as a means through which to achieve ‘effectiveness’ (Cho and Dansereau, 2010). In other words, justice is subordinated to managerial power and organizational success through a rational and instrumental formulation where justice is the means, and organizational effectiveness is the end that is truly valued. There is a sleight of hand here that surfaces the subconscious (or at least non-explicit) rational managerialism of much leadership theory. The circular reasoning is achieved by first claiming that leaders should be other-centred or even self-sacrificial (de Cremer, van Dijke and Bos, 2004), and next to uncritically assume that the interests of the others, collectively understood, align unproblematically with the corporate interests that the leader is supposed to represent anyway. If a leader is fair, it is argued, s/he might be better accepted by the followers (Janson, Levy, Sitkin and Lind, 2008) as well as being able to make them cooperate more effectively (de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2003) – all of this ultimately serving the achievement of the (non-justice-related) goals that the leader is employed to achieve. The position is that “[l]eader fairness can be reliably linked to behavioural outcomes” such as performance and commitment (van Knippenberg, de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2007: 129) – that “justice perceptions have been shown to have effects on people’s motivation, well-being, performance, attitudes, behaviours and other outcomes relevant for organizations and organizational members”

Affectivity and leadership justice  45 (Fortin, 2008: 93) – and that deploying leadership to increase perceptions of justice is “an actionable strategy for bolstering followers’ well-being and performance” (Kiersch and Byrne, 2015: 292). Also identified as organizationally relevant outcomes of employee perceptions of justice are: discouragement of disruptive behaviour, promotion of the acceptance of organizational change, reinforcement of the sense of trustworthiness in people in positions of authority, reduction of people’s fear of being exploited, provision of incentives for worker cooperation, as well as satisfaction of individual needs for control, esteem and belonging (Colquitt, Greenberg and Zapata-Phelan, 2005: 5–6). It has also been suggested that the perception of whether a leader is interpersonally just is directly related to whether that leader is seen as transformational (Katou, 2015). These leaders, it has been proposed, can “transform people’s motives and actions from the personal to the collective or organizational level” in turn influencing “employees’ organizational citizenship behavior, performance, and organizational commitment” (de Cremer, van Dijke and Bos, 2007: 1798). Conversely, when the outcomes an employee receives from the organization are felt to be unjust, leaders who “display behaviors that are perceived as valuable and useful towards the interest of the organization and its employees” (de Cremer, van Dijke and Bos, 2004: 473) can mitigate the negative effects of that sense of injustice. While circular reasoning might be criticized in terms of its logical fallaciousness, in the case of leadership justice the more serious criticism is that it acts as a means to use justice as a device for manipulating followers into consent in the name of the collective good as it is defined by organizational elites. Janson, Levy, Sitkin and Lind (2008: 267) propose that “new leaders may find it very useful to engage their followers early on by enacting some noticeable act of fairness”. The declared imperative is that leaders should perform dramatic acts to demonstrate justice, not that they should be just on the basis of any moral or ethical imperative. Concomitantly, “ethical leadership in organizations is increasingly portrayed as crucial for sustained success in today’s business world and recent scandals demonstrate that a lapse in ethics at the top can be costly for organizations” (Den Hartog and De Hoogh, 2009: 200). Despite the complexity of methods and analysis brought to bear on the positivistic pursuit of the study of justice and leadership, its neoliberal managerial ethos goes without any difficult ethical questions being asked. Taken for granted is the idea that, primarily, it is the corporation to whom ethical responsibility is owed. Further, this serves to justify the managerialist rationality outlined earlier – the idea that corporations can and should manipulatively enforce their will on others for their own good and that ‘justice’ is just another weapon in the arsenal used in the policing of that enforcement. Indeed, it can be said that research into leadership justice shares with much study of leadership the dangerous

46  Affectivity and leadership justice assumption that “given a favourable personality and a conducive situation then subordinates act simply as objects […] to be manipulated like so much machinery” (Ashman, 2007: 97). When this is the case, justice is reduced to being a rational means to that end rather than an end in itself.

The rationality of leadership justice Why is it still the case that the ‘state of the art’ (van Knippenberg, de Cremer and van Knippenberg, 2007) of leadership justice has been consistently informed by a rationality whereby justice is used as a means to enhance organizational self-interest in the form of ‘performance’? (e.g. Azeem, Abrar, Bashir and Zubair, 2015). This question can be approached by considering the relationship between what Weber (1978) calls formal rationality and substantive rationality. Formal rationality is the application of “quantitative calculation or accounting” (p. 85), often in monetary terms, for the achievement of particular goals. Bureaucratic organizing is the core example of the application of such formal rationality in that rules and routines aim to achieve “the most precise and efficient means for the resolution of problems” (Kalberg, 1980: 1158). By contrast, substantive rationality refers to “economically oriented action under some criteria […] of ultimate values” (Weber, 1978: 85). With substantive rationality, the goals pursued by formal rationality are evaluated and justified by an “extrinsic standard of value-rationality” (Eisen, 1978: 64). Thus, formal rationality determines the most efficient way to achieve goals, while substantive rationality relates to the values which go into determining or assessing what the goals should be. In the corporate ‘life-world’ imagined in leadership justice theory, there is a particular interplay of rationalities. Here justice is a means rather than an end – it is formally rational (cf. Du Gay (2000) on justice and bureaucracy). The substantive goal being pursued with non-­rational commitment is economic value as achieved by organizational effectiveness. This reflects a hybridized rather than a classic bureaucracy (Courpasson, 2000; Courpasson and Clegg, 2006; Rhodes and Price, 2011), one couched within a neoliberal culture that prizes the pursuit of self-­ interest and valorizes business success as an ethical end (Harvey, 2005; Brown, 2015) and its ‘ultimate value’ (Weber, 1978). Justice is located in the formally rational pursuit of organizational effectiveness understood in terms of calculable financial success in a competitive market place. This reflects the general tendency in leadership theory where “researchers’ overriding concern remains with managerial effectiveness instead of social critique” (Zoller and Fairhurst, 2007: 1333) and, ultimately, emancipation (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016). The imperative given to leaders is to ensure that their followers do not feel they are being treated unfairly so that the leader can better achieve his or her organizational goals.

Affectivity and leadership justice  47 This approach refracts Weber’s focus on formal rationality in that much of management theory has assumed, in the wake of Weber, that organizations are incubators for ‘cold rationality’ beholden to act “without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm” (Weber, 1948/1991: 225). Managers are imagined to be “logical, reasoned, rational decision makers” (Muchinsky, 2000: 802) who reject any form of heightened emotion as feminine and unnecessary (Fournier and Kelemen, 2001; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015; c. Acker, 1990). In practice, however, this is somewhat unrealistic. As Willmott (2011) explains, Weberian ‘personality’ is forged through a continuous struggle to live a life that is framed and informed by reason, yet critically is fully cognizant of a morally charged obligation recurrently to renew and enact a non-rational commitment to particular values. (p. 259) Weber (1948/1991) recognizes that love (conceived by him in relation to fraternity) is in conflict with rationally ordered institutions, suggesting also that “the split usually becomes wider the more the values of the world have become rationalized” (p. 330) and that this tension has “been most obvious in the economic sphere” (p. 331). Capitalism is the most extreme form of this, Weber (1978) contends, given the monetary calculability and impersonally that characterize economic relationships within it. In such conditions, the institutionalization of formal rationality strips the pursuit of wealth of ethical meaning rendering people “specialists without spirit” (p. 182). The cynicism this portends, for Weber, is one where the pursuit of economic goods is decreed like a fate and where economic order is characterized by the loveless impersonality of the iron cage (Weber, 1958a). With such fatalism, substantive and formal rationality are “always in principal separate things” (Weber, 1978: 108) addressing “largely distinct problems” (p. 111). The consequence, for Weber (1958b), is that The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. (p. 134) There is a distinctly gendered dimension to Weber’s resignation to the fate of modernity, one that Bologh (1990) sharply critiques as an ‘ethics of manliness’ (p. 42) characterized by the privileging of ‘greatness’ and achievement over ‘love’, care and relationality, as well as the separation between them. For Weber, the sad fate of the rationalized world

48  Affectivity and leadership justice is one where the “means-end pursuit of material interests” and the “subordination of value-rationality to instrumental rationality” result in disenchantment and nihilism (Gane, 2002: 2). This masculine ethos normalizes rationality by separating it from affect, that latter being sequestered into the private and feminized sphere of the home (Bologh, 1990) – the manager is reduced to being a ‘man of reason’ (Lloyd, 2002; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015). Bologh criticizes Weber as privileging masculine rational action so as to subordinate “substantive, ethical, human values and ends” to a “formal, bureaucratic, capitalist, calculating rationality” (p. 122). If instrumental rationality means institutionalizing the procedures that are most effective in achieving organizational goals, then leadership justice theory embodies the normative proposition that justice itself should be included as a part of this rational calculus. It is this separation between public/organizational life as rational and private/domestic life as irrational and affective that Bologh argues imbues Weber’s thought with a deep-seated privileging of masculinity. One of the results of this is a “desire for a loving world” being replaced by a “(manly) politically ‘realistic’ and ‘rational’ attitude” (p. 136). Leadership justice participates in a neoliberal variant of this attitude. It is worth noting that there have been numerous arguments suggesting that leadership either has or should become feminized. With this feminization, leadership focuses increasingly on “participatory, non-­ hierarchical, flexible and group-oriented” practices that are often, if not problematically, associated with feminine stereotypes (Due Billing and Alvesson, 2000: 144; Pullen and Vachhani, 2018). Feminine leadership was promoted as being able to ‘humanize’ the workplace through practices infused with “empathy, intuition, relatedness, nurturing and cooperation” (Edlund, 1992: 81) and values such as “building relationships, communication, consensus building, power as influence, and working together for a common purpose” (Trinidad and Normore, 2005: 574). At first glance, this seems aligned with Bologh’s (1990) call for a form of sociality based on “love, loyalty and nurturance” (p. 323). Despite its valorization of the feminine, on closer inspection feminine leadership has remained rationalized in the sense described earlier. Even though it evokes ethico-feminine categories such as care, love and so forth, it still privileges rationalization in that “feminine leadership seeks to arouse awareness of and appreciation for the contributions feminine leadership can make” such that “when the workplace is humanized, organizations are more effective” (Edlund, 1992: 87; cf. Pullen and Vachhani, 2018). At its most sanguine the claim is that “women are more likely than men to lead in a style that is effective under contemporary conditions” (Eagly and Carli, 2003: 807). This focus on ‘effectiveness’ in studies of feminine leadership (Eagly, 2007) resounds in studies that have devoted themselves to establishing whether men or women have

Affectivity and leadership justice  49 some ‘gender advantage’ when it comes to producing results (Vecchio, 2002). In this sense, the so-called feminization of leadership simply acts as a “market-oriented instrumentalization of femininity” (Enderstein, 2018) that serves to bolster existing masculine organizational rationality as it seeks its ultimate justification in “more sales, better market share, and to take away from competitors” (Calas and Smirchich, 1993: 79).

Ethics in the name of the other Having considered leadership ethics in relation to Weber’s thought, it can be surmised that dominant approaches to leadership justice remain very much connected with a Weberian rational ideal. Seen in this way, the substantive rationality of organizations rests in the valuing of organizational effectiveness, business success and, more generally, organizational ‘greatness’ (Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). With the prizing of this substantive rationality, justice is relegated to being a variable within the calculus of formal rationality. Moreover, conceiving of justice this way disparages as feminine any non-rational or non-instrumental values that might be associated with justice. On this basis, justice becomes divorced from ethics with, after Bologh (1990), justice is located on the privileged side of rational, masculine, public life and ethics is on the side of irrational, feminine, private life. The critique of managerialist approaches to leadership justice outlined above is not a reason to give up on justice as it relates to leadership. What it calls for is a way of thinking about organizational justice from a more genuinely other-centred approach that does not subjugate justice to corporate self-interest, does not privilege justice over ethics, and does not rest on the implicit assumption of the primacy of self-interest and its cold-hearted manipulative pursuit through instrumental rationality in a masculine “economy of contract and exchange” (Diprose, 2002: 10). Turning to Levinas, “once one is generous in the hope of reciprocity, that relation no longer arises from generosity but from the commercial relation” (Levinas, 1986/2001: 213). Applied to leadership, such commerce reflects an implicit contract whereby if the leader provides justice, this should be reciprocated by followers in the form of commitment to the organization and its substantive goals. Under such an arrangement, “sociability is reducible to an exchange economy of ‘rational minds’ where […] justice [is] subject to calculation and expectation of return” (Diprose, 2002: 184; see also Pullen and Rhodes, 2015) – precisely the form of masculinism that Bologh (1990) warns of. To consider an alternative form of leadership justice, Levinas’s ethical philosophy offers a guide to how leadership might overcome its self-­ preoccupation (cf. Knights and O’Leary, 2006; Jones, 2014) and privileging of masculine-instrumental organizational rationality. As Diprose (2002: 117) suggests Levinas is an especially valuable source for such

50  Affectivity and leadership justice considerations in that his work challenges “the ideals of reason and autonomy” which dominate the “ethics of manliness” (Bologh, 1990: 42) that characterize prevailing accounts of leadership justice. While Levinas’s philosophy cannot be regarded as a feminist ethics, its value here resides in the primacy it places on alterity and the pre-rational, affective caring relations between people being the font of ethics and justice (Borgerson, 2007), most especially in relation to leadership (Rhodes and Badham, 2018). What Levinas’s offers is an approach that, rather than separating justice and ethics into different spheres of life, explores the relations between them as being intractable and tense, yet necessary (Mansell, 2008). Turning to Levinas for a response to the gendered critique of rationalized leadership justice brings into question the status of the feminine in his work (see also Chapter 1). There have been varied reactions to this, most especially in feminist theory (see Chanter, 2001; Guenther, 2012) where Levinas’s ideas have been responded to both affirmatively and negatively (Sandford, 2002). The focus in this chapter remains on drawing on Levinas so as to conceptualize justice in a manner that does not rationalize it through masculine ‘economies of exchange’ (Diprose, 2002). With this purpose in mind, it is noteworthy that the ‘femininity’ associated with Levinas’s theory can be seen not so much as a feature of ‘empirical women’ (Sandford, 2002) but rather as an ethical association where “the absolute, absolutely originary welcome, indeed the pre-­ original welcome, the welcoming par excellence, is feminine” (Derrida, 1999: 45). Following Chalier’s (1991) re-reading of Levinas, the feminine is understood as that “which puts into question the easy conscience of […] rationality and self-conceit” (p. 122). Such an ethics is rooted in being “devoted to the Other before being devoted to itself” (p. 126). Ethics begins with alterity. For Levinas, justice must always be premised on ethics, such that to strive to do justice is inspired by an ethical concern for other people. Levinas does not use the term ethics to refer to some system of rational procedures, practices or dispositions that can ensure a sense of ‘goodness’ or righteousness on the part of one who adheres to them. Neither does he develop a set of prescriptions or values intended to guide or inform how people might live or respond to situations in which they find themselves. Instead, Levinas’s project is to delve into the very meaning of ethics – his is a ‘proto-ethics’ (Llewelyn, 1995: 4) that attempts an ‘ethics of ethics’ (Derrida, 1978/2001: 138) as they might give rise to a Weberian notion of ‘ultimate values’. Coming back to Weber (1978), value-rational action involves the “clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate values governing the action” (p. 25) as opposed to being ‘affectual’ – the latter being characterized pejoratively as an “emotional surrender” (p. 33) to “household communism” (p. 153) that should be set aside by a masculine-oriented rationality. For Weber affectual values,

Affectivity and leadership justice  51 understood as “[e]ros, ecstasy and emotion represent the threat of losing control: loss of mastery, loss of rationality, loss of manliness” (Bologh, 1990: 140). In contrast, for Levinas it is the ethical-affectual basis of rational action that is given primary importance, in a sense that recognizes that rationality and emotion cannot be regarded as mutually exclusive and belonging to different spheres of life. Levinas’s approach to ethics eschews the masculinist privileging of rationality central to the critique of dominant approaches to leadership justice canvassed earlier, instead locating ethics in pre-rational and affectual relations with the other. Levinas’s ethics is conceived in the face-to-face relation between people where the other person, as a ‘face’, is always regarded as radically different to the self. For Levinas “the face of the other person is not the appearance of the other person – it is not a collection of features given to visual perception” (Morgan, 2007:  67) but rather signals both the absolute particularity and unknowability of the other person as well as our responsibility to that person. As Levinas (1961/1969) explains “the relation with the face is not an object-­cognition” (p. 75) that can be apprehended within a system of knowledge, but signals a transcendence that puts the self into question. In more practical terms, the relationship with the face is “a dimension of human social experience that complements our existence as natural human beings and introduces the sense of value and goodness that we believe human life has” (Morgan, 2007: 84). Levinas holds extreme respect for the sanctity of the other person, a sanctity so revered that it never assumes that the other person can ever really be known in a rational way, nor that the other person should ever be put at my service. While I may be face-to-face with an other, at the same time that other is infinitely different to me and certainly not capturable in any categories that I might choose to apply it to him or her. For Levinas, it is the awe inspired by this ‘infinity’ that gives rise to ethics – the absolute respect for the other person in face-to-face proximity, and where that other comes first. The ethical relation that Levinas elaborates is quite different to how ‘normal’ relations between people might be understood. Ethics is certainly not about exploiting others or about using them for one’s own advantage through systems of instrumental rationality. Neither is it about reciprocity and fair exchange of making sure that each person puts in and gets repaid the same amount from relationships. Ethics instead is an out-of-balance ­relationship – one that puts the other person first in the name of generosity, respect and humility. Ethics is a kind of giving without taking or expecting anything in return. This ethics, the meaning of ethics, is like a love that gives freely without thought of the pursuit of self-advantage or ­repayment – precisely the love that is castigated from the public sphere in masculine forms of rationality (Bologh, 1990) common to leadership justice theory.

52  Affectivity and leadership justice Levinas describes the self as being hostage to the other. With ethics the self is not secure in its righteousness but is called into question by alterity, “by the presence of the Other” (Levinas, 1961/1969: 43). It is the other person who calls into question the very idea that one might live one’s life just for the purpose of satisfying selfish needs and desires. The ethical self is a vulnerable self in that it is vulnerable to other ­people. With this “[g]oodness consists in taking up a position in being such that the other counts more than myself” (Levinas, 1961/1969: 47). For Levinas, ethics involves an incessant questioning of the self by the other without self-righteous tranquillity – this is a questioning that marks out an “unfulfillable obligation” (Levinas, 1982/1994: 150). Levinas’s ethics is a very tall order, an ethics that seems almost impossible in the vastness of its demand for self-lessness. Being open to the desire for the other involves “the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability” (Levinas, 1974/1998: 48). This ethics is about being “for-the-other in vulnerability” (p. 71) … come what may. Practically, it would seem that Levinas’s ethics is hard to find in work settings, especially those where “[a]t worst employees are viewed as numbers and not as people, let alone ‘faces’ in the Levinasian sense” (ten Bos and Willmott, 2001: 781). In management and leadership, it is the comparison between people, rather than each other’s specificity, that is paramount, for example comparing their perceptions of fairness. Such leadership can be cast as “an attempt to capture the elementary experience of self and other in the sphere of managerial control” (Costea and Introna, 2008: 187) and “through this move the ‘Otherness’ of the Other, the exceptional, is neatly bracketed and ’covered over’” (­I ntrona, 2003: 212). That is not to say, of course, that all discussions of leadership have eschewed issues of ethics and alterity in the way that ­leadership justice has. This is most pronounced in considerations of ‘servant ­leadership’ (Greenleaf, 1977/2002). Such leadership derives from the ethical premise that “caring for persons, the more and less able caring for each other, is what makes a good society” (p. 17). Resonating with Levinas’s ethics, the moral dimension of servant leadership is said to be operationalized when leaders become other-focused. The servant leadership practices derived from this are: listening and empathizing with followers, devotion to serving the needs of others, commitment to people’s personal growth, and building and maintaining communities at work (Spears, 1998). Servant leadership brings with it a moral dimension absent in charismatic and transformation models (Hoch, Bommer, Dulebohn and Wu, 2018) with leaders ranging from Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jnr. to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin all said to match the general criteria established to identify charismatic leadership (Graham, 1991). Others, however, have clarified this suggesting that it is ethics that

Affectivity and leadership justice  53 distinguishes ‘pseudo-transformational leadership’ from ‘truly transformational leadership’ (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999). By this account, a  pseudo-­transformational leadership is characterized by a ‘manipulative intention’ (Lin, Huang, Chin and Huang, 2017), whereas a central component of a truly transformational leadership is “the moral character of the leaders and their concern for self and others (p. 182) – their ability to “care about the people and situation at stake” (Lurie, 2004: 10). Proposing that transactional forms of leadership are “grounded in a worldview of self-interest” (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 185), it is asserted that transformational leadership is based on relationships where self-interest is secondary to a commitment to ethical standards, focusing on the “best in people” and aligning action with the “ultimate benefit and satisfaction” of others (p. 189) – all underscored, in almost Levinasian terms, by the “necessity of altruism” (p. 189). Servant leadership and authentic transformational leadership share the idea that leaders not only will, but can, lead in a way that displays ethical care and respect for each and every other person. Moreover, it is posited that they can do so without at all conflicting with the organizational imperatives with which the leader is charged, or with the different demands that different people might place on the leader. It is assumed that a harmonious balance can be reached so as “to achieve the common good of the organization, while at the same time meeting the needs and safeguarding the rights of the various stakeholders” (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999: 200). What this does not adequately account for, however, is the complex and politically charged relationship that leaders are embroiled in practice (Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes, 2007b; Rhodes and Badham, 2018). Unlike these leadership theories, however, Levinas does not simply assume that adopting an ethical position of being ‘for-the-other’ can be easily used to achieve harmonious communal relations. Instead his work attends directly to the complexities of what might actually be involved when such an ethics is brought to bear on the social and political realities of the world – in the case here the world of organizations.

Practical justice As outlined above, for Levinas the meaning of ethics originates in the awe inspired in the face-to-face relation between two people where the other who one faces is infinitely different to oneself and ignites one’s responsibility. Practically speaking, however, the social and organizational world is not characterized by such dyadic relationships – as if the servant leader had only one master rather than a range of masters whose demands might conflict. Taken alone Levinas’s ethics is not ‘practical’ in relating to leadership practice understood as an in situ accomplishment located in the everyday complexity of relations with other people

54  Affectivity and leadership justice at work (Larson and Lundholm, 2010; Alvehus, 2018). Indeed Levinas’s thinking, as presented so far, is somewhat lofty in its appreciation of the ethical. In this vein, Levinas has been characterized as a ‘utopian idealist’ (Manderson, 2007: 80) and a ‘moral perfectionist’ in that he “describes the commitment we ought to have in ways that seem impossibly demanding” (Putnam, 2002: 36; Rhodes and Badham, 2018). The demands of Levinas’s ethics can be understood in terms of the relationship between his philosophy and his Judaism. It has been suggested that there is an analogue between Levinas’s work and a call for “translating the Hebrew Bible into Greek discourse” (Morgan, 2007:  389), the latter being understood as “the language of European and Western civilization” (ibid.: 388). In this sense, Levinas is “both drawing on ­Jewish sources and themes” and “universalizing Judaism” (Putnam, 2002: 46). This process is not one that seeks to convert gentiles to Jews even though Levinas’s “intended audience […] is not just Jews but humanity as a whole” (ibid.: 47). What Levinas does is to expand the ‘duty of hospitality’ central to Jewish thought so as to open up the meaning of humanity in general (Derrida, 1999). With this ‘opening up’, Levinas exceeds accusations of piousness and the abstract articulation of a moral perfectionist position in that his philosophy is very much rooted in the vexing moral problems of the present. Taken this way, the importance of Levinas’s thinking is its pragmatism as it concerns the practical importance of “service to others” (Shaw, 2008: xxi). It is a consideration of this that animates Levinas’s work – a matter that achieves a more ‘practical’ and less ‘perfectionist’ standpoint in his account of justice. This is practical not in the sense of offering normative advice on how to be just, but rather on elaborating the meaning of justice in social contexts human interaction. What Levinas’s work achieves, as explored next, is to move from ethics so as to consider “justice necessary as a practical matter” (Manderson, 2007: 73; Rhodes, 2016). Leadership is practiced in the ‘messy world of organizations’ – an ambiguous, dynamic, and situational context (Denis, Langley and ­Rouleau, 2010) where “leadership emerges and evolves in concrete social contexts” (Raelin, 2017: 220). Part of this messiness involves the vast range of different people and interests brought to bear on the leader’s day-to-day activities. So contextualized, if a leader were to abide by an ethics concerned with service to other people (Greenleaf, 1977/2002), this ethics of generosity to a particular other person would always conflict with the potential to be generous to all of the other others. The assumption that this might be achieved harmoniously is far from practical because one cannot offer the full potential of one’s generosity to all, and in a social, community or organizational setting generosity is always divided. Levinas (1974/1998) explains the meaning of such sociality for ethics in relation to what he refers to as the ‘third party’. With this term he is interested in what happens to the ethics of

Affectivity and leadership justice  55 the face-to-face when there are more than two people involved. This enables Levinas to move from a philosophical exploration of the meaning of ethics to a position that is much more relevant to the understanding of ethics and justice in relation to the everyday practice of leadership and organizations. For Levinas, It is the third party that interrupts the face to face of a welcome of the other man, interrupts the proximity or approach of the neighbour, it is the third man with which justice begins. (Levinas, 1974/1998: 150) The reason this is the beginning of justice is that the presence of third party diverts attention from the face-to-face relation where one is engulfed by the one other, to the face of an ‘other other’ as well as bringing into question the relationship between those two others. One’s attentions and resources must now be divided and therefore full devotion and responsibility inspired by the face of the one other is no longer possible – ethics, while still being meaningful, is now subject to inevitable compromise. It is with this compromise that rationality becomes required. When one is responsible for more than one other person, as leaders are, there is some need to share and to divide. One’s care and attention must be directed at many people at the same time. This is, indeed, the conundrum of an ethically informed justice – it is a pre-rational desire for the other that instigated justice, but justice itself calls for a certain practical rationality that works out how to divide things between all of the others. The experience of justice is then not a matter of being fair and equal, but of grappling with the ethical dilemmas of how to proceed when the needs of all can never be met. The conceptions of leadership justice reviewed earlier are aware of the calculative nature of justice given their focus on the distribution of resources, the application of procedures and the sharing of information fairly across all members of the organization. What differs is that while theories of leadership justice assume that such perceptions of fairness can be achieved and can be righteously aligned with corporate interests, with Levinas this form of division becomes the incessant question (rather than the answer) of justice. What also differs is that while leadership justice is enacted as a formal rationality, for Levinas justice is always that through which ethics is imperfectly operationalized in the social world. What arises practically is the need to negotiate the contradictions between ethical relations with the other and rational distribution. It is this that drives the relentless dilemmas that characterize the pursuit of justice. This is not an easy position to be in as far as Levinas’s ethics is concerned because division requires comparison between people, the very comparison that defies what Levinas means by ethics. Put starkly

56  Affectivity and leadership justice the implication is that “ethical leadership is unattainable” (Knights and O’Leary, 2006: 126). Levinas’s thinking portends that in practice there is no room for self-righteousness, only for an ongoing questioning of the self in relation to the others to whom one is responsible. Just leadership is no longer about trying to ensure followers perceive one’s actions as fair in order to improve one’s own effectiveness – it is about navigating the ethical quandaries and dilemmas that leading other people, and being responsible for them, inevitably raise. This justice, while it might result in a particular set of values on which a leader makes decisions, does not determine the nature of those values. Nor does it result in a normative prescription for how leaders should behave in particular situations. Instead, it attests to the radical particularity of each instance and the call to attend to the ethical specificities that this engenders. That is not to suggest that substantive rationality and ultimate values (cf. Weber, 1948/1991) are of no importance, but that there is something prior to such modes of rationality – responsibility to the other is the foundation of rationality. Just leadership, by this account, relies on remembering the ethical basis of rationality and of justice rather than justifying action only in a ­value-rational way. The everyday practice of leadership justice can now be understood in terms of the need to make decisions when faced with multiple and conflicting demands from other people, all of which can be conceived of as important and for which no rational calculation can determine the right thing to do (Clegg, Kornberger and Rhodes, 2007a). For leaders, this might manifest in, for example, conflicting demands from different followers, or conflicting demands between what is good for employees and what is good for the corporation. Dealing with such conflicts means, for leaders, the requirement to compare all of the demands, and decide which ones to try to serve, which to neglect, or how to compromise between them. Of course, such decisions might be made pragmatically or instrumentally in relation to what is best for the leader himself or herself, but if justice is to be considered then the decision must be based on some notion of what is the fairest decision even though that decision will not serve everyone. This is the practical challenge of just leadership, a challenge that is eschewed by leadership theory in its obsession with self-effectiveness through measuring perceptions of fairness. Justice, for Levinas, entails “a comparison of what is in principle incomparable” (Levinas, 1991/2006) – a comparison between at least two others who are radically different. On account of this, the practice of leadership justice is always already in a heated ethical conundrum in that ethics demands justice to be applied in organizations, but justice, because it requires compromise between people, can never live up to the absoluteness of the ethical demands that invoked it. The question for leadership practice is: how might these impossible dilemmas be resolved

Affectivity and leadership justice  57 or responded to? One way to address this is through the institution codes, norms or policies designed to guide judgement and decision-making (cf. Helin and Sandström, 2010; Adelstein and Clegg, 2016). Consistency of policy is one way that leaders can try to ensure justice, at least distributive and procedural justice. Another would be to establish the ‘legitimate values’ on which leaders would base their actions (Bass and Steidlmeier, 1999), for example honesty, integrity, fairness, trustworthiness, authenticity, appreciation of others, love, and equality (Russell, 2001; Lawton and Páez, 2015). The inevitable yet impossible condition that Levinas’s ethics invokes, however, is that by offering equal treatment for all by virtue or by law (even if that were possible) the absolutely singular ethical relationship of the face-to-face is irrevocably yet unavoidably broken. What does this mean for leadership and justice? As has been argued, a concern for justice highlights the necessary politics in which the leadership function is always located. This approximates, in Weberian terms, the conflict between the public and the private spheres. The key difference, however, is that while Weber privileges the masculine formal rationality of the public (Bologh, 1990), Levinas not only privileges what Weber regards as private/feminine but goes beyond this to explain how what might be conceived of as individual ‘ultimate values’ actually arise from relations with others. With Levinas, politics is always personal and the Weberian divisions do not hold, at least insofar as ethics and justice are concerned. Justice is about how this personal/political (viz. feminine/masculine) relation is managed. The disruption caused by the third party means that one must now respond to more than one other and make choice between them and to decide which one to put first. This portends an ongoing oscillation between ethics and politics (Simmons, 1999; see also Topolski, 2015) where leaders are caught up in contexts in which they might try at once to be responsible to one other (say an employee) only to find that they face demands from other others (say, another employee, a boss or a customer) and that these demands are not commensurable. Dealing with these competing calls for responsibility is the location where justice defines leadership. Moreover, in this ‘dealing’ there is no guarantee that everyone will perceive that matters are fair. It is not so much that leaders can declare themselves as being just on the basis of some or other criteria that might be a guarantor of righteousness, nor even on whether followers ‘perceive’ that they have been treated justly. Justice is something that places practical demands on leadership – demands to take responsibility and to decide when no decision is adequate to all. Justice insists that leaders negotiate the inevitable but necessary tensions between ethics and justice. This also means recognizing that it is the presence of those tensions that is the sign of ethical self-questioning in organizations and of just leadership (Byers and Rhodes, 2007). Just leadership is an ongoing engagement with the anxieties, dilemmas, contradictions and double-binds that occur in the

58  Affectivity and leadership justice conflict between the ethical demands of all of the others. Such justice must be inspired by an ethical caring for and generosity towards every single unique other person, while at the same time requiring compromise between them.

Conclusions and implications This chapter has provided a critique of dominant approaches to leadership justice, arguing that they appropriate justice as a rational means through which to achieve organizational effectiveness. Drawing on a Weberian (Weber, 1978) approach to rationality and bureaucracy, it was argued that in contemporary management thinking justice is not so much a substantive rationale for action as it is a formal and instrumental one. Turning especially to Bologh’s (1990) critique of Weber, it was further argued that this rationalization of justice belies its masculinization, and as a result human values grounded outside of a calculative rationality are sidelined. In seeking to redeem the value of justice in relation to leadership Levinas’s ethical theory and ideas were used to consider the possibilities of a leadership justice that is valued not on account of its formal rationality but on account of its foundation in ethical care for others. It is from Levinas that we understand individuals not as self-sufficient, but rather “always embedded in a context of relations that inherently charge the subject with responsibilities corresponding to its existential position” (Kleinberg-Levin, 2008: 21). For leaders, this existential position translates into a concern for other people as connected with the exercise of power and authority and, moreover, the taking of responsibility for that exercise. It is this responsibility, understood as an ethical responsibility that can only manifest in justice. It is not enough to suggest that justice is a particular variety of leadership behaviour but rather that leadership is the practice of justice. This statement registers that the function of the leader as one with responsibility to many others is always about working through justified means by which to attend to the multiple and potentially conflicting demands that are placed on him or her by them. The implications of this argument for leadership justice are significant. Such implications, however, are not of a formal or procedurally prescriptive nature – to render them so would fall in to the trap of rational calculation that Bologh (1990) has warned of us. As she explains, Institutionalization means that formal procedures are established that determine the mode of action to follow in a given case. If we are to avoid absolutization, the aim must be to transform impersonal institutions by infusing them with the rationality of love, compassion and aesthetic pleasure; to counterbalance the one-sided concern

Affectivity and leadership justice  59 with the quantitative, measurable outcomes and ‘objective’ impersonal considerations with a concern for qualitative, singular effects and ‘subjective’ personalized considerations. (Bologh, 1990: 141) Indeed, following Levinas, justice itself must be grounded in such singularity. What this means is that true justice must arise from ethics, from the face-to-face relation with the other person to whom one is responsible, who is radically different from us, and whose very presence demands generosity, hospitality and charity. In contrast, justice, as rational, “has a tendency to universalize, unify, and totalize in a way that can forget, neglect or suppress the plurality of voices that express, each one in its own way, the singularity of the other” (Kleinberg-Levin, 2008: 48). And so justice always violates ethics because it involves a comparison of the ethically incomparable. The implication for leadership is that justice is not about ensuring that people report they are treated fairly, but is about engaging in, and taking responsibility for, the heated ethical dilemmas that trying to be just entails. This justice is not a state of being that can be achieved in the cold comfort of self-righteousness, but is a motivating force that calls into question and troubles the practice of leadership in all of its dimensions. The quality of just leadership lies primarily in character of how leaders, individually and collectively, exercise their power in relation to other people. Any leadership practice that has a material effect on other people is open to deliberation in terms of ethics and justice. Following Levinas, with these deliberations leaders must concern themselves with their relations with all of the others their actions affect, while at the same time being prepared to answer to each other person – these are the boundaries of leadership justice. This is what Introna (2007) calls ‘singular justice’ in that it must be delivered face-to-face – any principles, laws or generalizations about justice are thus applied not to everyone, but individually in relation to each person, at least in the sense that each person receives them separately. As discussed earlier, the dominant understanding of leadership justice is problematically aligned with the Weberian distinction between formal and substantive rationality – a forced distinction between reason and conscience (Brubaker, 1984) and masculine and feminine (Bologh, 1990). In this case, justice becomes associated with masculine reason and rationality – a rational calculus whereby justice is at the service of organizational effectiveness such that an abstracted notion of the organization becomes the primary ‘other’ to whom a leader is thought to have ethical responsibility. In contrast, the consideration of Levinas (as translated into Weberian terms) put forward here has suggested that an ethically informed leadership justice is one where formal rationality must seek its primary justification in the concern for actual other people.

60  Affectivity and leadership justice This justification is not reflective, however, of what Weber (1978) refers to as ‘ultimate values’ but rather emerges from ethics understood in the Levinasian sense as being from and for the other – from alterity. The distinction is that while substantive rationality reflects the ethical norms that provide the standards against which “empirical events may be selected, measured and judged” (Kalberg, 1980: 1155), ethics precedes the establishment or adoption of such norms, located as it is in a pre-rational exposure and openness to the other. What is received from Levinas is the idea that it is not rationality but non-rationalizable alterity that is the font of ethics. It is this non-rationalizability that gives justice the possibility of being ethical, or more precisely of being developed in response to ethics. It is the embrace of this non-rational concern for others that characterizes just leadership. The dominant conception of leadership justice is one where what is ostensibly done in the name of the other barely conceals its inherent placing of commercial, corporate and/or organizational rationality above considerations of the arduous dilemmas that arise from having potentially conflicting responsibilities to ‘all the others’ (Levinas, 1974/1998: 159). While the practice of leadership is characterized by multiple and complex ethical challenges, contemporary theories of leadership justice have disengaged from such complexity by seeking to conceive of justice as a matter of masculine formal rationality based on creating a perception of fairness for the purpose of organizational effectiveness. Such theory participates in the tendency to regard leaders as archetypal figures free from the contradictions of context and that is expressive of a desire to control organizational destiny (Czarniawska-Joerges and Wolff, 2001). While such a conception of leadership may be organizationally seductive (Calas and Smircich, 2001) and appealing to an economics rationality (Bouilloud and Deslandes, 2015), it is naïve to the experience of ethics. The rational underpinnings of leadership justice theory appear like a bizarre male fantasy out of touch with the experiential complexity of the work of leadership and the varied contextual predicaments that leaders will construct and find themselves constructed in at different points in time (Fairhurst, 2009). Indeed, leadership justice theory speaks more to the desires for a leadership subsumed in instrumental organizational rationality than it does to the multiple possible realities of ‘doing leadership’ (Sveningsson and Larsson, 2006). This form of idealized justice denies ethics by reducing justice to the application of an instrumental formula that has as its goal not justice, but organizational effectiveness. As has been shown, this dominant approach to organizational justice, as it is pre-occupied with how leaders can influence the perceptions of justice amongst their followers, is both naïve and self-serving. Naïve in that it does not account for the complex ethical dilemmas faced by leaders who allow themselves to be affected by the ethical demands of others – self-serving in that it assumes that the purpose of just leadership is to

Affectivity and leadership justice  61 promote leadership and organizational effectiveness where justice is just a means to a corporately sanctioned end. In seeking to develop an alternative way for conceiving of leadership justice, Levinas ethical theory asks us to turn away from the embedded assumptions that leaders seek justice for their own and their organization’s effectiveness. Such are assumptions that render justice as merely another form of self-interest. What we are offered, instead, is the opening up of a space for a more affective, affirmative, experientially contingent and other-focused notion of leadership justice, one based on generosity and hospitality while at the same time being mired in the political practicalities of organizational life. This just leader is less interested in his or her own instrumental effectiveness, instead grappling with his or her conflicting relationships and responsibilities. This ‘grappling’ is central to the quality and condition of just leadership such that the meaning of what it might mean to be effective is put into question by the demand to do justice to all other people to which one owes responsibility. There is no end to the quest for justice. Indeed, it is this quest which is a condition of leadership, as well as one of its most indefatigable challenges.

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4 Justice, politics and workplace diversity beyond a pure ethics

Justice and social equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people has become an issue of major contestation on the global political agenda. This is a battle where homosexuality is still a crime in many countries, where LGBT people face discrimination, harassment and violence in society, where family law applies unequally to people in non-heterosexual relationships, and where same-sex marriage is aggressively opposed by many factions of society. Nowhere has this battle been played out more strongly than in the workplace (Humphrey, 1999; Raeburn, 2004; Colgan and Rumens, 2014; Webster, Adams, Maranto, Sawyer and Thoroughgood, 2018). In this arena, LGBT people continue to experience discrimination, abuse and stigmatization (Ng, Schweitzer and Lyons, 2012; McFadden and Crowley-Henry, 2018) despite activism seeking to address these issues having been in place since the 1970s. While part of a broader movement for LGBT equality, activism in the workplace has its own unique characteristics. Chief amongst these if that in order to garner organizational support, those promoting workplace equality have long been pressured to “balance their activist agendas with the need to contribute to the organization” by helping “create competitive advantage or improve organizational effectiveness” (Githens and Aragon, 2009: 124). The current situation is that “the proactive take-up of organizational equality and diversity activities [has been] driven by business case and bottom line arguments” (Özbilgin and Tatli, 2011: 1235; cf. Morley, 1998) where it is assumed that organizations are “capable of strategically implementing structures, processes, and policies in order to leverage the ‘business case’ of diversity” (Trittin and Schoeneborn, 2017: 308). Although the business case for diversity has been advocated in management practice, it has come under severe criticism, especially on moral grounds. Indeed, critically questioning the value of ‘business case’ arguments is an established part of diversity studies (Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop and Nkomo, 2010) even though the advent of business case arguments has been acknowledged as the reason for expansion of LGBT workplace diversity research since the early 1990s (Ng and Rumens, 2017). The resulting situation is that “tension between

Ethical praxis for diversity  69 an approach based on utilitarian arguments (the business case) and an approach based on social justice and human rights forms a crucial point of debate in the diversity and equality field” (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010: 102). Such tension arises because support for the business case relies on the presumption that “being morally good is materially good for business” (Michalos, 2013: 599), while critics lave long seen it as being ‘fatally flawed’ because it rests on a set of motives that are not ethically driven (Cragg, 2015). The purpose of this chapter is to critically reconsider debates about the business case for diversity, with specific reference to LGBT activism. While some argue that “radical practice of diversity necessarily involves rejection of the business case” (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010: 116), the chapter will explore how what will be called ‘ethical praxis’ can effectively operate within and against such business logic. Critiques of business case approaches rely on a consideration of the meaning of ethics as it resides in the motives of organizations. While this is an important consideration, it fails to account for how the business case logic can actually be used for purposes that are different from, and possibly in contradiction with, those motives. Called for is a way of theorizing diversity politics that, instead of standing on the moral high ground, adds to its ethical position a concern with the practicalities and possibilities of praxis. Such praxis emerges from considering how theory, in this case ethical theory, might inform “methods of acting in, engaging with, and addressing concrete ethics issues” (Nielsen, 1993: 131). To be clear this chapter seeks to document, explore and to some extent theorize this praxis but, emphatically, not to have invented it. The hope is to contribute to a research agenda that will highlight how diversity activists already have and can pursue workplace justice in organizations where business-based justifications for organizational changes of any kind are demanded. With such an agenda it is justice that is the unfaltering goal, yet it is a manipulation and exploitation of the business case logic that can be part of the political means. In exploring the idea of an ethical praxis for diversity, the chapter begins by reviewing and problematizing the distinction between business case and social justice justifications as they have become dominant in discussions on workplace diversity, including especially LGBT diversity. This distinction holds that while business approaches see diversity as just another means for securing commercial self-interest, social justice approaches claim a genuine ethical interest beyond business justification. Second, the chapter explores the specifics of LGBT diversity in terms of heteronormativity (Warner, 1993) and cisnormativity (Spencer and Capuzza, 2016) such that the identification of LGBT people as a belonging to a singular category is based on them being ‘other’ to the assumed norms of cisgendered heterosexuality. Judith Butler’s (2003, 2004, 2005, 2013) reading of Levinas (1961/1969, 1982/1985, 1974/1998,

70  Ethical praxis for diversity 1972/2003) is used to explain this othering as it relates to the politics of de/humanization. Third, Levinas’s conception of justice is explored as a means to argue that the ethics of diversity must be matched with a politics if it is to be effective. Through this, ethical praxis is identified as a means through which diversity activism can be theorized and has been practiced as an ethically informed yet pragmatic politics. Fourth, the issue of the business case for workplace diversity is reconsidered in relation to this ethical praxis so as to interrogate and elaborate the ethical possibilities that the business case logic inadvertently gives rise to. The chapter concludes by outlining how ethical praxis is a way that both uses and resists instrumental approaches to diversity so as to break impasse between the business case and the social justice case.

The business case for LGBT diversity For contemporary corporations, workforce diversity has become a major managerial and commercial concern (Herring and Henderson, 2014) heralded by a shift over the past 20 years from a focus on equality and equal opportunity to diversity management (Kirton and Greene, 2009). Central to debates on diversity has been a consideration of the motives behind why organizations have and should seek to adopt it. The debates have revolved almost exclusively around the distinction between the business case and the social justice case for diversity (Bleijenbergh, Peters and Poutsma, 2010) with the legal case sometimes added as a motivation but usually only when discussing public sector organizations (Colgan, Wright, Creegan and McKearney, 2009; Healy, Bradley and Forson, 2011). Although activism for workplace diversity originated from social concerns about discrimination and injustice towards women and racial minorities, in its adoption in business it has taken a much more economic and commercially driven direction (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010). What is referred to as the ‘business case approach’ is the dominant justification for diversity. It claims that a diverse workforce, at both firm and labour market levels, has direct business benefits. Hence, it is for the purpose of commercial self-interest that forms of discrimination that impede diversity should be removed (Konrad, 2003). The present situation, as initiated in the 1990s, is that “practices and discourses of diversity management have been increasingly justified by reference to business case arguments, leaving the impression that social justice concerns are less relevant” (Tatli, Nicolopoulou, Özbilgin, ­Karatas-Ozkan and Öztürk, 2015: 1233). This has resulted from “a shift where market discourses of the business case replaced moral discourses of justice and tolerance” (Kamp and Hagedorn-Rasmussen, 2004: 532). One effect of this has been the depoliticization of equality and the usurpation of justice-based activism with business-based pragmatism (Kirton and Greene, 2009). As with practices of gender and racial diversity that

Ethical praxis for diversity  71 preceded it, LGBT diversity has also been enrolled in this logic. The justification is that organizations with “high sexual orientation diversity [and] with a strong proactive diversity strategy” will outperform their peers (Cunningham, 2011b: 458). Such a view is also shared by managers who state that in relation to LGBT employees “corporate business objectives [are] the major drivers shaping diversity policy and practice” (Colgan, 2011: 731). Benefits from diversity, it has been argued, come in the form of: cost savings through lower turnover, reduced absenteeism, fewer discrimination lawsuits, improved quality of staff, improved understanding of diverse consumers, and increased creativity (Robinson and Dechant, 1997). With specific reference to LGBT diversity, positive business outcomes also include opening up markets within LGBT communities, driving organizational culture change by including diverse perspectives, and appearing ‘family friendly’ by supporting same-sex parent families (Foldy and Creed, 1999). It is also suggested that promoting LGBT diversity results in reduced workplace conflict and improved job satisfaction (Sawyer, Thoroughgood and Cleveland, 2015). An organizational culture dominated by heterosexism is argued to prevent many lesbian, gay and bisexual workers from being ‘out’ in the workplace as well as heightening levels of discrimination – both of which can result in role conflict, turnover and poor job satisfaction (King and Cortina, 2010). It has further been surmised that “sexual orientation diversity is positively associated with the presence of a creative work environment, and that this relationship is strengthened when there is a strong commitment to diversity within the organization.” (Cunningham, 2011a: 1042–1043). When, in 2003, the UK outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation, the justification for the passing of those laws included business case arguments (Colgan, Wright, Creegan and McKearney, 2009). The enthusiasm for promoting LGBT diversity to achieve commercial goals has endured significant critique (Lorbiecki and Jack, 2000; Heres and Benschop, 2010). This critique rests on the distinction between the business case approach and one that is committed primarily to addressing issues of “social justice, lack of representation, and discrimination within society and organizations” (Ahonen, Tienari, Meriläinen and Pullen, 2014: 263). Here, social justice is seen as an ethically justified end in its own right, irrespective of commercial imperatives or effects. By implication the logic and discourse of business serve to sully the more idealistic notions of ethics, fairness and justice. Even in practice it has been argued that it is not business-led initiatives that lead to improved levels of equality for LGBT employees. Instead, “impetus for sexual orientation equality work in many organisations has been the activism of LGBT people and their allies” and “based on social group membership, a social justice case and the need for collectivised action” (Colgan and McKearney, 2012: 360 and 372).

72  Ethical praxis for diversity It has been postulated that “the most notorious aspect of the diversity approach is that it seeks to bring about change within organisations on the basis of the ‘pull’ of business benefits” (Braithwaite, 2010: 147). This notoriety arises from an ethical critique of commercial self-­interest. The logic is that if diversity is adopted for business reasons, then its motives are selfish rather than arising from ethical demands for equality and justice. With business case diversity, social justice is argued to be sidelined because “the business case perspectives on diversity management often treats workforce diversity as a strategic asset based on an implicit assumption that achieving equality and social justice are not the legitimate ‘business’ of organizations” (Tatli, Nicolopoulou, Özbilgin, ­Karatas-Ozkan and Öztürk, 2015: 1246). Moreover, the implication is that if diversity and anti-discrimination programs do not result in commercial advantages, then they are best abandoned in favour of whatever other initiatives will (Knights and Omanović, 2016). The danger of the business case approach is thus identified as leading to “regressive equality outcomes if differences are deemed relevant only when they are compatible with bottom line demands” (Özbilgin and Tatli, 2011: 1231). The dominance of the business case argument is said to have led to a patchy and uneven application of diversity practices in organizations. This is especially so for LGBT diversity, as LGBT issues are still regarded by many as either a ‘sensitive’ or a ‘taboo’ area (Colgan, Wright, Creegan and McKearney, 2009). While diversity management as a general organizational practice is well established, it remains the case that LGBT diversity is not acted upon and that research (Yang and Konrad, 2011) and organizational programs have “a predominant focus on differences emanating from people’s ethnicity/race, sex and age” (Heres and ­Benschop, 2010: 441). If there is a business case for diversity, it seems that it applies unequally to those categorized as LGBT as compared to women and racial minorities. The same difference is also noted within the generalized category of LGBT. The joining together of the diverse sexualities and bodies identified under this rubric, while possibly as valuable as a political alliance, obfuscates the different types and levels of discrimination that different people face. One result of this is, for example, that while gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals might more easily assimilate into the business case logic, transgender people are largely ignored by diversity management (Öztürk and Tatli, 2015) while at the same time being chronically subjected to aggression, hostility, animosity and discrimination in the workplace (Sangganjanavanich and Cavazos, 2010). Even the justice of the business case is not meted out equally.

LGBT ‘identity’, ethics, hetero- and cisnormativity LGBT diversity differs from other forms (especially gender diversity) in that its object is not a group identified in terms of a singular shared

Ethical praxis for diversity  73 identity or set of identity characteristics, nor are LGBT people a “unified social group” (Colgan, 2016). For example, on their own terms there is little intrinsically in common between a transgender sex worker, a gay stock broker, and a non-binary teenager working at McDonald’s after school. Even though the workplace challenges faced by people of different sexual orientations and identities are quite different from each other (Chung, 2003; Shore et al., 2009), each can be classified as being the subject of LGBT diversity. What gives people categorized as LGBT commonality resides less in a shared identity and more in a shared alterity – in what they are not. To be LGBT means to not to conform to the ideals valorized in heteronormative and cisnormative culture as they relate to sexuality and gender. With heteronormativity (Warner, 1993) the reference is to “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only c­ oherent  – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged” (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 548). Heteronormativity operates at a moral level so as to define heterosexuality as being part of a culture bestowed with “rightness and normalcy” (p. 554). It is a regulatory practice embedded in law, social institutions and everyday practices (Chambers and Carver, 2008), and, traditionally, in the workplace. Heteronormativity establishes heterosexuality’s political power (Chambers, 2007) through inclusion and exclusion. Cisnormativity also relates to dominant heterosexuality, but specifically reflects a cultural norm that assumes that “gender remains stable and also supports a gender binary, assuming there are exactly two genders, and that every person is either/or” (Spencer and Capuzza, 2016: 13). As with heteronormativity, what is in place with cisnormativity is the powerful categorization of people in opposition to an assumed norm, and the discrimination that is enacted through that power (Bendl and Hoffman, 2015). As such, the category of LGBT, rather than having an internally consistent structure of common characteristics, identities, desires or practices, is defined as the agglomeration of various possibilities around gender, sex and desire that do not conform with hetero- and cisnormativity (Bendl, Fleischmann and Walenta, 2008). In this sense, hetero- and cisnormativity produces its LGBT other, at least on a categorical level. The social justice case for LGBT diversity thus rests on an ethically motivated resistance to these normativities in the workplaces (Bendl and Hoffman, 2015; Rumens and Tyler, 2015). Hetero- and cisnormative exclusion and LGBT workplace activism as it relates to ethics and politics can be fruitfully understood through ­Judith Butler’s more recent work (see Rumens and Tyler, 2015), especially as it draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.1 As Butler (2004) explains, Levinas shows how ethics is not rooted in reflexive awareness or knowledge of either one’s self or of others, but rather in the self being disrupted by the other. Morality, then, “does not proceed from

74  Ethical praxis for diversity my autonomy or my reflexivity” (p. 130), instead it is that very sense of the self that is rendered precarious by a responsibility that comes from the other. For Levinas (1961/1969), the very meaning of ethics resides in a primordial respect, care and reverence for the other person, where that person is regarded not as another of me, but as being unique and unassimilable into my own knowledge. Levinas offers an ethics of the other, in that rather than being based on self-love, self-comparison or self-interest, it finds its original locus in concrete experience with the other person. This ethics is thus opposed to egotism, greed and hubris. For Levinas, the ethical expression of being human rests on an “exception to selfishness, infantile narcissism, and egocentricity” (Marcus, 2010: 13) such that “the other concerns me despite myself” (Levinas, 1972/2003: 57). Such a focus on alterity is clearly salient to workplace diversity in that “diversity in Levinasian terms inevitably involves the ethical acknowledgement of the Other’s otherness” (Muhr, 2008: 186) – the very acknowledgement precluded organizationally by hetero- and cisnormativity. For Butler, this engagement with alterity is political in that “power circumscribes the kinds of ethical encounters that take place – how existing normative frames operate to regulate and determine who counts (and who doesn’t count)” (Lloyd, 2008: 103). This power operates through a self whose being “is dependent, not just on the existence of the other in its singularity (as Levinas would have it), but also on the social dimension of normativity that governs the scene of recognition” (Butler, 2005: 23). Hetero- and cisnormativity are such dimensions. At stake are two distinct modes of alterity. The first, aligned with hetero- and cisnormativity, is where the LGBT other is cast as abnormal, marginalized and subject to discrimination. The second is where the other is regarded as unique, irreplaceable and deserving of respect and devotion (Rhodes and Westwood, 2016). Butler’s (2004) reading of Levinas alerts us to it is how this latter meaning is centrally related to a politics of de/humanization. If the other’s difference from what is taken as the norm is used as the basis for discrimination in the context of oppressive social values, then that other is effaced and dehumanized. Conversely, if the other is approached in terms of their infinite uniqueness, and responded to with genuine care and respect, then alterity is a prompt to humanization and, in Levinas’s term, ethics. The specific character of LGBT as a category conceived through alterity thus renders an ethics of LGBT diversity conceivable in relation to Butler’s account of humanization. Discrimination against a person not conforming to hetero- or cisnormativity is a force that would rob them of any right to be treated as an ethical other. If, following Levinas, we are awakened to ethics by difference, awakened by the other, then the normalizing discourse ­Butler refers to serves to categorize certain people as not deserving of such ethical attention. Butler gives the example of how the “queer lives that vanished on September 11 are not publicly welcomed into the idea

Ethical praxis for diversity  75 of national identity currently being built in the obituary pages” such that “humanization takes place differently through variable norms of recognition” (Butler, 2003: 23 and 30). For Levinas, ethics is “the calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the other” (1961/1969: 43). By spontaneity Levinas refers to one’s sense of completeness as an individual who uses freedom to pursue one’s own self-centred goals. Spontaneity is a “joyous possession of the world” (1961/1969: 76) for oneself and one’s own gratification. Ethics, in this arrangement, is that which questions one’s own freedom and demands that engagement with the world for one’s own ends is always open to question by the other person. With spontaneity the other is just a part of the world that is at my disposal. Spontaneity is hence a sense of “autonomy to the point of internalizing or comprehending exteriority, placing the other in a closed context of meaning” (Nelson, Kapust and Still, 2005: 121). Ethics, in contrast, is a thorough questioning of the primacy of the ego in the name of the other – it interrupts the very formation of self and its interests. Levinas’s ethics evinces a ‘humanism of the other’ (1972/2003) – one not emanating from the self and its righteousness, but originating in the other person and one’s ethical obligation to that other. This is an other that appears as a ‘face’ (rather than as a category such as LGBT): a unique and incomparable other who reminds us that we are not alone in our self-absorption, and that we are indebted to the other for our very existence. Butler and Levinas’s account of ethics, as canvassed so far, serves us well in explaining the ethical critique of the business case for LGBT diversity. The business case is castigated in terms of its primary drive for organizational self-interest. The actions arising from self-justified organizational rationality are, of course, not identical to Levinas’s account of spontaneity. The two do, however, resonate in how corporate action on diversity can be understood as a variation of a “solitary freedom that does not put itself into question” (1961/1969: 304) but rather maintains the solidity and primacy of its hetero- and cisnormative self-interest as can be accomplished through its categorization of otherness. Following Butler, it is this categorization that produces a discourse of social norms that creates and perpetuates discrimination. Notably, the corporation is clearly not a person who is acting in the world. Actions are taken in its name by people whose own sense of who they are is wrapped up in an identification with the hetero- and cisnormative character of the corporate person that is notionally able to pursue what are construed as its own interests. It is on the basis of this corollary that the business case for LGBT diversity can be described as an affront to a ‘moral imperative’ rested on the illusion that “there is a continuous match between business needs and the rights and needs of disadvantaged groups” (Jonsen, Tatli, Özbilgin and Bell, 2013: 276). Conversely, the argument for the social justice case would claim that ethics would drive business to question its

76  Ethical praxis for diversity own spontaneously accepted idea of its self and its hetero- and cisnormative legacy so as to be interrupted by its responsibility for LGBT ­others – to yield to its responsibility for the sake of ethics itself by bringing its own hetero- and cisnormative identity into question.

Justice, politics and praxis after spontaneity and ethics While the discussion so far goes some way in understanding the impetus behind a moral critique of the business case approach, care needs to be taken not to stop here. While Levinas distinguishes between ethics and spontaneity, this serves to understand the very ethics of ethics itself, rather than to proclaim it as a normative or evaluative practice. The purpose in doing so “does not consist in constructing ethics […but only to…] find its meaning” (Levinas, 1982/1985: 90). Levinas’s ethics, taken alone, does not set out any specific or prescriptive ethics – it explores the more fundamental sense of the ethical that would lie beneath any such system. Because of this, while Levinas’s ethics might be drawn on to inform an understanding of the ethics of LGBT diversity, it is not adequate to inform its practice. That is to say, it is not a praxis because it does not lend itself alone to political action and its justification. Levinas offers an ethics described in what can appear as idealistic terms, elaborating how ethics is revealed in the face of the other such that we are awakened from selfish slumber and come to realize our ethical subservience to that other. Levinas goes so far as to state that the ethical subject is a hostage to the other, persecuted by the other, and always willing to sacrifice itself for the other (Levinas, 1974/1998). Acknowledging this, the practical implications of Levinas’s ethics emerge through the consideration of the passage from the meaning of ethics, to the practicalities of politics (Butler, 2013) and justice in the social world (Critchley, 1992). Levinasian ‘ethico-politics’ (Fagan, 2013) provides us with a counterpoint to the spontaneity of the business case and the ethics of the social justice case noted above. This is so, because ethical praxis exceeds the simple demands of ‘good conscience’ and comes to embody “the exigency to rebel against injustice committed against the other” (Tahmasebi-Birgani, 2014: 12). Aligned with Butler’s position, there is a continuity between ethics and politics, such that “political struggles against the norm are a way of securing the possibility of ethical relations” (Lloyd, 2007: 155). For Levinas, justice is called forth in response to the practical problems of enacting the excessive demands of ethics. Indeed, if a notion of ethics based on the sanctity of and responsibility towards the other person is accepted, what happens when one is called to responsibility for more than one person? Levinas calls this the entry of the ‘third party’ who divides one’s ethical attention between multiple others. It is in this sense that while justice can be regarded as the impossible but necessary

Ethical praxis for diversity  77 task of distributing one’s care, duty and resources between people, each of whom is unique and incomparable as well as deserving (Levinas, 1974/1998). In posing the question ‘how is it there is justice?’ Levinas (1982/1985) responds, It is the fact of the multiplicity of men [sic] and the presence of someone else next to the Other, which condition the laws and establish justice. If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything; but there is someone else. Do I know what my neighbor is in relation to someone else? Do I know if someone else has an understanding with him or his victim? Who is my neighbor? It is consequently necessary to weigh, to think, to judge, in comparing the incomparable. The interpersonal relation I establish with the Other, I must also establish with other men; it is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the Other; from whence comes justice. Justice, exercised through institutions, which are inevitable, must always be held in check by the initial interpersonal relation. (pp. 89–90) Justice is about how ethics manifests in the social and institutionalized world of interpersonal relations. Moreover, as Butler (2013) explains, with justice we enter the realm of the political – a realm that inevitably involves a “deformation of the ethical” while at the same time being unrefusable if ethics is to bear on social practice (p. 55). While it is an ethical desire for and service to the other that inaugurates the need for justice, justice demands rules and rationality so as to decide and justify how things might be divided between all of the others. It also requires political intervention that will counter injustice as it arises, using the practical means that are at one’s disposal. Resting on either moral self-conviction or subsumption to one other is not enough if justice is the goal. In relation to organizations, what emerges is that the task of justice concerns the very nature of the exercise of, and resistance to, organizational power if that power is to be exercised in a manner that places ethics prior to it (Byers and Rhodes, 2007). Justice is the imperfect social implication of ethics. With this idea of justice ethics (manifested for our purposes here in the social justice case for LGBT diversity) becomes yoked to politics in that while “ethics is fundamental” it is also the case that this means that “politics and political justice are necessary” (Morgan, 2011: 109). The question for LGBT diversity is not just about whether or not it is righteous in its demands for ethical recognition, but also about what political actions can be taken so as to respond positively to that demand. The necessity of politics is such that ethics, if it is to be meaningful in communal life, must yield to political action that seeks justice. Ethics and politics are connected in an inseparable praxis (Fagan, 2013) whereby

78  Ethical praxis for diversity “politics intervenes to put a stop to interpersonal and intra-group violence” (Bergo, 1999: 253). Striving for equality in the workplace is an example of such a political intervention in response to the spontaneity enacted in the name of organizational self-interest. It is here that business and justice cases for diversity interact rather than being conceived as separated by the ideational chasm between spontaneity and ethics. If political action is to be taken in organizations then the business case, as the dominant mode of the cultural logic of business, is an unavoidable part of that reality. This does not mean subsuming the demand for justice to business logic, but rather acknowledging that a politics that seeks justice cannot ignore it or wish it away with high-minded thoughts of ethics and responsibility. For Levinas and for Butler, the political pursuit of justice is necessitated by ethics, but is always ethically compromised. The purity of ethics, realized in the selfless devotion and responsibility to the one other, must always be divided and diluted in the face of the demands of all of the other others. Politics in this sense is an ethical praxis that, while never forgetting its origin in ethics, must engage in the practical realities of life in order for justice to be pursued. The question for LGBT diversity based on a demand for justice, is not one that can reside on the righteous moral ground that distances itself from business and its cases in order to maintain the moralism of its own position. The business case for LGBT diversity is, of course, an example of politics playing out in ­organizations – one that exemplifies calls for justice and equality have been reformulated within an overriding business logic. It is a politics that has lost sight of the demand for justice that inaugurated it – reduced it to yet another vehicle for self-interested, myopic and autistic spontaneity. In responding to this, an ethical praxis for diversity does not dismiss the business case tout court from a moral high ground, but works both with and against it, using its logic for purposes of its own ethically inspired project. The presence of the business case is a fissure in the long-standing wall of hetero- and cisnormative discrimination. That is not to say that it is necessary to discipline oneself to the logic of business – it is about using the resources at hand to act out a politics whose justification is to resist and oppose those who “ignore the responsibility for the other” (­Simmons, 1999: 98). That is, to oppose those organizations that ignore their responsibility to the LGBT other that they themselves have cast in their hetero- and cisnormative shadow. Might then the existence of the business case offer an opportunity rather than a threat to the possibilities for LGBT social justice? Might it not be something to be deployed politically for the sake of justice, rather than merely being castigated as justice’s unrighteous other? Might it not be something that can be politically employed for purposes beyond its own self-justification? Can a politics of diversity that uses and engages with the business case still retain the principle that justice and politics must never forget their origin in ethics?

Ethical praxis for diversity  79

Praxis, ethics and politics The distinction between the business and social justice cases for diversity has already been brought into question in diversity research where it is argued that a reconciliation can be found through organizational initiatives that “effectively combine performance with an affirmation of the value of the diverse other” (Maxwell, 2004; Swan and Fox, 2010; van Dijk, van Engen and Paauwe, 2012; Gotsis and Kortezi, 2013: 948). It is thus possible for managers to “support implementation of diversity management by both business-case arguments and by social-justice arguments” (Bleijenbergh, Peters and Poutsma, 2010) so as to “to obtain both equality and business success” (Kamp and Hagedorn-Rasmussen, 2004: 522). The result is a “dual agenda, meant to simultaneously foster the attainment of both the organization’s strategic goals and social justice by advancing the individual development and inclusion of all members of the organization” (Heres and Benschop, 2010). How balanced this agenda can be has, however, been brought into critical question. An affirmative answer as to whether organizations “will, or can, take the leap of faith necessary to give sufficient space to justice reasons for valuing diversity” has been judged as unlikely given “the extent that workplaces are constructed around the achievement of business or organizational goals” (Barnes and Ashtiany, 2003: 293). In practice, it is clear that organizations adopt LGBT-friendly policies for a variety of reasons that are not ethical in orientation. These include conforming to socially constructed standards within the human resource management profession, compliance with anti-discrimination laws, and competing with business rivals who have implemented such policies (Newbury, Gardberg, Hudson and Feffer, 2015). Following the discussion of ethics and politics that has been evinced here, even if the hopefulness of the dual agenda approach was possible it is still ethically inadequate. Seeking to reconcile corporate self-­interest with the pursuit of the ethical demands of the other puts ethics and self-interest on equal grounds. Following Levinas, however, justice must always be preceded by and subordinated to the ethics of the other. The other is the only ethical authority. What has been called here ethical praxis differs from the dual agenda approach in that rather than seeking reconciliation with commercial interests, for justice to be meaningful on its terms of its own origin, those interests must always be subordinated to ethical basis of that justice. This does not mean taking the high moral ground where business cases are to be wholly rejected (Tomlinson and Schwabenland, 2010) and social justice cases put on a pedestal of ethical idealism (Colgan and McKearney, 2012). Narrowing down diversity “into the varieties of pure social activists versus co-opted management” is not necessarily helpful to the realities of political practice (Swan and Fox, 2010: 571). Accordingly, the ‘praxis’ in

80  Ethical praxis for diversity ethical praxis means that pursuing the ethics of LGBT equality involves engaging in a politics of change that uses the resources at hand to aid that pursuit. Moreover, while the rhetoric that creates the distinction between the business case and the social justice case fails to account for or acknowledge this politics, existing research into diversity practice both demonstrates and exemplifies how diversity activists are actually engaging in it. A central part of this politics involves exploring how the existence of the business case can be strategically used to pursue ethically informed justice, without succumbing its self-oriented logic. Established patterns of hetero- and cisnormative discrimination can clearly lead to LGBT people having less power, less access to resources, less influence over others, and less ability to advance to positions of power and prestige (Link and Phelan, 2001; Herek, 2007). Against this, diversity activism and management harbour the potential to create sites of resistance where “the ‘business case’ rhetoric of ‘workplace diversity’ can act like a Trojan horse: on the outside are the HRM [business case] arguments, on the inside is a passion for justice and, for the marginalized, a drive for empowerment” (Jones and Stablein, 2005:160). With such activisms LGBT employees and their allies can join together to ‘rebel against injustice’ (see Tahmasebi-Birgani, 2014) in a way that recognizes that the business case provides a resource with which diversity can be sought through acts of resistance, rather than being simply dismissed on account of its manifest ethical poverty. It is the rhetoric of the business case that is a cleft through which action for the primary goal of social justice can be taken. It has been noted that the idea of ‘managing diversity’ focuses attention away from activism directed at equality for marginalized groups, and towards commercial and managerial agendas (Benschop, 2001). The danger is that diversity becomes a managerial tool rather than harbinger of social justice. Countering this, however, does not mean abstaining from understanding or exploiting business logic. Practically, this can be accounted for in that “while practitioners might use the business case model when appealing to senior managers, they also tend to define diversity with a social justice framework for themselves” (Ahmed, 2007: 241). While diversity management has been framed largely in relation to its business benefits, it is not a singular or homogenous discourse guided by just one motive. Despite the managerial centre of diversity management, there remains embedded in it the strong trace of social justice. This rings true even for those employed in organizations to promote diversity, in that while they “are supposed to be committed to the business case for diversity management that their organizations have employed […] they commonly have a wider personal vision of organizational change and development, including transforming inequalities, with an objective of social justice” (Tatli, Nicolopoulou, Özbilgin, Karatas-Ozkan and ­Öztürk, 2015: 1247). It is this use of the business case for the primary purpose of redressing inequality that exemplifies ethical praxis.

Ethical praxis for diversity  81 Accepting that the business case can be mobilized for the purpose of justice “leads to developing initiatives to counter inequality or discrimination while practising diversity management” (Kamp and Hagedorn-­ Rasmussen, 2004: 535) such that “playing the game is not simply a matter of deciding to be in or out, or choosing to sell out or keep pure” (Swan and Fox, 2010: 586). With ethical praxis business discourses related to diversity are used strategically (Tatli, Nicolopoulou, Özbilgin, Karatas-Ozkan and Öztürk, 2015) and without fidelity to their own commercial logics. The question this infers is not so much about whether managerially oriented approaches to diversity are morally justifiable, but rather about whether they can be used to “assist in the realisation of greater workplace equality” (Barnes and Ashtiany, 2003: 275). This is a question of ethical praxis – a question of what can be done, given the situation one is in, to pursue justice in the name of ethics. A good example comes in the form of employer-recognized LGBT employee groups established to “offer a space for social support and provide an organized platform from which employees can advocate for changes within their workplaces” (Githens and Aragon, 2009: 121). The significant expansion of such groups in recent years marks a particular and effective means through which justice has been pursued and achieved by and for LGBT employees. Such employee groups engage with organizations in terms of asserting how supporting their objectives is a means for the organizations themselves to better achieve their goals. Despite this, it has been noted that those involved continue to identify as activists and that they “often frame equity and fairness issues in business terms, though their primary motivations are usually much larger than the goal of increasing corporate profit or improving organizational effectiveness” (p. 127). Another example is the use of formal metrics, such as the Stonewall Equality Index, as a means through which organizations measure sexual diversity. While such metrics are positioned as a source of competitive advantage, it has been noted that their existence means that “engaging in a business case discourse occasions opportunities for LGBT organizations to connect with companies using a language they understand” (Rumens, 2014: 189). Ethical praxis might be considered as the domain of ‘tempered radicals’: those “individuals who identify with and are committed to their organizations, and are also committed to a cause, community, or ideology that is fundamentally different from, and possibly at odds with the dominant culture of their organization” (Meyerson and Scully, 1995: 585). With ethical praxis, however, the pursuit of justice is not so much located in an ambivalent identity. Instead the dominant ‘business case logic’ of organizations is used strategically and without subsumption to it – ethical praxis is only in-between justice and business to the extent that justice is on top as the superordinate priority. Without this there is always the threat that what began as political activism for the rights of LGBT people and other classified as ‘diverse’, that is rights that have

82  Ethical praxis for diversity been historically denied by work organizations, can become incorporated into a corporate ideology enamoured by manipulating diversity for its own ends (Ward, 2008). Diversity management and its business case are by now well institutionalized within management thinking and practice. While this institutionalization is more prevalent for gender and racial diversity, its driving logic of the business case is dominant across the general practice of diversity management. It is by exploiting this logic for the case of justice in the workplace that ethical praxis is enacted in a way that is not stymied by idealistic demarcations between business and social justice arguments. The Trojan horse of the business case (Jones and Stablein, 2005) acts as a means through which justice can be achieved. Employing this might mean resigning one’s ethical idealism, but it is a pragmatic choice that involves privileging the benefits of real improvements in justice, equality and diversity over the high moral ground that would divorce diversity politics and activism from an engagement with the internal dynamics of business.

Conclusion LGBT, as a classification relevant to workplace diversity, is an acronym whose identity is formed in opposition to the hetero- and cisnormative cultures that have long infused organizations. Moreover, the workplace issues facing individuals who might variously be identified with, or identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender are far from consistent in nature or intensity. The same is true for the actual and possible political responses to those issues. Despite these differences, LGBT, and its various correlates, has emerged as a political category that is central to workplace equality and diversity. Within this politics, it is demonstrably the case that the distinction between the business case and the social justice case has formed a central distinction in how the motives for the pursuit of LGBT diversity have been formulated, as is indeed the case with diversity more generally. What has been argued in this chapter is that this division, when looked at from the perspective of ethical praxis, is neither as stable nor as useful as it might at first seem. The instability of business case arguments has opened political possibilities in that, irrespective of its motives, the institutionalization of a business case logic for diversity in organizations has allowed people to actively respond to ethical demands for diversity. Such a response uses the rhetoric of the business case for purposes for which it was not ­designed – that is for ethically motivated purposes. What this heralds is a politically motivated ethical resistance (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014) that turns the language of business back on itself for the sake of non-­businessrelated motives. While this does not redeem the ethics of organizations at the level of managerial practice, it does show how ethical praxis can

Ethical praxis for diversity  83 be put in play despite that practice while still having to operate within the powerful cultural context that such practice creates. While others have hoped for a ‘dual agenda’ where diversity can lead to both business and social justice outcomes, in practice there is a likelihood that such an agenda will also mean social justice being constantly subservient to profit (Jones and Stablein, 2005). Railing against this, the contribution offered in the chapter has been to demonstrate how ethical praxis can be deployed both despite and because of non-­ethically motivated approaches to diversity in business. It has been asserted that critiques of the business case for diversity rely on a pure ethics that does not recognize the complexity of its connection to politics. Concurrently, it has been acknowledged that the support for the business case evinces a politics that has failed to remember its origin in ethics. Ethical praxis has been positioned as a way out of the stalemate of such positions. Already exemplified in the concrete interventions of activists, this praxis is deserving of attention too by researchers. Such inquiries would continue to investigate how the business case for diversity, albeit justified on the grounds of organizational self-interest, can be and has also been used to create real possibilities for justice in organizations. This would also show how political resources are being employed to achieve real improvements in justice, all the time never forgetting their origin in ethics.

Note 1 Butler’s engagement with Levinas in the 2000s is not primarily related to a consideration of gender or sexuality, but rather to issues of the meaning of morality (2005), global politics (2004) and political Zionism in particular (2013). Theoretically, however, the issues Butler draws out are relevant to politics in its different manifestations, including, in this case, LGBT politics.

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5 Radical democracy, ethics and the disruption of corporate sovereignty

Everything was going so well for The Volkswagen Group. In mid-2015, it overtook the Toyota Motor Corporation as the biggest auto manufacturer in the world. This marked the early achievement of an ambitious ten-year goal that had been set in 2007 (Trudell and Horie, 2015). The targets established by former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winkerton, and which critics at the time had ridiculed as delusional, were that by 2018 they would be “the world’s most profitable, fascinating and sustainable automobile manufacturer”. There was no ambiguity. Volkswagen would sell ten million vehicles per year, would have pre-tax profit margin of at least 8%, and would have the most satisfied employees and customers in the whole industry. Winkerton was steadfastly committed to making Volkswagen “number one with justification” (Muller, 2013: n.p.). As well as phenomenal growth in sales, Volkswagen was widely lauded for its ethical and sustainable approach to business. At the end of 2012, the World Forum for Ethics in Business named Volkswagen as an ‘outstanding corporation’ and granted it an ‘Ethics in Business Award’. The reason? Because of Volkswagen’s admirable efforts “in the fields of environmental management and corporate social responsibility”. Volkswagen was a veritable poster boy for corporate business ethics in the areas of environmentalism, sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It was a company touted as setting “an example of universal values such as integrity, responsibility and respect for people and the environment” (CSR Europe, 2013: n.p.). All of this came crashing down in the events following 18 September 2015. On that date, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued Volkswagen with a notice of violation of The Clean Air Act. The auto manufacturer had been caught having installed ‘defeat devices’ in 482,000 of its diesel vehicles in the US, a number that was later revealed to be 11 million worldwide. The devices detected when a car was being driven under emissions test conditions and only at that point turned on emission controls. They switched off during normal driving, meaning that performance improved while up to 40 times more nitrous oxide was released (EPA, 2015). A global scandal ensued. The company which once proclaimed the importance of resource conservation, climate protection

90  Democratic business ethics and emissions reduction (Volkswagen, 2014) was publically vilified for lacking the very values that it prided itself in. Caught red-handed, the future of Volkswagen was cast in a dark shadow of doubt. At best its reputation was in tatters, at worst its continued existence was in question. Almost a third of the company’s market value was wiped out in less than a week. Trust in the entire German manufacturing sector was questioned. Within days author of the 2018 strategy, Martin Winterkorn, resigned under threat of a criminal investigation (Boston, 2015). The story of Volkswagen in the lead up to, and aftermath of, the 2015 emissions scandal is as a telling example of the relationship between corporations and the ethics they espouse and organize. Concurrent with increased global dominance of corporations under neoliberalism has been the ascendancy of corporate business ethics and responsibility as explicit organizational practices to which corporations are beholden (Matten and Moon, 2008; Hanlon and Fleming, 2009). These practices include, for example, the development of ethical codes, the implementation of corporate social responsibility programs, the use of ethical audits, generous acts of philanthropy, and advocacy for good corporate governance. Corporate business ethics is positioned as being concerned with how corporations themselves might internally organize so as to improve their ethical practice, credentials, and/or public image (Phillips and Margolis, 1999; Hancock, 2008; Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). This is an ethics that has a “pro-business stance” (Parker, 2004: 198) and that is organized through corporate control and compliance systems, and instruments of managerial coordination (Laufer and Robertson, 1997; Stansbury and Barry, 2007) with the explicit goal of improving corporate performance (Wang, Duo and Jia, 2016). While positioned as voluntary (Marens, 2012, 2013), the practices of corporate business ethics have been institutionalized as an expectation of the contemporary corporation (Brammer, Jackson and Matten, 2012; O’Connor, Parcha and Tulibaski, 2017). Today’s corporations are enjoined to design and implement an ‘organization of ethics’ which claims to regulate ethical behaviour and enact social responsibility while also “yielding significant returns” in terms of profit maximization (Metzger, Dalton and Hill, 1993: 35; Young and Makhija, 2014) and strengthening the role of the market relations (Kinderman, 2012). This is an explicit strategy that corporate managers exude pride about. Volkswagen is a paradigm case. As Winkerton wrote in his essay in Volkswagen’s 2014 Sustainability Report, “sustainability, environmental protection, and social responsibility can be powerful value drivers” (in Volkswagen, 2014). What is reflected here is the dominant corporate view that “social values and capitalism can be combined in a seamless and complementary manner” (Cederström and Michael Marinetto, 2013: 417). There is an established body of politically informed scholarly work that offers a sustained critique of the approach to corporate business

Democratic business ethics  91 ethics that Winkerton exuded. This work highlights the fundamental incompatibility of responsibility and ethics with corporate strategy and self-interest (e.g. Banerjee, 2008; Shamir, 2008; Marens, 2012; ­Fleming and Jones, 2013), as well as calling for the politicization business ethics (Parker, 2004; Pullen and Rhodes, 2013; Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). Drawing on the Volkswagen emissions scandal as an illustrative example, this chapter builds on this existing critique as the basis for theorizing an alternative form of ethics for corporations – one based not on corporate moral agency and self-regulation but on the democratic process through which a society can hold corporations to account for their actions. The chapter uses the Volkswagen scandal to exemplify the argument that corporate business ethics is no barrier to the rampant pursuit of business self-interest through a well-orchestrated and largescale conspiracies involving lying, cheating, fraud, and lawlessness. It also shows that society, represented by individuals and institutions, is able to effectively resist these forms of malfeasance. In presenting what is dubbed ‘democratic business ethics’ the chapter argues that considering the ethics of corporations as being a matter that can and should be organized and controlled internally fails to account for the possibility of an ethics for business that does not place the corporation itself as the putative moral agent who can manage its own ethics as if it was an “isolated, ethically self-sufficient individual” (Lozano, 2000: 2) that is beholden unto itself to ensure its righteousness. Democratic business ethics places corporations subservient to the democratic sphere so as to defy their assumed ethical self-sufficiency and invulnerability. It manifests in political acts that render corporations vulnerable through a politics that contests both their putative morality and the deleterious effects of the exercise of their increasingly sovereign power. This ethics finds practical purchase as a form of radical democratic dissent and resistance that redirects power away from centres of organized wealth and capital, returning it to its democratically rightful place with the people, with society. The chapter begins by exploring the social, economic and political dominance of the corporation under neoliberalism, and its relation to corporate business ethics. This is a relationship where corporations engage in nominally ethical practices to legitimate their operation by mounting an image of a solid, unassailable, independent, and morally righteous corporate self (Hanlon, 2008; Rhodes and Pullen, 2018). It is argued that this process of legitimation uses ethics to serve the primary purpose of building ‘corporate sovereignty’ (Barkan, 2013). Second, Levinas’s (1968/1996, 1974/1998, 1968/2003) philosophy is deployed to show how the very meaning of ethics originates as a challenge to sovereignty. This leads to the idea of an ethics enacted by the disruption of corporate sovereignty and its attendant corporate business ethics. Third, drawing on theories of radical democracy (Mouffe, 1996; Ziarek, 2001;

92  Democratic business ethics Robbins, 2011), the contestation between ethics and sovereignty is developed into the idea of democratic business ethics. This is an ethics that contests corporate sovereignty through forms of dissent and resistance originating in civil society. The chapter concludes by asserting the need to rescue business ethics from corporate sovereignty, and to reimagine it on democratic terms.

Corporate sovereignty and corporate business ethics Ours is an age where unprecedented levels of political power have been ceded to corporations (Barley, 2007) and where “global capitalism is now internal to all communities on the planet” (Robinson, 2014: 223). Escalating since the 1980s, globalized neoliberalism has heralded changes to the political and economic landscape that have seen corporations grow in size, reach and sheer might. Present here is a shift in the “cultural logic of capitalism” where the role of the state is increasingly one of supporting corporations’ freedom and legitimacy (Hanlon and Fleming, 2009: 942). In practical terms, the share of the economy taken by large interconnected networks of corporations has burgeoned (Carroll, 2010) resulting in then being powerful political actors (Scherer and Palazzo, 2007) subject to diminishing levels of state control (Hassan, 2013; Veldman, 2013). Corporations are the prime movers of global commerce whose unabashed purpose is to pursue private rather than public good through their own increasing economic and political dominance – a situation where a major role of the state has become to serve the market (Hanlon and Fleming, 2009; Veldman, 2013; Howell, 2016). This ‘service’ is informed by the neoliberal ideology that maintains that “society’s resources are best allocated by self-regulating markets” (Pacewicz, 2013: 434) and where public intervention into business affairs is “legitimated when it tries to restore the conditions of fair competition” (Amable, 2011: 5). With neoliberalism the state is beholden to implement policies and laws that facilitate rather than restrict the expansion of corporate activity through the marketization of more and more dimensions of social and economic life. This is not laissez-faire liberalism, but rather a political doctrine where the state has a very specifically redefined role: to construct the conditions for the expansion of markets (Mirowski, 2013). By “decentralizing, deregulating and liberalizing” on a global level, nation states have used their power to provide “more attractive economic environments for financial capital” (Lipschutz and Fogel, 2002: 118). The central and powerful position of corporations in the neoliberal global economy has thus been achieved with state support across the world as governments have collectively taken on the role of maintaining market rule through a largely corporate economy (Peck, 2010). A significant effect of neoliberalism has been that the power of corporations has expanded to such an extent that it has become comparable

Democratic business ethics  93 with that of the state (Shamir, 2004) – the traditional locus of power whose laws first granted the corporation legal status and rights (Veldman, 2013). Volkswagen is a prime example of a globally powerful corporation. It was the world’s 14th largest corporation at the end of 2014, employing almost 600,000 people and turning over a revenue of US$269 billion (Forbes, 2015). If Volkswagen had been nation state it would have a bigger GDP than Finland, Chile, Pakistan, or Ireland (Statistics Times, 2015). This is part of a trend that culminated in 2000 when of the 100 biggest economies globally, more than half were corporations (Anderson and Cavanagh, 2000). The growing political and economic scope of corporations to dimensions hitherto largely reserved for states has been referred to as ‘corporate sovereignty’ (ICHRP, 2002; Rondinelli, 2003; Kapferer, 2004; Sawyer, 2006; Stern, 2011; Barkan, 2013; Peters, 2018). Such sovereignty has been achieved with the blessing and assistance of state governments, instigated as it was from a “transnational corporate agenda for deregulation and unhindered business operation across national borders” (Hossein-Zadeh, 1997: 244; Hassan, 2013) where individual corporations are beholden to state-enabled markets rather than to any single sovereign law (Barber, 1995; Rondinelli, 2003). The corporate sovereign thus edges closer and closer to a position whereby it is “monitored neither by international law nor by the legal norms of any particular state” (Kapferer, 2004; Sawyer, 2006: 40). It is in this way that neoliberalism has “shifted sovereignty to the domain of the global corporation and the world markets they control” (Barber, 1995: 296). The situation, as described by the International Council on Human Rights Policy, is one where “the concept of the sovereignty of states” is in danger of being “replaced by a new corporate sovereignty, which is unrestricted or unaccountable” (ICHRP, 2002: 10; Peters, 2018). It is in this context the neoliberal expansion of corporate sovereignty that corporate business ethics has come to the fore as a mode of self-­ regulation and self-organization which has “allowed management to define their own responsibilities” (Marens, 2012: 78). Practices associated with corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship in particular have vastly expanded alongside the globalization and liberalization of the world’s economies over the past 30 years (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009; Fleming and Jones, 2013; Djelic and Etchanchu, 2017). It is through such practices that corporations seek to make explicit their ethical status (Matten and Moon, 2008) in what is tantamount to a narcissistic preoccupation with establishing an appearance of righteousness (Roberts, 2001) and greatness (Rhodes and Pullen, 2018) in the eyes of others. The concurrent take-up of ethics by corporations and their expanding sovereignty are intimately related. Corporate business ethics has served to fend off demands for external regulatory control on corporations by inculcating a system whereby corporations assert that they can regulate

94  Democratic business ethics themselves (cf. Barkan, 2013; Marens, 2013). In this way, the corporate organization of ethics is centrally connected to corporate sovereignty – it is “a predatory form of extending corporate power under late capitalism” (Hanlon and Fleming, 2009: 937). We are in a position today where not only are corporations expected to “engage in some form of responsible behaviour” (Brammer, ­Jackson and Matten, 2012: 10) but also where “companies are proclaiming the virtues of their ethicality on a scale never before seen” (Fleming, ­Roberts and Garsten, 2013: 339). Again, Volkswagen is a case in point. Until September 2015, it was widely heralded – by itself and others – to be a company of exceptional and growing ethical credentials. All of the hallmarks were present: the glossy publications, the explicit strategies, the corporate programs, the awards and accolades, and the public acclaim. For example, in 2004 four of Volkswagen’s brands where announced by The Guardian newspaper to be amongst the ‘Top 10 ethical car brands’ (Guardian, 2004). In 2011, Volkswagen was singled out as a car manufacturer with outstanding environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices by the Calvert Sustainability Research Department (Urken, 2011). Volkswagen was also adamant that these were matters that it could manage and organize internally and voluntarily. In 2014, it declared that “a company can only be successful if it acts with integrity, complies with statutory provisions worldwide and stands by its voluntary undertakings and ethical principles” (Volkswagen, 2014: 46). From the assumedly axiomatic neoliberal position that all human action can and should be brought into the “domain of the market” (­Harvey, 2005: 3; Brown, 2015), it has been argued that matters of ethics and responsibility are reduced to a ‘moral imperative’ for competition (Amable, 2011) and subservient to the agenda of corporate capitalism. Moreover, an advocacy of corporate business ethics presupposes “the fundamental legitimacy of capitalism – private property, for example, and free enterprise” (Goodpaster, 1983: 3) – such that it “represents a further embedding of capitalist social relations” (Hanlon, 2008: 157). This legitimacy is evidenced in the neoliberal ‘market morality’ that asserts that business decisions should be based on pursuit of corporate self-interest within the law, that the impact on other people does not need to be accounted for in deciding actions, and that other people are to be treated either competitively with the aim of beating them or instrumentally to advance one’s own ends (Hendry, 2004; cf. Amable, 2011). This is a morality where maximizing shareholder value is the principle that guides the governance of corporations (Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000; Lazonick, 2015) – including how they organize their own ethics. Echoed here is the neoliberal form of reasoning that “configures all aspects of existence in economic terms” (Brown, 2015: 17).

Democratic business ethics  95 With corporate self-interest primary, championing corporate business ethics and corporate social responsibility is just “an excuse for ‘business as usual’ and ‘unregulated corporate activity’” (Fleming, ­Roberts and Garsten, 2013: 340) such that in practice corporations have largely “failed to responsibly use whatever autonomy and discretion they possessed to produce fair and generous outcomes for their various stakeholder groups” (Marens, 2010: 761). In Volkswagen’s case, this is evident in its goal of becoming the largest car manufacturer in the world. This was enunciated as “Our Strategy 2018 focuses on positioning the Volkswagen Group as a global economic and environmental leader among automobile manufacturers”. This would be achieved by focusing on “environmentally friendly orientation and profitability of our vehicle projects so that the Volkswagen Group has the right products for success even in more challenging economic conditions”. This statement reveals how Volkswagen’s environmentally driven ethics was really just an input, with the measurable goals being unit sales, return on sales before tax, and customer and employee satisfaction (Volkswagen, 2015). Central to Volkswagen’s corporate business ethics was its environmental strategy touted as a matter of “transparent and responsible management” based on “voluntary undertakings and principles” such as internally developed codes of conduct and values, and alignment with non-mandatory requirements of the United Nations Global Compact and the declarations of the International Labour Organization (Volkswagen, 2014: 20). Volkswagen’s ethical voluntarism is a dominant and illustrative feature of corporate business ethics. This voluntarism is such that organizations assert that they will choose to behave ethically without the need for external interference, while in practice “if ethical conduct is to be judged by its consequences, then the prime beneficiary of [business ethics] is the corporation itself” (Roberts, 2003: 257). At its most sanguine and unapologetic it is simply the case that ethics is just a matter of standard corporate strategy such that it should “be included in strategy formulation and that the level of resources devoted to CSR be determined through cost/benefit analysis” (McWilliams, Siegel and Wright, 2006: 15). Notably neoliberal states have abetted this by embracing the market and retreating from “socio-moral duties” (Shamir, 2008: 3; see also Van Cranenburgh, Liket and Roome, 2012). The relationship between corporate business ethics and corporate sovereignty can thus be conceived in terms of the way that ethics supports corporations by warding off unwanted regulatory intrusions (Vogel, 2008) and glorifying their own practice (Rhodes and Pullen, 2018) while they profit from state-enabled markets (Peck, 2010). What we have seen in the co-evolution of neoliberalism and corporate business ethics (Kinderman, 2012; Djelic and Etchanchu, 2017) is the suffusion of ethics with corporate sovereignty, resulting in a corporate

96  Democratic business ethics business ethics comprising of a set of organized practices that are defined in a terminology of ethics and responsibility but whose principle purpose and achievement is to support the expansion of corporate sovereignty. Corporate business ethics is beholden to upholding the legitimacy, authority, and licence of a corporation (Banerjee, 2008; see also Fleming and Jones, 2013). This is an ethics that sures up corporate self-righteousness in the liberalized quest for markets and profits. Moreover, corporate business ethics is the means through which “corporations and corporate executives constantly mobilize a host of agents to maintain their ideological and practical supremacy” (Shamir, 2004: 670). It is in this sense that corporate appeals to moral sensibility have served to ‘unleash’ capitalism by helping to legitimate corporate conduct “vis-à-vis society in a way that purely instrumental rationality cannot” (Kinderman, 2012: 30–31). Nevertheless, in the ‘market for virtue’ the voluntary take-up of ethics and responsibility is undertaken “only to the extent that it makes business sense to do so” (Vogel, 2005: 4). In this regard, at its core, corporate business ethics is just “business as usual” (Parker, 2004: 198)

Ethics and the disruption of sovereignty The practice of corporate business ethics is, to put it most simply, extraordinary self-ish – indeed, it is beholden to the corporate ‘self’ and its power to act and to prevail. What dominates is the drive to protect the putative corporate person as a site of self-sufficiency, security, and righteousness. This form of the corporation, as it has evolved through neoliberalism, is constructed as a ‘supra-individual’ that is attributed with agency and granted rights. The corporation is thus a “reified singular representation with the status of a ‘legal subject’ or a ‘citizen’” (Veldman, 2013: S24). So reified, corporations are seen to act as if they have the capacity for moral agency and ethical self-sufficiency. The modern corporation is conceived of as “a special kind of moral personality for which the law has made extensive accommodation” so as to allow it to acquire “a power of sovereignty over the public” (O’Mellin, 2006: 201 and 203). The assumption of corporate business ethics is that this sovereignty grants the corporation the right to its own ethical self-regulation without state intrusion. This assumption, as the bedrock of corporate business ethics, is deeply questionable. If we reflect on this in relation to the Volkswagen case, the questioning of the corporation’s ethics did not originate from any nation state in which it operated. Instead, it came in the form of dissent and disruption initially involving clean air activists and scientists. Although the scandal broke when Volkswagen was found to have deliberately violated the United States Clean Air Act, the state and its laws were only a latter part of the events that surrounded it. The presence of the defeat devices

Democratic business ethics  97 in Volkswagen’s cars was discovered through the actions of the independent not-for-profit organization The International Council on Clean Technology (ICCT). Their impetus to test the US vehicles was not to undermine Volkswagen, but rather to prove to Europeans that diesel cars could be more environmentally friendly given that they had passed the more stringent US anti-emissions laws. Working with the Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions at West Virginia University, the ICCT discovered that the diesel cars were emitting nitrous oxide at levels that far exceeded the regulated amounts. In May 2014, the ICCT passed their results to the US Environmental Protection Agency, and to Volkswagen (Neate, 2015). Volkswagen responded by trying to undermine the veracity of the findings claiming that the conditions under which the ICCT tests were done were inadequate, and that its own tests had revealed that the anomalous results were due to “various technical issues and unexpected in-use conditions”. After continued exchanges between Volkswagen, The EPA and the California Air Resources Board, Volkswagen could not hold to its story any longer, and on 3 September 2015 they admitted to installing software in their cars to cheat emissions tests (Gardner, Lienert and Morgan, 2015). On 18 September 2015, The Environmental Protection Agency issued the press release announcing the fraud. The story of how Volkswagen came to be caught for its highly organized and conspiratorial efforts to defy the law is a telling example of how corporate business ethics works. This is an organization which had gone to great lengths to both extol its own ethical virtues, and to deliberately hide its own criminal activity. Beneath all of its ethical grandeur what was revealed was a scheme that served to increase the corporation’s growth and to bolster its own sovereignty by acting as if it was above the law. Volkswagen was held to account for its legal and environmental transgressions not as a result of its own volition, and certainly not because of its stance on corporate business ethics. Instead, Volkswagen’s presumed sovereignty was brought into question and disrupted from the outside. As we will now explore, this disruption of sovereignty on ethical grounds can enable us to conceive of alternative ways to imagine an ethics for corporations – ways that retain the value of ethics while undermining the assumption that corporations can, will or should be the custodians of their own ethicality and responsibility. It is in relation to Levinas’s work (1968/1996, 1968/2003, 1974/1998) that such an alternative can be explored. This is especially valuable given that Levinas’s theorization of ethics directly questions the self-obsession and presumed immunity of an ethics rested in sovereignty. When Levinas speaks of ethics, he is not referring to some system of rational and organized procedures, practices, policies or dispositions that can ensure a sense of ‘goodness’ or moral righteousness on the part of one who adheres to them. Bolstering one’s own sense of power and invulnerability

98  Democratic business ethics is not part of this ethics either. Before any program, model, or code of ethics is arrived at, Levinas insists that ethics arises from one’s responsibility to other people. Ethics is not about oneself, personal, corporate, or otherwise but about service to others. Levinas’s is a relational ethics that manifests in generosity and humility – always about care and devotion to others before myself (Levinas, 1982/1985). Levinas shows how ethics is thrust upon us as we encounter a world of other people whose needs interrupt self-interest and the egoistic following of one’s own desires. This ethics is very much different to the assumption of sovereign moral agency and self-sufficiency assumed in organized corporate business ethics – these being understood, from a Levinasian perspective as a self-obsessed ‘ethics of narcissus’ (Roberts, 2001). On an individual level, Levinas argues that ethics is “prior to the Ego, prior to its freedom and non-freedom” (Levinas, 1968/2003: 51) and does not rest on any “authoritative structure” (Caygill, 2002: 149). With ethics the ego is stripped of “its self-conceit and its dominating imperialism” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 88) – stripped of its fantasy of sovereignty. Ethics is that with which “the ego can be put into question by Others” (Levinas, 1968/2003: 51). In place of the egoism central to sovereignty, we have “pity, compassion, pardon and proximity in the world” (Levinas, 1968/1996: 91). It is in this sense that Levinas suggests that ethics requires a relationship based on the self’s “deposition of sovereignty” (Levinas, 1982/1985: 52). Levinas is explicit: ethics “cannot be sovereign” (Levinas, 1974/1998: 194). This is so because ethical subjectivity is an “affective excess to the ego that opens it up to the dimension of ethics” (Diamantides, 2007: 12). This opening occurs through the disturbance of the ego’s self-assumed completeness – the assumption of its own sovereignty. Levinas’s ethics radically questions the very idea of personal sovereignty that, as we saw previously, corporate business ethics has asserted can be assumed by the legal and fictive person of the corporation. The point is that rather than ethics being able to be used to bolster sovereignty, it is sovereignty itself that is brought into question by ethics. Further, instead of relying on the establishment of a solid notion of self or identity, ethics manifests as a disruption of the power and completeness of the very idea of the self (Levinas, 1974/1998). Levinas’s notion of ethics disturbs and decentres authority on the grounds of responsibility to the other, to sociality (Abensour, 2002) and to the other’s freedom. The ethically informed disturbance of sovereignty reflects an “ethico-­ political-economic imperative to alleviate human suffering” and “the overcoming of economic inequality and exploitation by means of political struggle” (Ryder, 2012: 124). This anti-sovereign ethics does not support any singular and self-contained position of power, rather, it “involves the opening up of existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms”

Democratic business ethics  99 (Newman, 2010: 7). The practice of this ethics, that is to say its politics, is not a necessary, specific or ideologically defined set of norms, beliefs or practices. Instead, it is a mode of disturbance that would question, undermine and disrupt the pretentious authority of any such position – it is a “politics of the trace, a politics of disturbance” (Caygill, 2002: 138, see also Abensour, 2002). Analogously this is what happened to Volkswagen during the emission scandal: its falsely assumed position of sovereignty and ethical self-sufficiency was brought into question and disturbed, leading eventually to the corporation being held to public account for the actions taken in its name. It is in its radical questioning of sovereignty that Levinas opens difficult questions for corporate business ethics. Indeed, by considering corporate business ethics in this way, any conceptions of the ethical legitimacy of corporations, the moral justification of organizational behaviour, and the publicity of corporate righteousness are eschewed as just instances of self-centred preoccupation (Roberts, 2001). Levinas leads us to an ethics rested on the disruption of sovereignty – in our case the disruption of corporate sovereignty and hence also of the corporate business ethics that supports it. This ethics is practiced through “questioning and problematizing the morality vested in organizational practices” (Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013: 470) so as to contest the corporation by not accepting it on its own powerful terms, and neither accepting its political, economic or ethical dogma – it is about critique and resistance (Fleming and Spicer, 2007). In disturbing corporate sovereignty, ethics is woven into political action. The arrogance of the very idea that ethics can be organized and put to use in the service of corporate self-interest is placed under ethical scrutiny, a scrutiny that politically enacts “the continual questioning from below of any attempt to establish order from above” (Critchley, 2007: 123). Ethics thus ‘affects politics’ (Abensour, 2002) by insisting that resisting power, domination and oppression in the form of corporate sovereignty is necessitated by ethics. What begins as ethics turns to ‘ideological dissent’ (Dunphy, 2004) that informs the challenge to corporate sovereignty. In relation to corporations, the ethical practice we arrive at through Levinas is not one that is located within the corporation and its management, but rather it is found in the spaces of political dissent and resistance to the corporation. Situating ethics in this domain does not idly dream of a state-sponsored market-based utopia where corporations choose voluntarily to act in the interests of the community, and in the interests of those who are and have been exploited. Quite the contrary, it lends itself to a “project of ethico-­ political resistance and critique that works against forms of coercion, inequity, and discrimination that organizations so frequently and easily reproduce” (Pullen and Rhodes, 2013: 12) in the blinkered pursuit of sovereignty.

100  Democratic business ethics

Democratic business ethics The ethics to which Levinas awakens us is not one that would seek the consent of corporations to adopt it – to do so would be tantamount to looking for ethics in all the wrong places. The chief implication is that business ethics can be conceived in a manner that no longer assumes that ethics is and should be organized and controlled by corporations by and for themselves. For Levinas (in Wright, Hughes and Ainley, 1988) the liberal state, to the extent it is guided by the pursuit of justice, is the political institution that aligns with a non-sovereign ethics. While this would be the case as regards care and freedom for citizens, it would extend also to ensuring that commercial activity is governed in the interests of the people through justice. With neoliberalism, however, ethics and justice are increasingly lost as the informing principles of liberal democracy, especially as it relates to business. In its present configuration, “democratic state commitments to equality, liberty, inclusions and constitutionalism are […] subordinate to the project of economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital enhancement” (Brown, 2015: 26). In such a condition democracy needs rescuing from this neoliberal state project such that the enactment of a desire for justice is reinstated – in our case justice as it relates to the activities of the state-supported corporate sector. As the Volkswagen case has shown, a better place to locate business ethics is in practical modes of dissent and disturbance to corporate sovereignty arising within civil society. This was especially notable in the aftermath of the Volkswagen scandal. Not only did the scandal lead to a financial disaster in terms of billions of dollars in possible fines, a falling share price, the costs of vehicle recalls, and the company’s posting of its first quarter loss in October 2015 (Hotten, 2015), it was also a disaster in confidence. The news of the scandal received broad global coverage in the press and social media, and was the matter of political and civic discussion. In the month following the EPA’s press release, Volkswagen was held responsible for a weakening of the entire German economy (Stewart, 2015), a loss of public trust in corporations generally (Corner, 2015), and for the possible overturning of the entire motor industry (The Economist 2015). The implications of this for the corporation’s economic future were both significant and complex, and as late as February 2016 the already postponed publication of its 2015 financial results had not been released due to difficulties in establishing how much the cost of the scandal would be (Cremer, 2016) even though it had been established that US regulatory fines alone could amount to US$46 billion (Boston, 2016) and that as of January 2016 the company’s market share in ­Europe had fallen for the fifth consecutive month since the scandal broke (Shankar, 2016). In sum, the scandal amounted to a highly effective contestation of corporate sovereignty and its assumed ability to operate by its own rules and outside of the law.

Democratic business ethics  101 The scandal at Volkswagen would not have happened if it was not for the involvement of NGOs, scientists, law-makers, government agencies, the media, and the general public. While this might be regarded as a failure of the corporate world, it is an achievement of civil society that a major corporation was brought to justice. The scandal can be regarded as a democratic interruption to Volkswagen’s corporate sovereignty that was enacted in the name of ethics. This is not corporate business ethics by a long stretch. Instead, it represents what can be called ‘democratic business ethics’. Volkswagen being held to ethical account was a process of democratization achieved by a political process instigated and fuelled by the members and institutions of civil society. The ethics that was enacted aligns more with the idea of radical democracy than that of liberal democracy. That is, it was an example of a political practice enshrined in non-violent confrontation of different interests where resistance to power is central (Mouffe, 1996, 2000; Robbins, 2011; Ziarek, 2001). Volkswagen was the subject of this resistance that, in the words of the class-action suit filed against them in the United States, has been described as “one of the most brazen corporate crimes in history, a cautionary tale about winning at any cost […that…] spared no victim along the way” (Boston, 2016: n.p.). This is a far cry from the sanguine rhetoric that Volkswagen not so long before used to describe its corporate business ethics. Radical democracy differs from liberal democratic government in that it retains the root meaning of democracy as being that the power to rule must be retained with the social body – with the people rather than with a political class or the institutions of the state. Moreover, in a neoliberal era where the dividing line between the state and the corporation is being blurred to the point of approaching invisibility (Brown, 2015), radical democracy reasserts that both should be subservient to society. This marks a refusal “to allow the politics of democracy to be usurped by the economics of free market capitalism” (Robbins, 2011: 5). Moreover, no matter how much a contest between the body politic and the nexus of state and corporate interests appears to be like a battle between ­David and Goliath, the ethos of democracy demands that institutionalized power be confronted in the name of the people. The confrontation of power is central to radical democracy’s anti-­ sovereign political principals of dissensus and the non-violent confrontation of political differences. This serves especially to combat a false consensus rendered to support the interests of wealth and power (Mouffe 1996, 2000). It is this focus on the value of dissensus over consensus that is central to radical democracy. This evokes a scepticism of the assumed value of rational discourse as being the high road to democratic outcomes (for example, in the manner associated with Habermas’ (1996) notion of deliberative democracy). In radical democracy, following Mouffe, the public sphere is understood as a contested space where agonistic

102  Democratic business ethics differences should come into productive conflict without recourse to any hope of ideal consensus (Thomassen, 2010). Indeed, with radical democracy the appearance of consensus, for example between states and corporations, is always at risk of burying difference by privileging the powerful. Dissensus is not negative, however, it is a productive means through which democracy can be pursued by disturbing “the order by which government wishes to depoliticize society” (Critchley, 2004: 183). Radical democracy “represents a disturbance of the anti-political order of sovereignty itself” (Springer, 2011: 533). Moreover, even if theories of radical democracy have “said relatively little about capitalism and the economic sphere” (Thomassen, 2010: 185), it is questioning corporate activity within this sphere that is central to the very possibility of democracy in the age of neoliberalism. This includes, most especially, questioning and disturbing corporate sovereignty. This disturbance serves to rattle a system that “stacks the cards in favor of an un-­democratic corporate politics” so as to render a “democratization of business and society” (Zyglidopoulos and Fleming, 2011: 703) by mounting an ethically disciplined “challenge to the dominant apparatus of power” (Munro, 2014: 1129). Radical democratization opposes any authoritarian assertions of the right to power based on wealth and capital, instead claiming “political agency on behalf of and for the people” (Robbins, 2011: 62). Moreover, in a period that has seen state and corporate sovereignty amalgamate, the idea that government would mount a democratic challenge to corporations is becoming anachronistic (Wolin, 2008). Instead, we have a situation where politics is shaped by collaboration between elected politicians and representatives of business interests (Crouch, 2004). Radical democracy is principally aligned with the ethics and politics of corporate disturbance already articulated. Further, drawing out the connexion between radical democracy with Levinasian ethics facilitates the conceptualization of democratic business ethics. To begin with, democratic business ethics will not be found in the types of ethical programs and practice organized by corporations. Indeed, it can be asserted that the conditions of neoliberalism are ones that have sought to replace democracy with an ethics that seeks to “limit popular sovereignty” (Amable, 2011: 18). In direct contrast, democratic business ethics is enacted through individual and collective action in a civil society that disturbs corporate sovereignty on the grounds of ethics, just as happened to Volkswagen. It is important to acknowledge that sovereignty is incompatible with democracy if we accept that democracy is not about the preservation or enhancement of oneself, but begins with a primary respect for the rights of all of the others – of everyone, each unto themselves (Derrida, 2005). This is maximally escalated when that enhancement is to a corporate self whose desire for sovereignty appears to know no bounds.

Democratic business ethics  103 While democracy can be understood as being based on the rights of the other, it also has its basis in freedom understood as “the faculty to do as one pleases, to decide, to choose, to determine one-self, to have self-­ determination, to be master, and first of all master of one-self” (­Derrida, 2005: 13). The issue for contemporary societies, however, is about the distribution of freedoms when the freedom to participate in any form of dissent is so often curtailed by the freedom enjoyed by the neoliberal corporation. The internal operations of Volkswagen are a clear indication of this. On the one hand, Volkswagen has been characterized as a performance-oriented and hierarchically centralized organization where employees are expected to do what it takes to achieve corporate goals. Volkswagen has been described as an autocratic organization where employees at all levels ‘keep quiet’ about issues that do not support centrally directed imperatives for fear of being excluded from the company’s generous bonus system. This is an organization where arguing with a ‘superior’ is seen as impermissible and where “the company’s work environment is well known for eschewing debate and dissent” (Goodman, 2015, n.p.). Even subsequent to their admission of cheating on the admissions tests, Volkswagen continued to try to downplay the extent of the corruption. When Der Spiegel reported that “at least 30 people” were implicated in the scam, Volkswagen responded by saying that this assertion was “completely without basis” (Agency, 2015, n.p.). Let us not forget too that when the Environmental Protection Agency first confronted Volkswagen about the emission tests a year before the scandal broke, the company insisted that the anomalous results were due to “technical glitches” that could be easily remedied (Sage, 2015: n.p.). It was only after the evidence against them proved irrefutable that Volkswagen finally admitted to deliberate test cheating. As the scandal continued to unfold in February 2016, leaked internal memorandums indicated that Volkswagen executives knowingly and willingly “pursued a strategy of delay and obfuscation with United States regulators” (Ewing, 2016: n.p.). Self-protection appears to have been at the heart of the corporation’s response to the scandal. We are at historical juncture where the power of corporations to act freely and of their own will in the context of the free market is jeopardizing democracy (Barley, 2007). By implication, it is only through a radical reassertion of democracy as a contestation of the political dominance of corporations that a democratic ethics for business can be realized. As exemplified by Volkswagen, it is only under extreme pressure that corporations will themselves admit to and begin to address their own self-interested wrongdoing, and even then they will try to limit the degree of such admissions. The role of the state is also questionable. In Volkswagen’s case, serious doubt was raised about the German government’s willingness to ‘take on’ one of the country’s largest and most

104  Democratic business ethics economically important companies (Ewing, 2015). As seen with Volkswagen, democratic business ethics is that which would disturb corporate sovereignty in the name of ethics and in the context of political action originating outside of the nexus of the state and the corporation. This is an ethics through which corporations are held responsible not to themselves, but to society. Despite everything that happened, the fact that Volkswagen was finally brought to justice is a sign of hope – hope that powerful corporations cannot define their own morality as they unabashedly pursue their own economic interests at the expense of others.

Conclusions One might well wonder what is left of democracy in a world where “­giant corporations are acquiring a political and social capacity beyond the reach of governments” (Crouch, 2011: 137). It is tempting to respond with feelings of pessimism, despair and helplessness in the face of powers that appear so great that they defy even the possibility of resistance. Such feeling of weakness exacerbates as democracy has been reduced to a code word for the perpetuation of vast inequalities in power and wealth wielded by western governments and multinational corporations (Dean, 2009). As these very same corporations proclaim their moral legitimacy and assert that their self-determined and self-organized ethics is aligned unproblematically with the excessive economic demands of capital, one might also wonder whether an ethics founded in care for others is nothing more than a quaint fancy. Acknowledging the veracity of this pessimism, what has been articulated in this chapter is that the subsumption of democracy and ethics within the agenda of the neoliberal corporation is less of a reason to despair and more of a reason to resurrect business ethics on non-­corporate terms. This resurrection gives rise to what has been called here democratic business ethics. This is contrasted directly with the corporate business ethics that has ascended concurrently with the expansion of corporate sovereignty under neoliberalism. The premise of the argument has been that this corporate business ethics serves as a means to bolster corporate sovereignty by rendering corporations immune to external threat and interference. Corporate business ethics supports the sovereign corporate person in the global free markets that have been facilitated by state governments. Moreover, the ethical position and practices that support this sovereignty provide a moral justification for corporate freedom and, in turn, a moralization of corporations themselves. In questioning corporate business ethics, the Levinas’s philosophy has provided the basis for a different and non-sovereign understanding of business ethics. Levinas’s ethics, understood in terms of responsibility for others prior to oneself, is indeed very much a contestation of sovereignty. This is so because ethics relies on an openness and vulnerability

Democratic business ethics  105 to others rather than the assertion of a powerful and righteous self. Such ethics is not based on knowledge or self-awareness of any principles that defines righteousness, but rather comes from vulnerability to difference without assuming that such difference can be known. This approach to ethics leads to the possibility of democratic business ethics as it relates to political contestation of corporate sovereignty in the name of ethics. Democratic business ethics is thus conceived of as being based on respect for and the mutual existence of difference, and hence the disruption of singular sovereignty. A central implication of the position put forth in this chapter is that vehicles for ethics in business lie not with corporations but in spheres of civil society that bring people into contact with power and facilitate dissent. The institutions central to democratic business ethics are those that can effectively question corporations, most traditionally the free press, trade unions, political pressure groups, social movement organizations, and universities. The case of the Volkswagen emissions scandal that has been used to illustrate the argument is still very much a case in point. While ultimately the scandal arose out of Volkswagen having flagrantly and deliberately broken the law on a huge scale, it was not the government of any particular nation that brought them to justice but rather a network of individuals and institutions. Initially, this was instigated by the NGO the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) and the researchers from the University of West Virginia who discovered the test anomalies. This was followed by widespread reporting in both traditional and social media, consumer groups, concerned citizens, and public intellectuals. The rule of law, as a still standing pillar of liberal democracy, was used by these groups to bring Volkswagen to justice. Exposed were the limits of corporate sovereignty when a corporation that acted as if it could operate above the law found out the hard way that it could not. This holding of Volkswagen to account by society and in the name of justice demonstrates that democratic business ethics is a real and practical possibility, even in an era of seemingly insurmountable corporate sovereignty. The civil society institutions that hold the possibility of bringing democratic business ethics to life are also under pressure from neoliberalism to be incorporated into the corporate sphere. The force of democratic business ethics is a force of resistance to this, and one might hope also that new possibilities can emerge, for example, through “dissent enabling public spheres” (Whelan, 2013), ‘public arenas for citizenship’ through social media (Whelan, Moon and Grant, 2013), as well as through the practice of political activists and social movements that can direct public attention to global inequality (Cox, 2013; Munro, 2014). It is only through the existence of such institutions that democracy might not be lost between the cracks of state and corporate sovereignty.

106  Democratic business ethics A radical democratic approach attests that democratic business ethics is about corporations being at the service of citizenship and democratic freedom, not the other way around. While this amounts to an ethically based argument, in practice the intensity and power of neoliberalism and the sovereignty it bestows upon corporations may make such a statement appear naïve and unrealistic. What is not unrealistic, however, is the idea that working to undermine the assumed righteousness and inevitability of the extremities of corporate capitalism is a political act spawned by ethics. More precisely, it is with such acts that democratic business ethics can be located. In the face of ostensibly overwhelming corporate sovereignty, such acts could be cynically construed as meaningless and futile, but only so if ethics itself is also taken as meaningless and futile. What democratic business ethics proffers is that in the name of the other and in the name of humanity the assumed immunity of any single sovereign corporation must be questioned and contested. Despite enormously strong forces that might have it so, it remains the case that neoliberal capitalism is not the only imaginable future or the only possible source of political and economic legitimacy. And as a corollary, we can add that corporate business ethics is not the only possible ethics, if indeed, it were ever an ethics in the first place. To the contrary, the labour of this chapter has been to arrive at the idea of democratic business ethics as a business ethics that materializes in a politics that disturbs corporate sovereignty. Moreover, this is an ethics that arises from the other and manifests in democratic politics rested on difference and dissensus. Such is a radical democracy that disturbs that power which would seek to exceed that of the democratic sphere – in the case of corporations the very sphere that breathed life into them to begin with. Ultimately, it is in this democratic sphere, the place of the rule of the people, where business ethics is to be found.

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6 Difficult freedom and the saying of a critical business ethics

The issue of reflexivity has been a significant methodological preoccupation for researchers and writers of organizational research for some time (Weick, 1999), with debates being the most fertile in the 1990s and 2000s. At that time, many organizational theorists struggled with the question of how to conduct and write reflexive research (Cunliffe, 2003: 983) to such an extent that reflexivity had become central to many approaches to organizational research (Clegg and Hardy, 2006: 437, see also Gilmore and Kenny, 2015; Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2009) and one of the core identifying features that was posited as uniting critical approaches to the study of management (Fournier and Grey, 2000; Wickert and Schaefer, 2015). For those researchers who responded to the ‘crisis of representation’ in the 1990s, what emerged was a deepseated anxiety over the extent to which researchers could be regarded as objective observers whose responsibility was to tell the truth about those observations (Hatch, 1996). A recognition of this crisis came with it a grave realization that the creation of written representations carried with them “serious intellectual and moral responsibilities, for the images of others inscribed in writing are most assuredly not neutral” (Van Maanen, 1998: 1). A concern for such moral responsibilities echoed through the 2000s as writing organizational research came to be interrogated as an ethical practice (e.g. Wray-Bliss, 2003; Collins and Wray-Bliss, 2005; Rhodes and Brown, 2005; Jeanes, 2017). These considerations marked an ethical unease over writing and a questioning of the conventional morality of texts – a convention where that which is regarded as ‘good’ is that which sticks to the facts (Watson, 2000) and establishes the researcher’s position as an authoritative knower (Bjørkeng, Carlsen and Rhodes, 2014). With reflexivity such a morality was radically undermined in that the pretence of factuality, and the presumed ability of researchers to achieve its representation, is brought into ethical question. The chapter concludes the book by revisiting the idea and practice of reflexivity in organizations as it might be informed by Levinas’s ethical philosophy. While each of the previous chapters has discussed, in various ways, the ethics of organization practice, in this chapter that

114  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics consideration is brought back an examination of the practice of those (such as me) who write about the ethics of organizations. In this sense, Levinas’s work is turned back such that his ethics is not to be used as an analytical tool, but is also central to the methodological exercise through which such analysis is possible. The chapter begins by discussing how reflexivity has been theorized and debated in relation to studying organizations, using this as a means to develop the central question that of how we can consider the ethics of writing research if writing is no longer to be judged on its adequacy in representing the reality of organizations. Having developed this question, some terms for the discussion are set out by establishing the idea that, in post-representational theory, writing involves an intertwined combination of factuality and fictionality – or using the terms deployed here, mimesis and poiesis. Having set out this ground, Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said, and Derrida’s theorization of responsibility and undecidability are used to develop the idea that writing is always already an ethical practice in that it entails an active rendering of reality, rather than a passive reporting of it. The implications of this are considered in relation to the temporality of writing qua knowledge so as to understand writing as an ethical opening to the other. The implications of such an ethics for the practice of research writing are discussed. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how, after reflexivity, ethical writing can be understood as a practice of poiesis that mediates between the desire to know and the desire to be ethically open to the dynamics of knowing and not knowing. This then points to the idea of an academic freedom (cf. Rhodes, 2018) for the creative productivity of writing, where to be responsible means responding to others through the exercise of this freedom. This is, however, not freedom in the sense of an absence of restraint or the possibility of unlimited options, but rather a ‘difficult freedom’ (Levinas, 1963/1990) where we are called to respond to the unending demands of the other “without the clarity of implementation tactics” (Arnett, 2017: 31). Such is an openness to an infinite responsibility and the needs to translate that responsibility into the finite realties of human relationships, accepting always that such a translation will never do justice to the demands from which it arose (Rhodes and Badham, 2018).

Ethics in post-representational theory In 2004, Guillemin and Gillam commented that “[a]lthough reflexivity is a familiar concept in the qualitative tradition […] it has not previously been seen as an ethical notion” (p. 262; see also Etherington, 2007). While this had too been largely the case in business and organizational research, debate over ethics and reflexivity had begun to emerge by the mid to late 2000s. Collins and Wray-Bliss (2005), for example, proposed

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  115 the need for ‘ethical reflexivity’. They argued that the ambiguous authorization of writing about other people’s oppression is one whose ethical implications “have yet to be seriously and explicitly explored in the field” (p. 801). They offered the practical ethical response of allowing those researched to respond to research texts, for researchers to make themselves vulnerable by questioning their own voices, and to avoid objectification and closure over those researched (see also Etherington, 2007). This echoed the call for research to reflexively account for its ethical relation with the various ‘others’ to which it both refers to and relies on for its own constitution (Rhodes and Brown, 2005). It also attested to injunctions that research and writing should be conducted with “a reflexive and ethical responsibility for out acts” (Cunliffe, Luhman and Boje, 2004: 276) by offering “a more critical and ethical basis for constructing meaning, identities and the taken-for-granted workings of our institutions and language communities” (Cunliffe, 2003: 990). The ethical concerns that were introduced to the study of organizations via discussions of reflexivity emanated from the position that researchers are active in their rendering of organizational realities, rather than being passive transmitters of an observable and externalized truth accessed through the application of an assumedly neutral suite of established methods. Methodological dilemmas emanate from the way that the correspondence between language and reality has been deeply questioned by those forms of social enquiry born out of the ‘linguistic turn’ that developed out of a dissatisfaction with positivism (Heracleous, 2004: 176), even though this dissatisfaction has far from afflicted everyone in the field (e.g. Donaldson, 2005). Nevertheless, the central tenets of the methodological bedrocks of post-representational theory (Lather, 1991: 25; Chia, 2000) all rest on a questioning (or even a severing) of the relation between language and an independent external reality that it might once have been purported to re-present. What was put at stake was “analyses of language as system or code employed by humans to represent their more fundamental ‘thoughts’ or ‘meanings’” and what has been staked against it was the treatment of language as “the human’s way of being, the primary means humans have of sense-making, interpreting, or understanding” (Stewart, 1996: 4). Positioned thus, it was considered no longer tenable to conceive of language as a metaphorical mirror that can and should reflect and re-present the world as it is (Rorty, 1981). As was so often and easily repeated, the starting point is that language constitutes and constructs, rather than represents, organization and organized meaning (e.g. Mumby and Clair, 1997 Grant, Hardy, Oswick and Putnam, 2004; Phillips, Lawrence and Hardy, 2004; Styhre, 2005) at least insofar as they are considered “social objects of knowledge” (Chia in Chia, Parker and Reed, 2000: 537). By such a reading, language is not just concerned with the epistemological function as the medium of knowledge, but is recognized in terms

116  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics of its ontological function of constituting that which it commonly professes to represent (Stewart, 1996). An important point taken up from considerations of reflexivity was to “avoid mistaking one researchers’ perspective for the truth” (Hatch, 1996: 370) and, moreover, to avoid the narcissism and arrogance of the claim that theoretical and scholarly discourse might provide a superior means by which to render the truth in language as compared to other forms of cultural discourse (Rhodes and Parker, 2008; Rhodes and Westwood, 2008). With such post-representational insights brought to bear on research methodology, the self-image of the researcher was questioned to its core: No longer all-knowing, all-seeing, objective and omnipotent, the researcher has been forced to re-examine his or her relation to the research process, and is now acutely aware of the social and historical positioning of all subjects and the particular intellectual frameworks through which they are rendered visible, the researcher could now only produce knowledge already embedded in those frameworks. (Clegg and Hardy, 2006: 435) It is here that the ontological function of language achieves force, as it pushes and pulls at the very identity of the researcher and of those researched (Rhodes, 2001). It is with the notion of radical reflexivity (Cunliffe, 2003) in particular that ontology and epistemology collide (cf. Johnson and Duberley, 2003) such that both being and knowledge are regarded in terms of text, and their hierarchy disrupted. Through reflexivity the very unity of the being of the researcher was thus brought into question, rendering researchers to need also to account for their own multiplicity and fluidity (Pullen, 2006). In the context of the methodological questioning that was engaged in through post-representational research of organizations sketched above, there emerges a question of what responsibility might mean when truth is no longer equated with re-presentation (see Helin, 2019). Such a view takes reflexivity beyond just being an epistemological matter, and instead regards it more primarily as an ethical one (Payne, 2000). In seeking to build on and extend established debates on methodological reflexivity, it is this question that the chapter draws attention to. To put this more specifically: if, as researchers, we accept that our deployment of language in relation to the world can no longer be justified and authorized by an equivalent relation of language and representational truth, then on what basis can it be considered in relation to ethics?

Mimesis and poiesis The questions raised in introducing this chapter reflect what had been a radical questioning of the alleged representational properties of

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  117 research texts and their adequacy as portrayals of the real. For some this went so far as to signal the ‘demise of an episteme of representation’ (Knights, 1997). Although tales of representation’s death (or at least of a faith in representation) might be exaggerated, nonetheless within post-­representational theory we can still find a deconstructive space that deeply disturbs the distinctions between the real and the non-real, and the factual and the fictional, as they can be said to be features of written texts (Cunliffe, 2003; Rhodes, 2019). This suggests that the researcher is not only reflecting on or theorizing the goings on in the world, but is also “an author of fiction who develops character, situation and plot” (Hatch, 1996: 360). To take reflexivity seriously means that it is no longer tenable to assert whether a research text is true or false – instead it is ‘made up’ and also ‘true’ (Watson, 2000; Rhodes, 2015). Indeed, the acknowledgement of this fictionality heralds an abandonment of the suspension of disbelief that failed to recognize that, “mischief was not afoot in the kingdom of the real” (Taussig, 2003: xvii). And this is not grounds for pessimism. Quite the contrary, the legacy of debates over methodological reflexivity points to the ability for research to recognize itself as a creative practice that can delegitimize the common sense of reality and render that reality malleable rather than immutable – the goal of research is to transgress rather than report reality (Schubert, 1995), to “testify to the reality of lived experience while at the same time undermining the self-evident character of that reality” (Rhodes, 2009: 656). To further consider the implications of this transgression, we can understand the research text in relation to its reflexive awareness of the artifice of the representational (i.e. mimetic) faculty (Taussig, 1993). The understanding of textuality so central to post-representational theory can be regarded as a case where claims to representation, scholarly or otherwise, cannot be separated from the unique and creative elements of any text, a creativity and difference that is at play through both it being written and it being read. This is a powerful combination where reality is brought forth through the inseparable interplay of fact and fiction (cf. Case, 2003), copying and creativity (Rhodes and Pitsis, 2008) – and rationality and affect (Gherardi, 2018). Writing participates in a form of poiesis (as well as one of mimesis), where poiesis can be understood as the making and performance of a text (Threadgold, 1997). Poiesis is a ‘making’ that is bound up in what exceeds mimesis of representational endeavours (Taussig, 1993) where the distinction between the “real and the representation of the real are problematized through the reflexivity of [this] mimetic excess” (Rhodes and Westwood, 2008: 47). This is an active and dynamic notion of language that sees text as a form of re-writing that is creative and expressive as well as being subject to subsequent re-writing. Here writing and reading collapse in the moment of fiction. But this creativity is not free as if to be without bounds – rather

118  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics it is a freedom that is limited, following Threadgold (1997) again, by institutional, disciplinary and political structures. What we see is that so called ‘realistic’ representations become labelled as ‘true’ not because of correspondence with objects but because they conform to orthodox and regimented practices of reading and writing (Brown, 1994). For some writers, the realization of the limitations of institutionalized writing practices has led to their subversion (see Rhodes, 2019). As a practical response to the crisis of representation, the result has been the production of research accounts outside of the genres traditional and conventional to science – a desire to “write out of the box” (Styhre, 2005) so as to challenge oppressive orthodoxies (Phillips, Pullen and Rhodes, 2014). The result is that by problematizing the researcher in this way […] researchers have engaged increasingly in forms of experimental writing […] through such means as fiction, narratives of the self, performance science, polyvocal texts, responsive readings, aphorisms, comedy and satire, visual presentations, auto-ethnographies and mixed genres. (Clegg and Hardy, 2006: 437) Including such experimental writing in organizational research portends new ways to think and talk about organizations and allow room for doubt, uncertainty, contradiction and paradox (Phillips, 1995) and subvert the dominance of masculine rationality as the hallmark of ‘good’ science (Rhodes and Pullen, 2009; Vachanni, 2019). In the 1990s and 2000s, this saw scholars publishing research texts about organizations in the form of impressionistic fictions (e.g. Brown and Kreps, 1992), poetry (e.g. Kostera, 1997, 2006), fiction, docudrama, journalism and first-person confessionals (see Pacanowsky, 1995) and plays (Steyaert and Hjorth, 2002). More recently, this has been extended to more politically explicit texts that destabilize established writing conventions through practices such as ‘cyborg writing’ (Prasad, 2016), ‘feminine creation’ (Biehl-Missal, 2013), ‘creative academic fiction’ (Lipton, 2017) and ‘bisexual writing’ (Phillips, Pullen and Rhodes, 2014). Collectively, such work (see Rhodes, 2019 for a review) builds on “a legacy of chaining marginalization of subjects by writing back into the centre by destabilising language and knowledge-power structures” (Sayers, 2016: 379).

Responsibility So far, this chapter has rehearsed ideas already established in debates over research methodology and writing in organizational research. In seeking to further join in and take forward the issues raised theoretically, the ethical implications embedded in them will now be considered. This begins by turning to Derrida’s consideration of the relation

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  119 between ethics and undecidability, particularly as it might be considered in terms of writing (cf. Rhodes and Brown, 2005) and the “heightened sense of academic responsibility within the practices of scientific inquiry” (­Trifonas, 2003: 107) that Derrida’s thinking attests to. This sense of responsibility emerges from recognition of not just the practice but also the politics of representation, that is, the “ethical and political stakes in presenting an argument or characterizing a people” (Peters and Trifonas, 2005: 5). Derrida considers what it might mean when a writer is faced with the ability to ‘say anything’ and ‘say everything’ – “to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law” (Derrida, 1992: 37), that is, in this case, how to respond to the freedom from factuality that reflexivity heralds. Derrida offers two possibilities. The first response is summed up in his sentence: “I can say whatever I like and I say it in the guise of a poem, a fiction, or a novel”. (Derrida, 1996: 80) The second response is that “I can say anything and thus, not only do I not simply say what I please, but I also pose the question concerning to whom I am responsible”. (Ibid.) For Derrida, the first response is to be labelled ‘irresponsible’, the second ‘responsible’ such that writing becomes tied up in the democratic and political experience of responsibility, rather than that of anarchy. What this means is that responsibility is wrapped up in democratic decision – it is a matter of being active in deciding what to do, rather than proceeding with a predetermined or other-determined calculus. So, while in principle one may have the right to ‘say anything’, that does not extinguish the responsibility of what it is that one says. Rather than being a case where “morality is reduced to narrative” (Reed in Chia, Parker and Reed, 2000: 539), writing is a political experience of “knowing who is responsible for what and before whom” (Derrida, 1996: 80). To explain this, we need to examine further what Derrida means by responsibility and how it is related to his conceptualization of ‘undecidability’. The point, as it relates to writing, is that the response to freedom, if it is to be responsible, must be rendered in terms of decision. It is only through such decision that a political and ethical responsibility can be realized (Derrida, 1996). Decision-making, if it is to be free, must pass through an ordeal of ‘undecidability’: an oscillation between determined

120  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics possibilities in a defined situation (Derrida, 1988). In the context of the ethics of writing, this oscillation is between choices of what and how to write. This does not point reflexivity in the direction of naively treating “all accounts as in principle equal” (Whittle and Spicer, 2008: 618) or falsely assuming that it is a harbinger of ‘quality research’ (Gabriel, 2015) but is about how one might take responsibility for the account that one renders. Not an unbounded freedom, nor relativism, the issue of responsibility is about deciding on a course of action without being able to predict the effects of that decision. Such is the difficult freedom of ­ethics – it is freedom made of the obligations that arise from turning away from oneself to the other, a “going out to the other” (Robbins, 1999: 43) without any rules or formulas to guarantee moral self-­assurance (Arnett, 2017). For a decision to be free and sovereign, the instant it is made “must remain heterogeneous to all knowledge as such, to all theoretical or reportive determination, even if it may or must be preceded by all science and conscience” (Derrida, 1997: 219). The direction here is to render writing into “the field of decision in the order of the ethico-political” (Derrida, 1988: 116) such that the experience of undecidability is also that of moral responsibility. While on face value, the notion of undecidability might be read as “an abdication of the responsible use of language […] the opposite […] is true” (Wills, 2005: 37). As Trifonas puts it, “the ability to choose freely among manifold options of undecidable and non-indicative possibilities does not demarcate a responsibility abdicated or an obligation ignored – it reveals a responsibility multiplied, an obligation intensified by the power to choose” (2003: 123). In such a manner, writing is an ethical as much as a descriptive practice, to the extent that one decides to do it and how to do it. Furthermore, deciding what to write, who to write about, how to write, and for whom to write are ethical decisions which cannot be singularly pre-figured by fact, theory or method. It is here that undecidability, as a condition of responsibility, is connected directly to poiesis as discussed earlier. The medium in question, which relates to the obligation and responsibility of ethics to politics and the practice of the institution, is language and two ways of thinking about the value of language. Derrida defines these complementary modes of thought in relation to the principle of reason as “instrumental” (informative) and “poietic” (creative), essentially by associating their contrasting methods of semiological effect (e.g. representation/undecidability) with research type which his ends oriented and fundamental. On the basis of the difference of values of finitude, which must not proceed from knowledge but always head toward the possibility of its reinvention. (Trifonas, 2005: 211)

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  121 At this point, we can provisionally consider that a poiesis, as part and parcel of reflexivity, is a condition of responsible writing in that with it comes the response to the undecidability of facing the dilemma of being able to say anything. Without poiesis, without creativity and response, the hubris of claiming a mimesis untainted by the creative ‘act’ of authoring seeks closure over the past at the moment of the present as if that which has gone can be made present once and for all (Rhodes and Pitsis, 2008). It is by working the tension and mutual constitution of mimesis/ poiesis qua representation/undecidability that responsibility comes to be a struggle at the very heart of writing with freedom.

Writing in time If we take seriously Derrida’s insistence on responsibility and decision in relation to his injunction that responsible writing asks the question ‘to whom I am responsible?’ (Derrida, 1996: 80), then the question of writing in relation to self-other relations becomes pivotal. Indeed, the issue here is not that the writer is to be regarded as rational actor inscribing the world, but rather that writing is bound up in those self-other relationships. And, moreover it is this very relationship that is the very font of ethics for Levinas’s (1961/1969). So, while as researchers we might write about others for others, it is from that otherness that our writing enables the writer to become herself or himself. The writer is hostage to that other, a relationship that gives, is a position, no matter how unstable, from which to write. Writing is thus a matter of writing the self, not necessarily in the reflexive confessional of the autobiography but rather in the sense of what has been called ‘autography’ (O’Flynn, 1999: 175). The object and addressivity of the text create the writing subject, they create the I from the rendering of the other (Rhodes, 2001). In one sense, this might be a matter of finding one’s voice, but it is also a recognition that in so doing that voice comes from others. This is the dialogic relation between the self, others written about and the others to whom the text is addressed. Ethics in this sense, and again following Derrida (1994), is part of an ongoing project of learning how to live in the temporal dimension between life and death. This is not a responsibility to be met by the application of rationality but rather one that attests that in writing we might become who we are (Nietzsche, 2001/1887). This learning, however, cannot be something that is ever ‘done’ as if the mechanics of judgement, rule, and law be applied to some text or other such that it be granted the status of ethical or unethical in a final day of judgement. Instead, this is the ethics of the promise, the ethics of what Derrida calls the ‘to-come’, never escaping the anxiety and the ordeal of the undecidable. Here, the duty to the other is never completed in good conscience but is located in the future: the promise of ethics (cf. Derrida, 1995: 28). The argument is that acknowledging a

122  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics temporalization of ethics, one that hopes for ethics and that dreams of ethics, does not foreclose its future possibility within the present. The future remains as an “alterity that cannot be anticipated” (Derrida, 1994: 64) such that the “responsibility toward the other is also a responsibility toward the future, since it involves the struggle to create openings within which the other can appear beyond any of our programs and predictions” (Attridge, 1992: 5). This ethics is in the performative category of the promise and can never be finished, can never have been said to have been kept once and for all. If such a concrete ethical position were proposed to have been reached, then surely ethics would come to an end in an eschatological ultimate destiny from which there would be no future. Such a knowable destiny would extinguish the undecidability that fuelled ethics in the first place. What this extends to is the ethical notion that knowledge be regarded not as an object, but as an activity located in time: a promise of ethics in the doing rather than the done. This promise can be considered in relation to the distinction that Levinas makes between the saying and the said. For Levinas, the said is that which is signified, it is the ontological function of language that seeks to represent and objectify. In the terms adopted here, the said is that use of language which is thought of as having achieved representation. By Levinas’s description, the said is that which would constitute […] identity, and recuperate the irreversible, coagulate the flow of time into a ‘something’, thematize, ascribe a meaning. It would take up a position with regard to this ‘something’, fixed in a present, re-present it to itself, and thus extract it from the pliable character of time. (Levinas, 1974/1998: 37, italics added) At issue here is that the said does not acknowledge the temporality of its own occurrence, pretending instead to be true now and forever in a fervour of epistemological arrogance, surety and security. In contrasting the said to the saying, Levinas directs us to the very limits of language as a means of signifying the ethical relation with the other. It is in the saying that language is not reduced to an objective knowledge but involves that activity of knowing. Saying is a matter of responding to the other in a way that “weaves an intrigue of responsibility” (ibid.: 6). Saying is sincerity, an openness to the other that does not shut down or close off the other in the said. Saying is not “the communication of a said, which would immediately cover over and extinguish or absorb the said, but saying holding open its openness, without excuses, evasions or alibis, delivering itself without saying anything said” (ibid.: 143). The saying is the ethics of language that constitutes the condition of the possibility of the said, yet an exclusive focus on the said overlooks the “essential

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  123 exposure to the other” – the quandary that results is that “Saying is never fully present in the Said, yet the Said also constitutes the only access we have to it – it leaves a trace on the Said but is never revealed in it” (Davis, 1996: 75 and 76). Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said does not ‘solve’ the ethical imperative to account for power, but it does at very least suggest an ethics of humility in writing. While writing might always be pulled towards the practices of the said, its origins in the saying should not be forgotten, reflecting an openness not to knowledge but to unknowability.

What is there to do? Reflexivity in organizational research has not been without its critics. Czarniawska (in Weick, 2002) had it that reflexivity, in some of its variations, can be practiced as a warped narcissism, one where researchers, in recognizing themselves in the mirrors of their own text, fall in love with themselves and forsake all others. Indeed, a possible effect of this is that “though reflexive inquiry is generally promoted as a way of uncovering one’s biases […] by closely examining our motives and values [… one’s own views can become…] even more entrenched” (Barry, Carroll and Hanson, 2006: 1103). In concerning himself with reflexivity, Weick summed up that there needs to be a constant reminder that “we are not the point”. He adds that “in the name of reflexivity, many of us tend to be more interested in our own practices than in those of anybody else” (Weick, 2002: 898). What this points to is that reflexivity, in the name of a concern for others, can become manifest in “extended statements by researchers about their own positions at the expense of writing about others”. Such statements are tantamount to “egocentric musings, self-promoting confessionals”, and “more reflexive than thou testimonials” (Rhodes, 2000a: 522). In the context of the discussion in this chapter, what such criticisms are suggesting is that the practices developed to respond to reflexivity fail to disrupt the assumed mutual exclusion of self and other, and fail to usurp the privileging of the self over other that is the very antithesis of ethics (Levinas, 1961/1969, 1974/1998). If ethics “occurs as the putting into question of the ego, the knowing subject [or] self-consciousness” (­Critchley, 1992: 5) to respond to it from the security of that self-same ego is an abandonment of ethics. At the same time, however, in the moment of responsibility it is “I, a singular self, who am obliged to respond to a particular other” (ibid.: 6). In such terms, reflexivity involves the ongoing negotiation between the infinite demands of the wholly other and the possibilities for action of the self. The mutual implication of self and other that this entails means that “the possibility of either purely ethical behavior (total openness to the other) and a complete violent exclusion of the other (total appropriation of alterity) does not exist” (Roffe, 2004: 42).

124  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics The ethical response to reflexivity is something that does not quit, it does not give way to ‘good conscience’ as if some mandated form of writing, or standardized method could somehow stand in as a proxy for the ordeal of undecidability demanded by the ethical decision. To be after reflexivity, in the sense of being subsequent to it, is always to be after reflexivity, in the sense of pursuing it. The consideration of reflexivity advanced here is not one that calls for the creation of a mechanics of judgement through which particular texts may be assessed in order to make an assessment of their relative ethicality. It is not that, as if from on high and with supreme clarity of judgement, one might presume to be able to issue self-satisfied verdicts, as some do, that some writers “fail to meet their own reflexive aspirations” (Alvesson, Harley and Hardy, 2008: 481). Indeed, to do so would work against the ethical ‘saying’ that has been attested to. It would attempt to institute a vocabulary of ethics in place of a grammar of ethics. In terms of writing practice, the ideas being advanced here are not those that insinuate a legislation of thought that might lead to wholesale change, but more ones that seek to promote and provoke reflection and action at a local level (Chan, 2000) to such an extent that that locality works down to the ethical deliberations over the specifics of authorship and writing. Attention is drawn not to the representational accuracy of the text, but to the way that it constructs a reality that conforms to orthodoxy by cleaning up the mess of reality that lies behind it through the application of convention (Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). The practical implications of this are an attestation to a responsibility, experimentation and political imagination that breaks from the established ways of thinking and writing that confine becoming. The practice that this promotes is not one that can be elucidated in a nomothetic fashion – indeed, the difficult freedom that Levinas teaches is one that concerns being awakened to an “ethical demand without accompanying assurance of a stipulated program for action” (Arnett, 2017: 16). For organizational research, this invokes a scholarly practice that attests to its own freedom through an ethically and politically motivated contestation of forced normalcy (Pullen and Rhodes, 2009) and repressive epistemic authority (Rhodes, 2019). Indeed, if what has been attested to here in the name of an ethics of the saying were to be translated into code to be used for gauging the ethicality of research writing, then to be sure no such writing would pass muster. If reflexivity demands an ethical response to the other, then that responsibility is not something to be achieved once and for all through textual manipulation. It is better understood as a ‘horizon’ in the sense that just as the visible horizon makes it possible for us to experience things in terms of distance, the ethical horizon […] is the condition of possibility for the ethical act. The radical otherness of the other

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  125 despite the fact that we can never attain it as a state, makes possible any attempt. (Roffe, 2004: 43) And this attempt is a struggle to move from the concreteness of the said to the ethics of the saying, in Levinas’s terms. What then does this ethical horizon of reflexivity mean, in a practical sense, for research and writing? What the various statements and deliberations so far in this chapter have been trying to get at is that the recognition of freedom and reflexivity in writing presents writing as a futural activity located in the undecidable process that the writer faces every time he or she reaches for the pen – in other words, a difficult freedom. Although it has been announced here that a practical response will be provided, it is worth reconfirming too that the ethics being considering is not one that comes in the form of examples that are to be followed in an obedient, deferent or passive fashion – such is the difficulty and potential of our freedom. Abandoned is the futile hope that particular research methods and processes might be developed, such that when followed, ethics would be secured and good conscience assured. Ethics is not so easy. Moreover, should such a method be secured, it would mark the end of poiesis, the end of the future and the end of ethics. As Derrida has stressed, the ends of science qua research “must not proceed teleologically from knowledge, but always head towards the possibility of its reinvention via an open inquiry” such that instrumental/informative value of research is made secondary to its poietic/creative value (Trifonas, 2003: 111). More importantly, it suggests the need to consider knowledge as a dynamic field of play in which engagement means the pursuit of free decision, even when that choice feels hamstrung by power, institutions and the apparatus of the state (Rhodes, 2019). Practically, to be responsible is to always strive towards the exercise of freedom in one’s writing rather than to rest of the methodological laurels of past convention. Such responsibility is not that which seeks to accumulate knowledge, but that which seeks to disrupt knowledge through a radical questioning of the rigour (mortis) of theory’s own substantive and methodological self-confidence and control. This means that reflexivity, whether the term is used or not, is mobilized not as a ‘textual strategy’ (Alvesson, Hardy and Harley, 2008) or mean to acknowledge ‘bias’ (Bansal, Smith and Vaara, 2018) but through writing practices that disturb the very contours of truth as institutionalized, such that the difficult freedom that arises from a responsibility to others is awakened from its self-satisfied slumber. It is in such actions that the implications of the form of reflexivity and responsibility elucidated here achieve their practicality. But there is, of course, a danger that what was once poetic, dangerous, and liberatory becomes established as its institutionalization forecloses

126  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics on its dynamism. In other words, when poiesis becomes organized it might lose the promise of the future that enables it to engage in the ethics of writing. In the terms of Jean-François Lyotard what happens here is that “power assumes the name of a party” (1986: 75) which seeks to ban alternatives, to ban avant-gardes by demanding adherence to ‘correct images’ and ‘correct narratives’. Indeed, such an adherence is precisely the type of reference to the ‘truth’ that reduces ethics to dogma. That is institutionally legitimated and legislated. But, as Lyotard suggested there is a public for such legitimated knowledge, a public that desires it as an “appropriate remedy for the anxiety and depression that public experiences” (1986: 75). And of course, as suggested earlier, it is precisely such an anxiety, in the form of undecidability, that is required if we are not to rest easy in the presumed finality of the “good conscience of having done one’s duty” (Derrida, 1994: 28). As far as writing is concerned, ethics means being open to “moving beyond what we already know by endeavoring to put the systemacity of what may appear to be grounded or static into motion, play, kinesis” (Trifonas, 2003: 113, italics in original). Responsibility in writing is thus not about knowledge understood as the here-and-now assurance of one’s own representations, conclusions or convictions, but about their constant temporalization such that knowledge is never fixed, and always to come, always attesting to the saying.

The self of reflexivity A consideration of the thinking on reflexivity that has been laboured over in this chapter speaks directly to the practice of writing research. Moreover, what has been argued for works in direct opposition to the way that reflexivity has most often been taken up in writing practices in organizational research. Commonly the acknowledgement of reflexivity has demanded “ways of doing research which reflect back on themselves, especially in terms of the relation of the researcher to the research process” (Hardy and Clegg, 1997: 10) and where “the emphasis is on textual practices used by researchers to present their work reflexively” (Alvesson, Hardy and Harley, 2008: 481), most especially through methodological elaboration and confession (Bansal, Smith and Vaara, 2018). Such forms of reflecting back manifest in researchers including in their writing a meta-commentary on their own work together with attestation to their own powers of self-awareness. This presents itself so as to explicitly acknowledge and try to account for the author’s role in the construction of the meaning of that writing. It has been proposed that there is a ‘need’ to “reflect on our reflections” (Antonocopoulou and Tsoukas, 2002: 859) through the “inclusion of the researcher in the subject matter he or she is trying to understand” (Hardy, Phillips and Clegg, 2001). Researchers are implored to question how they “make truth claims and construct meaning” so as to make the nature of those claims “more

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  127 transparent” (Cunliffe, 2003: 985). Each researcher is now not just to research other people, but to supplement this with looking inwards and “studying himself or herself to create a reflexive dialogue” (Humphreys, 2005: 852) so as attain some sense of authenticity through an awareness of his or her own biases (Bansal, Smith and Vaara, 2018) There is a deep irony in this use of reflexivity, however. While there is the demand to highlight the “problematic effects of [the] authorization of the ‘expert’ academic and subordination of the researched” (WrayBliss, 2003: 308), this problematization works against its own ethos when reflexivity is responded to from a position that researchers can and should ‘reveal’ themselves in their research, “make their assumptions explicit”, “expose their situated nature”, “uncover taken-for-granted practices”, as well as “revealing how our research is a narrative construction with its own discursive rules and conventions” (Cunliffe, 2003: 985, 995, 1000 and 993, italics added). Reflexivity is thus concerned with rendering a researcher’s biases explicit (Bansal, Smith and Vaara, 2018) and “visible through personal disclosure” (Hardy, Phillips and Clegg, 2001: 535) and with “critical self-appraisal” (Buchanan and Bryman, 2007: 497). Such demands for self-revelation mean finding out the ways in which research accounts are ‘partial’ and how they “incorporate assumptions of which we are not ordinarily aware” (Antonocopoulou and Tsoukas, 2002: 859). The irony in this is that while such responses to reflexivity question the authorial authority to know (i.e. to say the said), they simultaneously propose the institution of an additional and more far-­reaching knowledge and self-authority: the presumed ability of researchers to be able to be self-present in their writing by revealing themselves, as if a cloak of mystery and deceit can be removed to un-conceal the real goings on behind the artifice of the written account. Such a denuded research, it is unreflexively implied, is more honest and truthful than the one hiding behind the artifice of the cover of the garment. In such a guise, reflexivity does not so much question the character of truth and knowledge in research, as much as extend its ambit, while leaving its centre unchanged, rendering the research still invulnerable to the alterity of the other, as still in retention of an interpretive monopoly that secures their own authoritative position (Bjørkeng, Carlsen and Rhodes, 2014). Knowledge is still something that can be achieved in the here-and-now without deferral, provided that truth is represented. The radical undermining of knowledge that reflexivity implies is itself undermined when the response to reflexivity stems from “a desire to see more clearly and more broadly – to elucidate our own biases, to bring up for discussion the things we take for granted” (Antonocopoulou and Tsoukas, 2002: 861). If “reflexive theoretical positions are those best able to account for their own theorizing” such that “knowledge can account for its own production” (Hardy and Clegg, 1997: 13)

128  Difficult freedom & critical business ethics rather than becoming open to the forms of undecidability discussed earlier, in the name of a questioning researchers’ mastery over the other through expertise, this expertise is strengthened in that added to it is the putative ability to also have mastery over oneself through the act of self-revelation. Contrary to this response to reflexivity, what has been argued for here is that the implications of reflexivity are not accounted for in the specifics of authorial self-representation in the research text. When reflexivity means that researchers feel required to add their own meta-commentary about themselves in their work, there is a significant danger of enhancing rather than questioning the authorial authority that spurred the turn to reflexivity in the first place. The authorial self is thus ‘cleaned up’ by reflexivity so as to remove any visible stains of ignorance or confusion (Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). In such cases, the author is not just claiming to ‘know’ their field in an authoritative manner but also gestures to knowing themselves in the same way. In other words, reflexivity seeks to quell the anxiety of undecidability through presence and knowledge rather than embracing it as the very centre of responsibility. This chapter started by posing the question, what does responsibility mean when truth is no longer equated with re-presentation? While methodological reflexivity has brought attention to the ethical concern for displaying “in our writings/conversation the interactions between our selves and our participants” (Etherington, 2007: 599; Robinson and Kerr, 2015), its ethical limitations arise from the still distinct notions of self and other on which it is founded. This means that a response to the question of responsibility is not one that comes in the form of a concreted answer that might be codified into practice, but rather calls for continued deliberation and innovation – in particular, deliberation over the meaning of the ontological relation between self (as researcher) and other (as researched) and the exercise of power that is embedded in this relation. The radical openness that is foreshadowed in such an ethics is one that exists in the aporia between the other as unknowable and the other as the source of one’s own becoming. The implications of this for research practice are more radical than the forms of self-accounting outlined above. As Trifonas (1999) suggests, To expose our discourse to the questioning of the other, not by devolving it into a rhetorics of autonomy, but by welcoming its resistances to a dialogues of the Self to the selfsame, is to open oneself to the play of learning through queries and objection that empty the subject to infinitize and to enrich its heteronomy. (p. 185) This does not mean becoming mute in the awe of the encounter with the other, but rather engaging in discourse that does not collapse its own self-proclaimed meaning as being knowledge once and for all.

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  129 Knowledge, thus temporalized, is always something to-come (Derrida, 1995), always an attestation to the saying (Levinas, 1974/1998). There remains for research a desire to relate to other people, to understand them and, in a sense, to know them. This is a desire for “wanting-­tosay-something-meaningful” but yet whose meaning is not the realization of concrete knowledge, but of an active knowing, understood as the realization of the “undecidability of what remains to be thought by the other” (Trifonas, 1999: 185). The ethics of this active knowing does not quit. While chasing after it, one never gets beyond it. As Derrida puts it, “undecidability is not simply a moment to be overcome by the occurrence of the decision […] the relation to the other does not close itself off” (1996: 87). As well, however, this does not spell paralysis. Writing is still pragmatic such that “judgments have to be made and decisions have to be taken” (Critchley, 1996: 35). Reflexivity does not spell an end to knowledge, but rather recognition that knowledge and its writing are actively produced by particular decisions and actions taken. Such pragmatism does, indeed, stem from the acknowledgement of the fictionality of research, in that it requires truth not to be judged on the basis of representationalism or correspondence, but on the basis that it might “encourage human compassion” and provide insight into the relations between ourselves and others (Watson, 2000: 504). This is not about being ‘right’ or ‘final’ in a representational sense, quite the contrary, it is about continuing the project of knowing in that it advances towards future possible actions and decision (­Watson, 2008). In this sense, it is through undecidability that we can pragmatically “choose strategies for understanding the world without the possibility of final knowledge of whether we are right or not” (Rhodes, 2000b: 25) while still taking responsibility for them. And to be responsible, the decisions that inform these choices “must pass through an experience of the undecidable” (Critchley, 1996: 35) such that the future is never limited by the conventions of the past in the form of the injunctions of method. This resonates with long-standing calls for the social sciences to be informed by an active imagination (Mills, 1959) that is creative in making links between the lives of actual people and the structures that they are located in (see Watson, 2008). This works against the “rule following methodological pre-occupations” that understand inquiry as the implementation of a “set of formalized techniques administered by experts” (Clegg and Rhodes, 2006: 172) and suggests instead a requirement to forge new theoretical articulations that provide “not only a way of thinking and theorizing the practices of others but also a manner by which theory can engage with different people and perspectives” (Rhodes, 2007: 34, see also Rhodes and Westwood, 2008, Ch. 3). It is both the legacy and promise of reflexivity that can invigorate the imagination in research, its poiesis, as an ongoing project of saying the ethical.

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In closing… Debates over reflexivity in organizational research, past and present, have brought forth some serious contentions over the status of the knowledge generated through the writing of research. This chapter has worked to suggest that a positive response to the challenge of reflexivity emerges from the implications for ethics and responsibility that the freedom invokable through reflexivity intimates. This at once suggests a heightened sense of academic freedom, the in-principle freedom to ‘say everything’, and with this the democratic responsibility for the exercise of that freedom (Derrida, 1992). This is, indeed, a pressing and difficult issue given that, as it has been argued, “management academics appear to want to claim power, but not responsibility” by having failed to respond to others (Dunne, Harney and Parker, 2008: 276). Methodologically, it is after reflexivity that a response to this failure can be considered. This is a response that threatens a radical rupturing of knowledge, as we might be able to write of other people in research – what is being written is never a matter of capturing the other in its infinite distance from knowability, but is more humbly understood in that “the other is not known as other but as a sign of a sign of the other that is not itself” (Trifonas, 1999: 193). As this book has gone at least some way to illustrate, approaching research from the perspective of ethical disruption is one way that the unknowability of the other might be approached in a manner that accepts the difficult freedom that marks ethical relations. With such disruption, knowledge no longer exists as the “satiating of the intellect’s appetite for finitude” (Trifonas, 1999: 193) but in an openness to difference and to one’s obligations to the other. It is such a radical openness that is proposed for consideration as an ethical response to reflexivity. The very practice of writing this book (and indeed this chapter) it is such an openness, as it concerns theorizing, that has tried to embrace – an openness to different ways of ‘doing knowledge’ as well as disrupting that knowledge that would undermine the possibility of ethical relations. It is the cultivation of poiesis that has been put forward as a way that this openness might practically manifest in ethical research writing – an attestation to Levinas’s idea of the saying. The difficulty that accompanies freedom comes in knowing that whatever it is that we freely do, it will never be enough and the response is also always to do more. To be after reflexivity does not just mean to be subsequent to it as if it could be dealt with through new programs and practices – instead, it means after in the sense of the continual pursuit of the horizon of reflexivity and its promises and potential. Concurrent is a pursuit of ethics as an equally futile but absolutely necessary means through which to attest to the saying, and to the ethics to-come, that is never possible to be pulled back from the future to the present. This  means writing in a way that asks questions rather than provides

Difficult freedom & critical business ethics  131 answers, that refuses the hubris of generalizations, that provokes thinking rather than provides answers, that generates possibilities rather than prescriptions, that seeks openness rather than closure, and that cultivates poiesis instead of pretending or pretending to extend mimesis. Collectively, this is a disturbing ethics.

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

Bauman, Z. 1, 3 Beauvoir, S. de 5 Bologh, R. W. 47–9, 58–9 Brown, W. 9 bureaucracy 46, 58 business of ethics/justice 25–8 Butler, J. 13, 69, 73–8, 83n1

deception 19, 36 democratic business ethics 13, 14, 100–4; see also individual entries Derrida, J. 1, 3, 114, 118–21, 125, 129 diachrony of ethics 5–6 Diprose, R. 49–50 discrimination 13, 31, 36, 68, 70–5, 78–81, 99 dissent: ethical anarchy and 30–3; ideological 31 distributive justice 43, 57 Diverted Profits Tax 34

capitalism 12, 22, 23, 30–2, 35, 36, 47, 90, 92, 94, 96, 101, 102, 106 Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions, West Virginia University 97 Chalier, C. 50 charismatic leadership 52 charity 8, 59 cisnormativity 69, 72–6, 80 civil society 32–3, 36, 100–2, 105 classical liberalism 8, 9 Clean Air Act 89, 96 cognition 24, 25 commerce 26, 36 corporate business ethics 92–6 corporate freedom 12, 19, 22, 33, 104 corporate sovereignty 12, 13–14, 31, 34, 89, 91–6, 100–2, 104–6; disruption of 96–9; political disturbance of 29 corporate tax avoidance 21–2 Czarniawska, B. 123

efficiency 20, 41 egoism 1, 98 employer-recognized LGBT employee groups 81 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 89, 97, 100, 103 equality 9, 13, 57; LGBT 68, 70–2, 78–82 ethical anarchism 28–30 ethical anarchy 12, 19–36; and dissent 30–3 ethical critiques, and democracy 33–5 ethical demand 7, 11, 35, 56, 124 ethical disruption, politics of 10–14 ethical praxis 13, 76–82 ethical reflexivity 115 ethico-political disturbance 15 ethico-politics 31, 76, 120 ethics: business of 25–8; diachrony of 5–6; and disruption of sovereignty 96–9; as ‘first philosophy’ 11; in the name of the other 49–53; passive, politics of 1–16; and politics 6–8; in post-representational theory

Abensour, M. 11, 27 adiaphorization 2 affectivity 12–13, 41–61 anarchic ethics 12, 19–36 arche 23–4, 27, 28

138 Index 114–16; synchrony of 5; see also individual entries exploitation 27, 35, 36, 41, 45, 51, 69, 80, 82, 98, 99 face-to-face 3, 51, 53, 55, 59 feminine leadership 48–9 ‘The Force of Law’ (Derrida) 2 formal rationality 13, 46, 47, 49, 55, 57–60 Foucault, M. 8–9 Friedman, M. 19, 20, 22, 35 gender diversity 72 generosity 3, 7, 8, 26, 27, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, 61, 98 The Gift of Death (Derrida) 2 Google tax avoidance 21–2, 33, 34, 36 greed 33, 36, 74 heteronormativity 69, 72–6, 80 heterosexism 71 homo oeconomicus 9 homosexuality 68 hospitality 3, 7, 8, 26, 54, 59, 61 humanization 74, 75 humility 51, 98, 123 ICCT see International Council on Clean Technology (ICCT) ideological dissent 31 inequality 20, 34 instrumental rationality 42, 48, 49, 51, 60, 96 interactional justice 43 International Council on Clean Technology (ICCT) 97, 105 International Labour Organization 95 International Monetary Fund 21 Judaism 54 justice: business of 25–8; distributive 43, 57; interactional 43; leadership 12–13, 41–61; practical 53–8; procedural 43, 57; singular 59; social 13; see also individual entries just leadership 12–13, 41–61 knowledge 3, 4–5, 24 labour 25–6 language 3–5, 25 leadership: charismatic 52; feminine 48–9; just 12–13, 41–61; servant

52, 53; transformational 52–3; see also leadership justice leadership justice 12–13, 41–61; ends of 42–6; ethics in the name of the other 49–53; implications of 58–61; practical justice 53–8; rationality of 46–9 leadership justice theory 46, 48, 51, 60 Levinas, E.: affectivity and leadership justice 42, 49–61; on an-archic ethics 12, 19–36; business of ethics/justice 25–7; democratic business ethics 91, 97–100, 104; on diachrony of ethics 5–6; difficult freedom & critical business ethics 113, 114, 121–5, 130; ethical praxis for diversity 69–70, 73, 74–9, 80n1; as moral perfectionist 54; on neoliberal morality 10; organization disturbance and politics of passive ethics 1–7, 10–16; on saying–said distinction 14; on synchrony of ethics 5; as utopian idealist 54 Levinasian managerial ethics 28 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) identity 72–6 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) workplace diversity 13, 68–83; business case for 70–2; cisnormativity 72–6; heteronormativity 72–6; justice, politics and praxis after spontaneity and ethics 76–8; praxis, ethics and politics 79–82 liberal democracy 8, 32, 100, 101, 105 Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Bauman) 2 Lingis, A. 10 Lyotard, J.-F. 126 managerialist rationality 45 market-based ideology 8 market morality 19–36 masculinism 49–50 mercy 3, 5, 7, 8 metapolitics 11 mimesis 116–18 moral certitude 7–8 moral impulse 2 moralization 3 Mouffe, C. 32, 101–2 Nemo, P. 1 neoliberalism 8–12, 14, 19–21, 33, 36, 90–3, 95, 96, 100, 102, 104–6

Index  139 neoliberal morality 8–10, 15 neoliberal piety 11 oppression 10, 31, 36, 74, 99, 115 organizational disturbance 1–16 organizational justice, theories of 43 other-centred approach 44, 49 passive ethics, politics of 1–16 passivity 1, 3, 4, 10, 12, 24, 25 poiesis 116–18 political anarchism 28–30 politics: of ethical disruption 10–14, 23; ethics and 6–8; metapolitics 11 The Politics of Friendship (Derrida) 2 Postmodern Ethics (Bauman) 2 post-representational theory, ethics in 114–16 post-structuralism 2 practical justice 53–8 procedural justice 43, 57 profit maximization 19, 90 proto-ethics 50 racial diversity 70–1, 82 radical democracy 12–14, 23, 32, 33, 35, 89–106 rationality 2–4, 6, 13, 50, 56, 58, 75, 77, 117, 118, 121; economic 10, 60; formal 13, 46, 47, 49, 55, 57–60; instrumental 42, 48, 49, 51, 60, 96; of leadership justice 46–9; managerialist 45; market 20; neoliberal 9; organizational 42; substantive 13, 46, 47, 49, 56, 59, 60 Reagan, R. 20 reflexivity: in organizational research 113–31; self of 126–9 resistance 31, 91, 99, 101 respect 4, 36, 42, 51, 53, 74 responsibility 2, 3, 14, 25, 61, 118–21 righteousness 1, 7, 8, 16, 42, 50, 52, 57, 75, 91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 105, 106 same-sex marriage 68 self-comparison 74 self-glorification 11 self-interest 8–15, 19, 23, 32, 34, 41, 46, 49, 53, 61, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 83, 91, 94, 95, 98, 99, 103 selfishness 1, 15, 36 selflessness 7, 78

self-love 74 self-righteousness 3, 56, 59, 96 servant leadership 52, 53 singular justice 59 Smith, A. 8–9 social justice 13, 69–73, 75–80, 82, 83 spirituality 23, 25 spontaneity 75–8 state sovereignty, political disturbance of 29 Stonewall Equality Index 81 subjectivity 25; ethical 98; political 12 substantive rationality 13, 46, 47, 49, 56, 59, 60 synchrony of ethics 5 tax avoidance 21–2, 33–4 tax shaming 34 Thatcher, M. 20 thematization 1, 4, 23–7 Threadgold, T. 118 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 4, 25 Toyota Motor Corporation 89 transformational leadership 52–3 Trifonas, P. P. 120, 128 ultimate values 50, 57, 60 undecidability 119–22, 128–9 United Nations Global Compact 95 value-rational action 50–1 Volkswagen Group: corporate business ethics 92–6; corporate sovereignty 92–6; democratic business ethics 100–4; Emissions Scandal of 2015, 14, 89–106; ethical voluntarism 95; ethics and disruption of sovereignty 96–9; 2014 Sustainability Report 90 Washington Consensus 21 Weber, M. 46–51, 57, 58, 60 Weick, K. 123 Williamson, J. 21 Winkerton, M. 89 work, organization of 26, 36 workplace diversity see LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) workplace diversity World Bank 21 World Forum for Ethics in Business (2012) 89 writing in time 121–3