1st Edition
Organizing Corporeal Ethics A Research Overview
This book explores the meaning and practice of corporeal ethics in organized life. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied, and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it.
Pullen and Rhodes show how corporeal ethics is fundamentally based in embodied affect, yet practically materialized in ethico-political acts of positive resistance and networked solidarity. Considering ethics in this way turns our attention to how people’s conduct and interactions might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Pullen and Rhodes outline the ways in which ethically grounded resistance and critique can and do challenge self-interested organizational power and privilege. They account for how corporeal ethics serves to destabilize the ways that organizations reproduce practices that negate difference and result in oppression, discrimination, and inequality.
The book is suitable for students, scholars, and citizens who want to learn more about the radical possibilities of how political actions arising from corporeal ethics can strive for equality and justice.
1. The Ethics of Organization 2. Corporeal Ethics and Organizations 3. Ethics Beyond Organizational Patriarchy 4. An Ethico-Politics of Resistance 5. The Affective Organization of Corporeal Ethics
Biography
Alison Pullen is Professor of Gender, Work and Organization at Macquarie University, Australia.
Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
"Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes’ latest book, Organizing Corporeal Ethics, engages with pertinent multidisciplinary debates to expand the discourse on ethics in the field of organization studies. Through a careful tracing of how ethical questions have been previously grappled with in the field, the book presents a compelling account of the ways in which embodiment configures how we socially relate to one another; and, therein, calls attention to the ethical considerations we owe to the ‘other’. Ultimately, Organizing Corporeal Ethics offers a refreshing intervention into many of the debates on ethics currently inculcated in high degrees of scholarly inertia." Ash Prasad, Royal Roads University, Canada
"While there is a long history of ethics as an intellectual topic upon which we can simply legislate in a wholly rational manner, it has also been increasingly acknowledged that ethics is corporeal in subtle and diverse ways. In their book Organizing Corporeal Ethics, Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes have provided a vivid demonstration of the embodied nature of ethics individually, organizationally and relationally throughout all our social networks. This text combines a much-needed research overview and original critical reflections on the body, its affects and corporeal relations in relation to the theory and practice of ethics as well as guiding us along paths that have not previously been recognised, let alone travelled." David Knights, Professor at Lancaster University and Oxford Brookes Business School and Fellow of The British Academy, UK
"Corporeal ethics is a much-needed alternative to the rational-masculine form of ethics in organizations. This became very clear to me while reading the pages of this state-of-the-art book in which Pullen and Rhodes put together the vibrant debate around the notion, tracing its disciplinary roots, linking it to affects, resistance, and gender, and demonstrating its various manifestations in organizations and social movements. All in one book! So if you want to learn what it means to locate ethics to interactions between human bodies, and think it in terms of generosity, openness and care, and how this way of thinking helps to strive for justice, this is a must read! The book is an ethico-political and generous act in itself. It merits to be read carefully." Anu Valtonen, Professor of Cultural Economy, University of Lapland, Finland
"Corporeal ethics constitutes an emerging and important approach to the ethics of organization. The authors articulate an ethics of organization that is embodied and pre-reflective in origin, and socio-political in practice. The ethics they write about is a situated practice referred to as an ethico-politics of resistance to those forms of organizing that close down difference and enact oppression. It is time for a new foundation of ethics, feminist, situated and based on inter-corporeality." Silvia Gherardi, Professor, Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, University of Trento, Italy
"Organizing Corporeal Ethics is an important addition to discussions of the role of the body in business ethics, but also extends further into a social, philosophical and political exploration of the body, its affects, and its relations. This important work will be central to future conversations about bodies and ethics in the field of business ethics and beyond." Gazi Islam, Professor of Business Administration at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France, and Editor of Journal of Business Ethics
