Volume 10(2): 187–203 Copyright © 2003 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing

articles

Martin Parker Keele University, UK

Abstract. This introduction to the special issue consists of some arguments that are intended to fold the concepts ‘ethics’ and ‘politics’ into one another. The aim of this exercise is to take business ethics to task for having a narrowly ‘ethical’ view of its ambitions. Instead, I propose that business ethics needs to embrace political theory in addition to the moral philosophy that it has (up to now) treated as canonical. I argue that such an enlargement will encourage those who currently practise business ethics to ask broader questions about the current legitimacy crisis facing market managerialism, and also seriously to consider alternative forms of organization and exchange. The paper concludes with a short review of the rest of the issue. Key words. business ethics; ethics; moral philosophy; political philosophy; politics

Ethics and Politics1 Oddly, ethics and politics are often considered to be separate things, and all I want to do in this opening paper is to ask some questions about this separation.2 Of course, we have compound terms such as ‘ethicopolitical’ and common ways of arguing that treat matters of politics as if they were matters of ethics, and vice versa. However, the problem often remains. It is as if we have two sets of ideas about values that are located in different parts of our heads. In the right brain, let us say, we have ideas 1350-5084[200305]10:2;187–203;032762

Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing about how we should treat other people that depend on various evaluations of intentions and actions. These are small things, local matters. In the left brain, we have ideas about how societies, markets and institutions should be organized. These are big things, and distant matters. Such a split allows us to say that we think someone ethical but disagree with his or her politics; or, of course, to agree with someone’s politics but judge that he or she is an unethical person. It also allows us to have demarcated domains of academic enquiry that are concerned with ethics, usually framed by various elements of moral philosophy, and other different domains that are concerned with politics. Hence, when a subject such as ‘Business Ethics’ is constituted, it does not need to include matters that might fall within the domain of a non-subject such as ‘Business Politics’. Now, as any simple structuralist would tell you, this is what words do. In making a word mean something, it becomes not-something-else. There is nothing particularly remarkable in this operation, and no great sin is involved in distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘that’. However, as any semiotician or post-structuralist would tell you, such divisions are not always innocently equivalent either. The cuts that make ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘white’ and ‘black’ often contain connotations of dominance and subordination. Putting things in their proper place is, after all, an act of classification that involves certain operations of power. By defining a boundary, it also defines a centre, and hence gives that centre a defining position. But the boundary between ethics and politics is not really one of the dominance of one term over the other. We do not, in everyday terms, usually claim that one is more important than the other, or that one makes sense only if defined by the other. What seems to be happening here is that the boundary is used to demarcate a particular understanding of the distinct domains that pertain to each word. Hence within the domain of ethics, the questions and problems that pertain to politics are made distant. And, within the domain of politics, ethics is an irrelevant matter that can legitimately be bracketed with other kinds of conversations. But why do I want to claim that is this a problem? It might, after all, simply be a serviceable way of describing two different things. One is the stuff that pertains mainly to the qualities of persons and their relationships, the other is constituted by what might be broadly called the social. One is about agents and their means, the other is about structures and their ends. ‘Ethics’ derives from the Ancient Greek ethos, which describes the character or personal disposition of a person, whereas ‘politics’ is derived from polis, the city-state. I suppose this division between people and social structures is a fairly commonsensical one, even though its social theoretical underpinnings have been the subject of extensive debate and reframing for quite a few years now.3 But my problem here is not really one of social ontology, but one of disciplinary boundaries. To be more specific, I believe that the constitution of the one part of business and management studies that is aimed explicitly at

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker matters of value—business ethics—is structured in such a way that it excludes politics. And, further, I believe that there is a rather tidy affinity between a narrow use of the word ‘ethics’ and a market managerial ideology that considers questions about persons to be legitimate but questions about political economy to be largely settled. So, in not asking questions of business politics, business ethics both justifies itself as properly concerned with ‘ethics’ and also avoids troubling the promanagerial hegemony of the wider discipline. Now I think this means that the pro-business ideological stance taken by most business ethicists is not always a ‘deliberate’ one. I do not believe that most of the authors in this area have consciously deliberated over a range of social and political choices and concluded that liberal capitalism is the best solution. Some clearly have, but most seem not to have considered these matters in any detail at all. Rather, the use of the word ‘ethics’ means that questions and answers are framed in generally individualistic ways which tend to exclude any sustained examination of the contexts within which individuals operate. Efficiency and/or profit constitute the ‘bottom line’ for individual action, and this is a line that defines what lies inside business ethics and what is assumed to be outside it. Asking questions about the line would threaten the integrity of the discipline, so it becomes easy enough to see how a defence of a kind of intellectual coherence smuggles in a series of ideologically loaded limitations. So, if ideology is concerned with what is made visible and what is made invisible, what do (and don’t) we see within business ethics? Virtually all business ethics texts contain references to Kantian conceptions of duty, particularly the implications of the categorical imperative— ‘do as you would be done by’.4 Such arguments are then usually counterposed to utilitarian notions of the greatest good for the greatest number, often connecting these to their contemporary formulations in stakeholder theory. Often there is also reference to virtue theory and discussions of the importance of individual or organizational character. However, there are also some interesting blind spots in what counts as the relevant intellectual capital. The moral philosophies that are incorporated largely comprise the classics of the analytical canon, and it is rare to find references to 20th-century ‘continental’ philosophy here. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Levinas are largely absent from the business ethics text (even though these authors had much to say about ethics), as are many references to the various forms of 20thcentury Marxism, let alone feminist and post-colonial thinking. In addition, there are some clear absences in terms of the intersections between moral philosophy and political theory. Detailed interrogations of law, the state, power, justice, equality, liberty, democracy, human rights and so on are also missing from the centre of business ethics. A less often remarked presence is that virtually all business ethics texts seem uncritically to inherit the repertoire of case studies and discussion

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing questions that are common in management teaching texts. Such cases, often copyrighted as being ‘owned’ by a particular person or institution, are almost always framed as a personalization of the issue concerned. ‘What would you do in this situation? Give reasons for your decisions.’ This stress on the agency of the individual seems to obliterate consideration of structural constraints, even to the extent of asking readers to fill in questionnaires and conduct exercises aimed at ‘discovering’ what their beliefs are. It seems fair to say that the moral philosophical resources most commonly deployed—deontology, utilitarianism and a curiously de-socialized version of virtue ethics—encourage precisely these kinds of individualized thought experiments. Whether interrogating one’s moral duties; evaluating potential means and ends; or considering traits of character such as wisdom, fidelity and so on, the emphasis is on active consciousness informing personal choices. Selves and contexts are made transparent by subjecting them to the clear light of reason, what Vattimo calls ‘the ideal of emancipation modelled on lucid self-consciousness, on the perfect knowledge of one who knows how things stand’ (1992: 7). The management decision maker collects the evidence, judges it according to the most appropriate ethical framework, and then makes a decision on what actions should be taken. Further, these decisions are also often framed within chapters on key business issues—sexual harassment and diversity, health and safety, whistleblowing, intellectual property, the environment, and so on. This is, of course, eminently ‘practical’ by definition, but it also succeeds in excluding many matters that are then deemed beyond the remit of the case in point—globalizing inequality for example. Rather like the ceteris paribus of economics, only certain matters are defined as relevant, and everything else becomes a form of background noise. Everything else is somehow ‘outside’ business ethics. So that is why I think that the distinction between ethics and politics is a problem; but, rather than simply remonstrating with business ethicists for the apolitical consequences of their myopia, I want to show its incoherence from within. I want to show that, on its own terms, the distinction makes little sense. And, if I do this with a measure of success, then the disciplinary defence must give way to an enlarged conception of what business ethics should properly consider. Or, and this is really the option that I would relish, the pro-managerial business ethicists must argue their ideological commitments loudly and clearly and not sneak them in as a bottom line masquerading as commitment to a particular disciplinary formation. More on this later, but for now I will begin by laying out the supposed differences between ethics and politics, before folding them together in a series of ways.

Ethics versus Politics To see how the dualism works, we might consider some ‘pure’ forms of both domains, in the persons of Kant and Machiavelli. To take ethics first,

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker the Kantian position is to say that you can be properly ethical only if your concern is to act according to your rational duty (Kant, 1964).5 That is to say, the circumstances of the world in which you find yourself are relevant only insofar as they allow individual thinkers to clarify their absolute obligation to act as if their actions were to be a general law that applied to all others like you. Here, ethics is conceived as that still small voice within that insistently demands that you do the right thing, regardless of its consequences for yourself or for others. Only individuals can finally decide whether or not they are acting ethically, since it is a private matter, settled between self and conscience. Of course, other people can and do make such judgements about others, but it is the self from which ethics springs. The wider world will undoubtedly be a better place if we all make such judgements in similarly rational ways, but this is an act of addition. It begins from the one, not from any sense of the whole. Politics then. By contrast, Machiavelli’s advice to his Prince was not to dwell on such private matters. What is important, in order to be an effective politician, is that the individual should see the whole situation realistically, and then act with whatever methods are most likely to achieve the desired goal. The methods must be appraised according to their likelihood of success, and must be tempered with a cool-headed understanding of what human beings are like, both individually and collectively. [I]f a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous . . . he will find that some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practises them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be vices will bring him security and prosperity. (Machiavelli, 1999: 50)

It is rather unkind to see Machiavelli as simply cynical or ruthless, since these condemnations are ones that reflect a naive sentimentality about the rights and wrongs of actions that Machiavelli is concerned to counter. Right is action that achieves its goal, wrong is action that fails. If this means being cruel sometimes, or kind at other times, then let others see it like that if they must. But their evaluations are essentially unimportant, except insofar as they might impinge upon the strategies that are currently being deployed. So the wider world will be a better place if it is organized by power, when enemies are defeated and allies are made loyal. The thoughts and intentions of others, and the conscience of the Prince, are of no pressing concern, as long as actions achieve the plan. Now what is interesting about these (highly overdrawn) characterizations is that they reflect two seemingly incommensurable traditions of thought. For the ethicist, the world of the politician is merely vulgar power-seeking and it is difficult, if not impossible, to see any merit in political reasoning. Indeed, the sort of world that they seek to bring into being is one that would be profoundly unethical, one in which the accidents of success would masquerade as goodness. For the politician,

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing the ethicist practises a pointless glass bead game with no clear purpose. To make matters worse, such a game is possible only because politicians have tamed the world with their clarity of vision. To neglect the political arrangements that allow for solitary reflection, rather than (for example) the mass slaughter or starvation of moral philosophers, is an unforgivable act of hubris. Right brain, left brain. We both say neither, so let’s call the whole thing off.

Ethics/Politics What is even more interesting about this set-up is that it is so patently a bad description of what has actually been thought and said within the domains of ethics and politics. It is, if you like, a way of organizing the pure (structuralist) relation between the words, but does not at all reflect the (poststructuralist, and empirical) fact that there is actually a constant slippage between the two terms. To take the most obvious example, within moral philosophy, a Kantian ethics of duty is often counterposed to a utilitarian ethics of outcomes. According to a utilitarian, an action is good if its results can reasonably be calculated to produce the maximum benefit for the maximum number of individuals. The intentions of the actor or the nature of the action are irrelevant here, because they do not in themselves constitute the criteria for judgement. Rather, the action can be deemed ‘good’ if a calculation has been made that compares the benefits and disbenefits of one set of outcomes with those of another. If the ‘felicific calculus’ has been applied correctly, then the result should be the production of more pleasure than pain. This is certainly an interesting and important way of justifying action, and one that has had huge ramifications for a wide variety of areas (not least management), but it is difficult to see how we might categorize this as ethics and not politics. As MacIntyre suggests (1989: 126), the utilitarians are the inheritors of Machiavelli. That is to say, their concerns are really with the sorts of decisions that might organize the polis and not with the cultivation of a certain kind of ethos, beyond a thoroughgoing rationalism. The sort of advice that utilitarians are interested in giving is to someone with power, someone who has the capacity to make decisions that will have implications for the lives of many other people. Their concerns were with what we would now call something like ‘public policy’—the scientific organization of education, prisons, the state and so on. I am not claiming that Bentham, Mill and contemporary stakeholder theorists are ‘unethical’ in some pejorative sense, simply that their concerns are more to do with politics than with ethics as we might commonly articulate those terms. Indeed, it might be said that contemporary politics (and managerialism) is almost entirely utilitarian in its character, since it almost always involves choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. There are no pure positions here, simply the adjudication of competing interests.

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker What is odd is that moral philosophers and business ethicists have persisted in treating this body of ideas as if it had more in common with Kant than with Machiavelli. But this slippage seems to be built into ethics from much earlier in its history, so perhaps to treat it as a confusion is still to rely too much on the assumption that these matters can be meaningfully separated at all. For example, it has been argued that Plato’s constitution of his favoured polis, The Republic, is the psychology of the good individual writ large (Arrington, 1998: 43). Indeed Aristotle, in the text now called The Nicomachean Ethics, makes it clear from the start that he sees his enquiry as being concerned with the health of the polis. In defining the object of his text, he tells us that it would seem to belong to the most authoritative art and that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears to be of this nature, for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state . . . and since, again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. (1980: 2)

So Aristotle felt he was writing about politics, and not merely about ethics. Indeed, in his work on rhetoric, he suggested that ethos was just one of the ways in which public speakers could establish the credibility of their claims. Ethos was a matter of how others judged your character and hence your speech in the public arena. When combined with logos (logical argument) and pathos (emotional appeals), it was likely that you would be a convincing rhetor. So the point of these techniques was to ensure the public credibility of argumentation, and hence the general health of the polis, and not merely to come to some private adjudication about what made a particular action ethical (in the modern sense). This a crucial point, since it begins to expose the very odd ways in which contemporary versions of moral philosophy (including virtue ethics) within business ethics have ‘de-socialized’ these kinds of ideas and made them into an exercise of transparent personal reason. As Foucault puts it, the Greeks raised questions about the truth-teller’s role in society, about ‘the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller’ (2001: 169). They are not particularly concerned with abstract processes of reasoning considered apart from the sorts of practical contexts that constitute life in the polis.6 Indeed, Aristotle’s desired state for human beings, eudaimonia (usually translated as ‘flourishing’), is very clearly a social diagnosis of the ways in which the characteristics of a person have some sort of fit with the characteristics of a given citystate. So polis and ethos are part of the same package: a good city is possible only with good characters, just as virtuous characters are likely to make for a flourishing city. MacIntyre points out that this sort of argument is aimed at Plato’s heroic account of the death of Socrates, since it disallows the possibility that someone could be virtuous and yet suffer

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing (1989: 67). Conscience, rather than being merely a private voice to be listened to or ignored, becomes a collectively adjudicated property of certain social practices.

Ethics/Politics This is not to say that I consider Aristotle’s position on ethics and politics to be right, or MacIntyre’s version of it for that matter, but simply to note that both necessarily blur the ethics/politics distinction. This is an approach that MacIntyre also adopts in his exposition of (amongst others) Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Adam Smith, all of whom he treats as simultaneously ethical and political theorists. Now, if we turn to political philosophy, we can begin to see that the ethics/politics distinction begins to make even less sense. Contemporary texts in this area routinely cover Aristotle, Kant, Bentham and John Stuart Mill, as well as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Lenin (Brown, 1990; Barry, 1995; Bronner, 1997; Simon, 2002). In asking ‘what are the characteristics of a good polis?’, political philosophers and theorists seem to have no particular difficulty in including authors who are also commonly identified as moral philosophers. This is not to say that their treatment of these figures is the same, far from it, but rather that the constituent elements of moral philosophy can be deemed relevant even if they are treated as theories of the ‘public’ world rather than the private. The boundary for political philosophy seems to be expansive enough to include anyone whose ideas are aimed at thinking about, and perhaps even creating, a form of social order that is (named as) more just, free, rational, democratic and so on. Of course these grand and warm words have little agreed meaning, which is why (from the 1970s onwards) political philosophers have spent a great deal of time attempting to articulate just what commitments these words might contain. By and large, the debates have been between liberals and communitarians of various persuasions who collectively express a certain hostility to utilitarianism (Mulhall and Swift, 1992). I shall cite three famous examples. Starting from a notion of the ‘right’ to freedom from interference by others as a starting point, Nozick (1974) has made an argument for a minimal state that is neither anarchist nor redistributive. Treating such a state as merely a ‘protection agency’, which results from market transactions between free individuals and different potential agencies, he proposes that this form of organization can then be suggested to be the only legitimate monopoly. However, Nozick deems to be illegitimate any further extensions of the power of such agencies, or any others, that transgress on sovereign rights. Such a view contrasts with John Rawls’s much debated Theory of Justice (1971), which begins with a neo-Kantian reformulation of an ideal form of social order. If we didn’t know whether we were male or female, working class or middle class, black or white, then what kind of social order would we choose? Rawls’s answer is that, rationally, we would decide on a society

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker in which liberty was maximized and goods and access to power were equally distributed. So, behind the ‘veil of ignorance’ as a hypothetical starting point we can specify general principles that should apply to all social institutions and that justify limited forms of redistribution. Finally, Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) puts forward a communitarian critique of the forms of liberalism sponsored by Nozick and Rawls by arguing that no liberals actually specify the good beyond articulating some primary value to freedom. Yet the idea of an entirely free, ‘unencumbered’, self is one that makes no sense because freedom can only ever mean something within a given social context. Hence, any judgements of everyday morality and politics must make reference to what is deemed to be good within a particular community. Now this is theorizing at a very high level of abstraction, with little attention to the technicalities of institutions other than the state itself, and even then with little attention to actual policies. Nonetheless, because of their expanded focus, these authors represent a form of thought that opens up the possibility that business organizations could be interrogated in ways that are rarely done within business ethics itself. To put it another way, attempting to specify the general rules that might be used to judge a particular social formation might also mean a serious attempt to think about the structures and legitimacy of business too. It is precisely because political theorists do not assume the existence of market managerialism that their thought experiments can so powerfully question it. In some sense, this is ‘utopian’ theorizing which can be deployed to challenge the ‘naturalism’ of current social formations and suggest potential alternative ways in which we could organize ourselves (Parker, 2002a). So how would these three political theorists approach the question of whether contemporary corporations are just, free, rational, democratic and so on? Nozick’s libertarianism certainly supports free markets, but (like Adam Smith) he would have problems with any institutions that gain monopolies over any particular markets. The power that large corporations have in constraining people’s freedoms is clearly a violation of what he sees as the primary right to non-interference in one’s affairs. In principle, then, Nozick might support market managerialism, but it is unlikely that he would support the actual practices that market managerialists engage in. For Rawls, the answer would depend on whether business organizations could be seen as meritocracies within which all individuals have the opportunity to maximize the rewards from their natural talents, and also whether the redistributive elements of the state were actually working to the benefit of the poorest members of society. Again, there would have to be a distinction here between the ideology of free market capitalism and a dispassionate description of actually existing globalized free markets. Given the massive inequalities of status and power that corporations routinely create and reproduce, and their persistent attempts to escape state regulation, my guess would be that someone

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing deciding rationally behind the ‘veil of ignorance’ would not find them justifiable. Finally, Sandel’s communitarianism would have to ask whether big business exemplified the community spirit and collective virtues that deserve celebration and protection. In this case, given the predominance of liberal justifications for market success and failure, and Sandel’s own diagnosis of US democracy as increasingly ‘procedural’ (1997: 73), it is clear enough that he would be hostile to corporations because they do so much to damage local senses of community and democracy.7 Putting it simply, communitarians are usually going to be suspicious of any institutions that celebrate liberal freedom as a primary value and routinely attempt to externalize their costs, whether human or environmental, in order to maximize the utility of small numbers of people. To be clear here, these are no more than speculative arguments based on very sketchy accounts of some significant ideas within political philosophy.8 Importantly, though, all these thinkers raise issues that can be used to consider a general relationship between business organizations and justice, and hence provide some rationally grounded forms of argumentation with which to think about the hegemony of market managerialism. In many ways, this seems to be precisely what business ethics is missing. However, I need to be careful not to suggest that an expanded version of business ethics can find all that it needs within political philosophy. For a start, like moral philosophers, political philosophers have largely been uninterested in commenting on institutions that might mediate between the state and the individual. Further, they have done little to insert their theories into the particularities of the present age, and seem (like many thinkers) to prefer philosophical introspection to changing the world. Finally, there is also a clear danger of swinging too far towards one term and simply repeating the dualism that I began with. If questions about the polis become detached from questions of ethos, then we are back with Machiavelli and Kant once more. That is to say, if some general rules or orientations are specified to the satisfaction of rational people, then important questions about how and why people actually act and account for their actions are in danger of becoming a lesser concern. Nonetheless, the important point I want to make here is to recognize that the sorts of questions that business ethics deals with can be greatly enlarged if we share the terrain occupied by philosophers of politics, and that they provide plenty of conceptual tools to make a start with.

Ethics and Politics But what difference do these sorts of arguments make? So what if, in many of the writings on ethical and political theory, it is hard to find a clear line between ethics and politics? Well, it seems to me that this does matter if it shapes the sorts of responses that business ethicists might

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker have to a variety of issues. Because business ethics has been largely constituted through a one-sided engagement with moral philosophy, it seems that it is then relatively easy to ignore some very substantial matters that pertain to the politics of business organization. Because business ethics asks ‘how can people in organizations be good?’, it does not often ask ‘how can business be part of a good polis?’ The two questions might look similar, but their implications are very different indeed. It seems to me that business is currently going through a substantial legitimation crisis, which has parallels with the early years of the 20th century (Parker, 2002b; and Crossley in this issue). Since the late 1990s, there has been an explosion of activity and interest in anti-corporate protest, which seems to exemplify an explicit impatience with the supposed inevitability of market-led globalization and forms of managerial self-interest that justify inequality and environmental damage. Simultaneously, within the business school, we have the growth of something called ‘Critical Management Studies’—a movement that is attempting an academic critique of hegemonic ways of thinking about organizing. Outside the academy, I would also argue that a broad change in the climate of representation of business can be found in films, novels, cartoons and so on from the 1970s onwards. Now, more than ever, corporations and their managers are represented as evil utilitarians who would do anything to enhance shareholder value. Finally, and perhaps most urgently, the wave of corporate scandals that began in the early years of the new millennium shows no sign of abating. Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, WorldCom, Xerox, ImClone, Anderson and Adelphia are now names on a roll call of accounting fraud, overpaid executives with share options, huge golden parachutes, and employees sacrificed to the bottom line. To put it simply, many people in many places do not trust the market managerial version of the new world order. Yet the common response to this crisis is all too often to claim that it is some individuals, or certain organizations, or even the B-School itself, that are at fault here. The response particularizes and, in so doing, in effect manages to avoid the spotlight being turned on to some larger matters. Business ethics, which should surely be at the centre of these debates, seems limited to fiddling with some form of ethical rearmament while the action is happening elsewhere. In blaming these various problems with capitalism on the ethical principles of individuals and groups, there is an obvious danger of failing to consider two more general and related issues. ●

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First, to examine just why certain sets of beliefs have been propagated with such enthusiasm, which is also to ask what kind of function they play within market managerial societies and which groups benefit from them. Here, business ethicists have much to

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learn from economic sociologists and those studying international political economy (Sklair, 2001). Second, to consider (perhaps using some ideas developed by political theorists, particularly feminists, anarchists and communitarians) whether alternative organizational frameworks and conceptions of exchange might offer potential for a different kind of polis. In assuming that market managerialism is here to stay, the possibilities of communal, cooperative, small-scale, radically democratic forms of organizing are almost entirely erased. Business ethics simply means business as usual.

In the most general of terms, what I am proposing here is that business ethicists might like to think why they don’t call their discipline ‘business politics’. A change of name might be useful in itself, even if what I really intend, to avoid the difficulty of excluding ethics in the name of politics, is that what is termed ‘business ethics’ should be expanded to include matters that are commonly deemed to be political. Unless this is seriously attempted, business ethicists will continue to be the servants of power, mere hand-wringers who believe that either changing the education of managers or tweaking the rules by which capitalism is run are sufficient to have a real effect in dealing with the massive legitimacy crisis that market managerialism now faces. That, it seems to me, is why we can treat the reliance of business ethics on certain versions of moral philosophy as having an ideological function. By commission or omission, this is an area of thinking that seems to prefer to keep its sights lowered, and hence avoids seeing some pressing problems concerning the justice, freedom, rationality and democracy of modern forms of organizing. ‘Business politics’ would not call for the end of ethics, or some other apocalypse. It might be thought of, in the most utilitarian manner, as a tactical re-branding which seeks to encourage those who are interested in questions of value to refocus their enquiries, but it is certainly not intended to be an argument that consequently and finally leaves Kant and his friends out in the cold. Nonetheless, as an acknowledgement of the intertwined history of the two words, as a recognition of the ideological limitations of business ethics and as a provocation to further debate, this will be my proposal. It is quite probable that business ethicists will carry on with business as usual, on the disciplinary grounds that these are not proper questions to ask of ethicists. In which case, they might not be surprised if others keep asking awkward questions more loudly, while business ethicists continue whispering carefully to each other in certain journals. Or, they might want to defend business ethics as it is currently constituted precisely because it has a pro-business stance, but then they will be responding politically, which is precisely the sort of talk I wish to solicit. And, once we start talking about the politics of business, I think it becomes harder to believe that market managerialism is the one best way,

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker or the only way, or the end of history. Believing in the possibility of alternatives is where meaningful debates about both ethics and politics must always begin, and also why such debates must take place.

Six Papers So I introduce six papers that in some very different ways advance the sorts of thinking that I am suggesting is important.9 Not that all these authors would sign up to my argument above of course, but all their papers deal with traditions of thought that blur the boundaries between ethical and political evaluations of organizing. We begin with a remarkable application of ‘analytic’ philosophy to the problem of ethics in business by Alex Arthur. His concern is to establish whether it might be reasonable to treat the language of business as if it were a different language—which he calls ‘Utlish’. Speakers of Utlish follow a general rule that suggests you say what it is in your interests to say, that which maximizes your own utility. If, Arthur implies, Utlish is a coherent language, then perhaps ‘external’ criticisms of business practice by moralists and critical management academics are wide of the mark. Business language and culture should be treated with the same respect and dignity that liberals should afford to any other form of difference. However, on a variety of logical and sociological grounds, it seems that the Utlish experiment fails to support the strong relativist thesis. Further, Arthur elegantly shows that any act of translation from one language into another implies decisions about experience, honesty and meaning that cannot be disentangled from each other. That is to say, the logical incoherence of a language such as Utlish is compounded by its necessary location in contexts where ethical and political judgements are constitutive of any form of language. So a strong defence of the difference of business from the everyday, and its insulation from general concerns about truth and honesty, are both shown to be misguided. In ‘As if Business Ethics Were Possible’, Campbell Jones explores the limits and tensions of business ethics through a philosophical tradition that looks and feels entirely different from that exemplified by Arthur yet comes to some oddly similar conclusions about the emplacement of grand words within their ordinary social contexts. Jones’s ‘deconstruction’ of business ethics is not a destruction (a critique) or the application of a certain method of analysis (like Arthur) but a careful soliciting of the possibilities for ethics. Employing a Derrida who is read through Levinas, Jones insists that ethics, to be worthy of its grand name, must involve moments of worrying indecision when confronted by demands that are both contradictory and valid. The bureaucratization of ethics, which is discussed by Roberts in the paper that follows, evades the importance of thinking about ethics as this response to aporia, an experience of absolute undecidability. If we knew what to do, then there would be no ethics. Just as the giving of gifts or the offering of hospitality are tainted if

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing they are calculated for rational self-interest, so does Jones suggest that business ethics (if it is to become something more than ‘strategic’) must unsettle its relation to various Others. It must be uncomfortable if it is to be worth something. John Roberts’s paper ‘The Manufacture of Corporate Social Responsibility’ is similarly concerned not simply to assume that business is somehow unethical but rather to evaluate the current enthusiasm for corporate social responsibility and its productive possibilities. Again using arguments derived from Levinas, Roberts tries to avoid the easy condemnations of corporate cynicism and self-interest, and instead explores the more progressive possibilities of what a word such as ‘responsibility’ might mean. The problem, he argues, is not that there is no ethics in the boardroom but that it is an ethics that is usually distanced in time and space from the consequences of actions. Because of this, it becomes difficult to see how those who are ‘encrusted’ within the corporate body can respond to others who are effected and affected by their actions. The routinization of ethics through codes, or its surveillance through performance indicators, looks as if it addresses the problem when it actually exacerbates the separation of actions from consequences. In some way then, it is the insulation of persons that encourages the sorts of utilitarianism which Levinas, and Roberts, are not inclined to call ethics at all. And if we cannot do justice to the other who is near to us, then how can we develop a sensibility that encourages political justice for all those others who are far from us? The paper by Ren´e ten Bos is also concerned to diagnose the ways in which business ethics achieves a form of distancing from the world, and hence achieves a kind of comfort of the kind that Jones suggested was so dangerous. Ten Bos suggests that the greatest enemy of busy protestants is a melancholic understanding of the world as a pointless series of moves and codes. Such an attitude is potentially paralysing, and the response for those who wish to organize the world (whether managerial utopians or more radical ones) is to build strong versions of accounting that can include the movements of capital and labour as well as arrange a series of proper ethical responses to such a world. The accounting of business ethics hence sets itself against melancholia. Further, following arguments from Walter Benjamin, ten Bos argues that a noble melancholy is the essence of a critical attitude—an attitude that deals with the world for what it is, and not what ethicists claim that it should be. As with Roberts, this paper seems to suggest that business ethics is a defensive response. The threat of catastrophe, of meaninglessness and disorder, provokes the will to order and hence the demand for a clear ethics that can place the self in a transparent relation to a troubling world. Nick Crossley’s ‘Even Newer Social Movements?’ is concerned with one of the most explicit threats to the order of contemporary managerialism—the anti-corporate protests that I referred to earlier. Crossley, in sociological rather than philosophical fashion, asks us to

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker consider whether we can treat the current dizzying range of protests as something like a new social movement. In other words, is it an example of a new form of lifestyle and identity politics, rather than an outgrowth of the class politics of older social movements? His answer is both yes and no, but in getting there he makes splendid use of the work of Jurgen ¨ Habermas, particularly with reference to notions of legitimacy crises. Most importantly, he uses Habermas to situate anti-corporate politics within the context of neo-liberalism and as a response to genuine present grievances. Habermas’s pragmatic neo-Kantianism is particularly useful in the context of this special issue, since (like Rawls’s work) it is an exemplary demonstration of the way in which a particular ethical commitment (to the ideal speech situation) can be re-staged as a political analysis of the blockages to genuine democracy. Although Habermas can easily be criticized as an example of the systematizing tendencies of ‘grand theory’, Crossley has done a valuable job in showing where his work can be applied, as well as its potential weaknesses. Edward Wray-Bliss concludes the issue with a look at a different formulation of politics—the relation between the researcher and the researched. Just as Roberts and Jones argue that ethical decisions and relations in organizations should not be encrusted or effaced, so WrayBliss suggests that this is also an ever-present danger for academic research. Taking the emergent field of Critical Management Studies as his text, Wray-Bliss makes a compelling argument for greater reflexivity and honesty about the processes that lead to the construction of ‘critical’ accounts of organization. It is, after all, easy enough for academics to claim that they are committed to certain ethical and political goals, but unless they embody these ideas in their research practices they run the risk of merely reproducing relations of power and not changing them. Wray-Bliss uses some of his own interview transcript material to show how preferred interpretative frameworks can easily erase any sense of the fragile co-construction of what counts for knowledge about management and organizing. In throwing down the gauntlet to ‘critical’ academics in this way, Wray-Bliss reminds us that texts such as this one that you are reading are political too—in the sense not only that their content uses the word ‘politics’, but that academic journals literally re-produce power/ knowledge conventions that are, to all intents and purposes, exclusionary. In pointing to a more reflexive, or perhaps dialectical, research relationship, Wray-Bliss is also pointing to the very real limits of special issues on ‘Ethics, Politics and Organizing’. These six papers do not add up to anything like a shared diagnosis of ‘what is to be done’ about the political and ethical problems of organizing, but they all explore uncommon ways of asking questions about organizing and provide some new resources with which to ask those questions. Business and management are absolutely central elements in the construction of the modern world. At present, and despite broad

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Organization 10(2) Ethics, Politics and Organizing unease, the existence of rigid disciplinary boundaries, right-wing ideological commitments and naked self-interest means that relatively few management academics are asking awkward questions that challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpin the massive inequalities of globalizing market managerialism. I hope that these papers might begin to provide some alternative ways of thinking, and then perhaps even catalyse the actions that might follow from such thought. After all, why else would anyone write about politics and ethics?

Notes 1

The strikethrough on the section headings is an allusion to Heidegger and Derrida’s strategy of leaving a term ‘under erasure’—that is to say, attempting to erase it for tactical reasons while acknowledging that the word, and the idea, are always still there. 2 I choose here not to consider the term ‘morality’ in any detail, though I assume that this word refers to everyday practices that are concerned with accounts of good and bad behaviour. That is to say, ethics is the study of morality. For more discussion of the implications of this argument, see Parker (1998) and Jones in this issue. 3 See, for well-known examples, the writings of Elias, Giddens, Bourdieu, Lockwood, Archer, Mouzelis and so on. 4 For more detailed and properly cited exploration of the contents of business ethics, see Parker (2003). 5 My apologies from now on for the undignified way in which I am rushing through the complex ideas of some very interesting thinkers. My intention here is to make a general argument, not to explain or argue the merits of various forms of ethical and political argument. There are plenty of texts that already do this—try Singer (1993) on ethics or Barry (1995) on politics. 6 Foucault suggests that modern senses of critical thought derive their genealogy from questions about ‘who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relation to power’, whereas the ‘analytics of truth’ that shaped Western philosophy are about decontextualized reasoning (2001: 170). Or, to put it another way, logos loses its subordinate relation to rhetoric and becomes a dominant term. 7 For communitarian critiques of management, see MacIntyre (1981); on political economy, see Brown (1990: 177 passim). For a general review, see Horton and Mendus (1994); for applications to management see Mangham (1995) and the responses that follow. 8 Not, I hasten to add, that these are the only significant ideas. There are plenty of examples of feminist, green and post-colonial political philosophy which can and should be added to my trinity of famous men. 9 All the papers were presented, in earlier forms, at an ESRC seminar in Stoke on Trent in May 2001. Thanks to Hugh Willmott and Irena Grugulis who got the grant, and hence funded the seminar.

References Aristotle (1980) The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Introduction: Ethics, Politics and Organizing Martin Parker Arrington, R. (1998) Western Ethics: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Barry, N. (1995) An Introduction to Modern Political Theory, 3rd edn. London: Macmillan. Bronner, S., ed. (1997) Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader. London: Routledge. Brown, A. (1990) Modern Political Philosophy. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2001) Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Horton, J. and Mendus, S. (1994) After MacIntyre. Oxford: Polity. Kant, I. (1964) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Machiavelli, N. (1999) The Prince. London: Penguin. MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue. London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, A. (1989) A Short History of Ethics. London: Routledge. Mangham, I. (1995) ‘MacInytre and the Manager’, Organisation 2(2): 181–204. Mulhall, S. and Swift, A. (1992) Liberals and Communitarians. Oxford: Blackwell. Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. Parker, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: Ethics, the Very Idea?’, in M. Parker (ed.) Ethics and Organizations, pp. 1–13. London: Sage. Parker, M., ed. (2002a) Utopia and Organisation. Oxford: Blackwell. Parker, M. (2002b) Against Management. Oxford: Polity. Parker, M. (2003) ‘Business, Ethics and Business Ethics: Critical Theory and Negative Dialectics’, in M. Alvesson and H. Willmott (eds) Critical Management Studies, 2nd edn. London: Sage. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sandel, M. (1982) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sandel, M. (1997) ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self’, in S. Bronner (ed.) Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader, pp. 73–84. London: Routledge. Simon, R., ed. (2002) Social and Political Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Singer, P., ed. (1993) A Companion to Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Vattimo, G. (1992) The Transparent Society. Oxford: Polity.

Martin Parker is Professor of Social and Organizational Theory in the Department of Management at the University of Keele. His writing is usually concerned with organizational theory and the sociology of culture. His most recent books are Organisational Culture and Identity (Sage, 2000) and Against Management (Polity, 2002), as well as some edited or co-edited books—Science Fiction and Organisation (Routledge, 2001), The Age of Anxiety (Blackwell, 2001) and Utopia and Organisation (Blackwell, 2002). Address: Department of Management, University of Keele, Newcastle-under-Lyme, North Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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