Ethics as Critical Practice: The “Pentagon Papers”,Deciding Responsibly,Truth-telling,and the Unsettling of Organizational Morality

Introduction

… ethics becomes then the principle of morality’s anxiety, that which unsettles it. (Gros, 2005: 532)

Moral philosophy has been mined by students of organization and management to supply the field with normative foundations for warranting judgments about the ethics of practice (e.g. Steinmann and Scherer, 2000). It has also been invoked to justify the introduction, or explication, of rules, procedures and guidelines (e.g. ethical codes) for practice (e.g. Bowie, 1999). In contrast, empirical studies have treated ethics and morality as “objective realities to be investigated” (Jackall, 2010: 2); they have focused on the institutionalization of morality in organizational practices (e.g. Jackall, 2010; Ortmann 2010) and have accounted for the “doing” of morality by organizational actors (e.g. Watson, 2003). Studies of ethics that are more critical in orientation have inter alia reflected upon how accretions of power, vested in organizational structures, rules and technologies, may establish and support moral orders that impede “ethics” (e.g. Bauman, 1991; Helin et al., 2011; Jones et al., 2005). These studies have also explored the potential of ethics to challenge “professional power” (Randall and Munro, 2002) and to “break the grip of regulation” (Iedema and Rhodes, 2010: 203) so as to transform relations of power in the context of organizational practices. Critical studies of ethics shed light upon how people exercise their freedom and “manage to define their ethical position in relation to their everyday practice” (McMurray et al., 2011: 543). This paper is intended to contribute to this emergent body of work. Drawing on the thinking of Foucault and Derrida, we commend and develop a concept of ethics as questioning and problematizing the morality vested in organizational practices, a probing that we associate with self-crafting and (trans)formative processes.

We conceive of processes of negotiating organizational moralities as situated within relations of power. The practical articulation of these processes may, we submit, effectively conflate “morality” and “ethics” – as in the case of the corporate managers studied by Jackall (2010) in Moral Mazes whose questioning activity was subordinated to figuring out how to emulate the moral compass of their bosses. Such conflation may also be challenged, as in the case which we will explore in detail in this paper: Daniel Ellsberg’s ¹ leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” (hereafter Papers) to The New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg’s act of whistleblowing provided documentary confirmation of the extent of US involvement in Vietnam that had been denied by successive administrations. In revealing “ineptitude, deceit and concealment” (Bok, 1989: 205), Ellsberg’s actions became a catalyst for the accelerated ending of the Vietnam War. ² They also contributed indirectly to the impeachment of President Nixon. Finally, Ellsberg’s whistleblowing bestowed upon him the notoriety of being the “most dangerous man of America”. ³ In this paper we revisit this well-documented case (Bok, 1989: 205–9; Karnow, 1983; Rudenstine, 1998) to illustrate and develop our conception of ethics as critical practice.

“Whistleblowing”, ⁴ broadly conceived of as “the process by which insiders ‘go public’ with their claims of malpractices by, or within, powerful organizations” (Perry, 1998: 235), has attracted a range of interpretations: as a heroic act of virtuous individuals (Grant, 2002; Alford, 1999, 2001); as an act assessable from the viewpoint of professional morality (e.g. Bouville, 2008); and as a fulfilment of one’s duties (Vandekerckhove & Tsahuridu, 2010). Many whistleblowing studies assume and affirm “the principled ethico-political stance of the whistleblower versus the governing realpolitik of the system; moral wo/man against immoral organization” (Perry, 1998: 236). In conceiving of whistleblowing as a practice, we do not presuppose a specific “morality” or “ethico-political stance”. Instead, we focus on the constitution and formation of ethical subjectivity in the process of questioning the dominant moral order.

Drawing mainly on material presented in Ellsberg’s Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2003), our analysis attends to (i) the Pentagon’s organizational “morality-in-use” and (ii) the process of “self-crafting” that transformed Ellsberg from self-styled “cold-war warrior” into the “most dangerous man in America”. We necessarily rely upon Ellsberg’s recollections in this and his other writings (2004, 2010), with all that such dependence entails in terms of selective memory and the presentation of self. Autobiographical, self-reflexive accounts of this kind are, we contend, acts of self-constitution (rather than attempts to reveal a “true self”). They are confined within, as well as enabled by, a (confessional / debunking / record-straightening) discourse, and by the necessarily limited capacity of subjects to give a full account of themselves (see Butler, 2005). ⁵ With this in mind, we stress that our analysis is not intended to reveal the “real Ellsberg” (Small, 2003). Consistent with a focus on practices (rather than intentions), we leave behind a notion of the autonomous self that is assumed in many (e.g. humanistic) forms of analysis (see Willmott, 1998). For us, “Ellsberg” is not a unified entity to be represented but, rather, the name for a “site of a multiplicity of practices and labours” (Rabinow and Rose, 2003: xx) which invites analysis. Methodologically, our approach might best be characterized as “an exploration of philosophical issues through empirical material” (Law, 1996: 283).

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. We first explicate our key distinction between morality and ethics before illustrating it briefly by reference to Jackall’s Moral Mazes. Next we situate our approach in the context of contributions of practice theory to analyses of organizing, and especially to the study of “ethics as practice”. We then consider central elements of the “prescriptive ensemble” (Foucault, 1986: 25) in which Ellsberg was embedded before tracing how an engagement in specific practices generates a shifting relationship of the self to the prevailing moral order(s). With regard to Ellsberg’s breaching of the rule/oath of secrecy, we explore how the constitution of ethical subjectivity (that is, the becoming of a responsible self) involves “going through the ordeal of the undecidable” (Derrida, 1992: 24) in which the ethical subject “invents” him/herself in the practice of making decisions beyond rules. Finally, we elaborate our understanding of “ethics as critical practice” by relating Ellsberg’s leaking of the Papers to parrhesia – that is, “the ethics of truth-telling as an action which is risky and free” (Foucault, 2010: 66). Overall, our purpose is to develop and promote an alternative, postfoundationalist way of conceiving of, and studying, ethics as a critical practice of questioning and problematizing moral orders and the moral rules-in-use in organizational contexts. We thereby open up an appreciation of how human beings may enact their freedom in a considered way and constitute themselves as ethical subjects in relation to organizational demands.

Morality and Ethics

The terms “morality” and “ethics” are often used interchangeably (e.g. Kelemen and Peltonen, 2001). In the post-structuralist thinking of Derrida and Foucault, which we engage to explicate our conception of ethics as critical practice, this distinction is key. Their respective positions can be traced back to radically different – or even opposed – sources: Levinas in Derrida’s case, and Nietzsche in Foucault’s case. What they share, and what we attend to here, is a refusal to identify ethics with morality or moral law (Ziarek, 2001).

Derrida invites us to understand ethics in terms of our relations to the other. In appreciating Levinas’s “anarchic responsibility [which] is based on the affirmation of the irreducible alterity and the asymmetry of the other” (Ziarek, 2001: 8), he declines to locate ethics in rules and laws or in an autonomous subject. Instead, for Derrida, ethics issues from our infinite obligation to respond to the Other. ⁶ To be clear, an insistence on the distinction of “morality” and “ethics” does not imply a rejection of rules and laws. But it does make possible an affirmation of the ethicality of deconstructive questioning and problematizing of the self-evident authority of institutionalized morality and “systems of regulated and coded prescriptions” (Derrida, 1992: 22), including corporate and professional “codes of ethics”. Such questioning is “ethical” insofar as it opens a space for increasing responsibility and justice in relation to the other (see Caputo, 1993; Howells, 1999; Jones, 2003; Keenan, 1997).

Central for Derrida’s conception of ethics is the understanding of “undecidability” as a condition of possibility of politics and ethics (Derrida, 1996) and the situating of decisions in the (aporetic) space between the generality of the rule, a norm or an imperative, and the singularity of the unique situation. For Derrida, ethical or responsible decisions cannot be reduced to the application of a rule, whatever its legitimacy may be. Only if a decision departs from, or dislocates, the programme, Derrida contends, is it properly a decision. “The decision must not follow, must not simply unfold the programme” (Derrida, 2000: 38).

In ‘Force of Law’ (1992), Derrida gives the example of the decision of a judge who is expected to exercise judgement, and not just apply the law. Derrida here reveals the aporetic character of (responsible) decisions. Such decisions presuppose “undecidability”, ⁷ otherwise there would be no decision, involving judgement, but a calculation leading to programmable and predictable results. Such decisions must refer to the (moral) law and break it in the light of the singular situation. For a decision to be “just and responsible”, Derrida writes, it must “be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy it or reinvent or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case” (Derrida, 1992: 23, emphasis added). Being regulated is necessary, as without the background presence of rules and norms there would be arbitrary decisionism based on a misconceived sense of “autonomy” which consists in “giving oneself one’s law” (Derrida, 2000: 38). Finally, such responsible decisions rely on knowledge, in fact, they demand to “try and know the maximum” (2000: 40), but justice and the responsible decision cannot wait; it cannot furnish itself with infinite information. There is an aporia, which requires a “decision of urgency and precipitation, acting in the night of non-knowledge and non-rule” (Derrida, 1992: 26).

Ethics is the actualization of one’s responsibility in specific contexts under conditions of undecidablity (Clegg et al., 2007b; Weiskopf, 2004). Such responsibility emerges from answering or responding to the other and implies three modalities that are “enveloped and implied in one another” (Derrida, 1997: 250). One “answers for self” (for what one is, says, does), one “responds to the other” (that is, one responds to the question, call, request of the other) and one answers “before the other” or “before the law” (a court, a jury, an agency authorized to represent the other legitimately) (1997: 250–2, original emphasis).

Turning to Foucault, a “profound Nietzscheanism” (Deleuze, 1998; Bardon & Josserand, 2010), coupled to an abiding concern with freedom, is evident in his understanding of “morality” and “ethics”. Foucault’s Nietzscheanism is apparent in his appreciation of the historicity of normative concepts and their emergence (Entstehung) within relations of force. Indeed, Foucault was inspired by “the idea of reactivating the project of a ‘genealogy of morality’ … by tracing the lines of transformation of what one might call ‘moral technologies’” (Foucault, 1991: 74). With regard to freedom, Foucault problematizes the disciplinary technologies that inter alia make human beings “subjects”, impose normative orientations on them and bind them to constructed identities by conscience and self-knowledge (Foucault, 1977, 1982). More broadly, Foucault’s genealogical studies destabilize the “normative matrices of behaviour” (Foucault, 2010: 4) in a manner that points to a space for reconsidering and reinventing our relations to self and others. In this regard, it is relevant to note how Foucault’s entire corpus has been persuasively read as an ethical project which offers the prospect of an ethics beyond respect for the moral law (Bernauer, 1990), even though it is only in his later work that “ethics” becomes a direct focus of study, and an explicit distinction between “morality” and “ethics” is drawn (Foucault, 1986, 1997a, 1997b).

For Foucault, morality comprises a set of values and rules for action – a “prescriptive ensemble” (1986: 25) exemplified in “the moral code” (1986: 25) – that is institutionalized and transmitted within and through various “prescriptive agencies”, including organizations. This “prescriptive ensemble” conditions and frames who we are, what we can be, what we ought to be, how we should conduct our relations to ourselves and to others. Crucially, however, it cannot fully determine our mode of being or our response to institutionalised demands. There is, as those directly influenced by Foucault have argued, an “undecided space” which pre-exists and cannot be fully occupied by the “prescriptive ensemble”. This is a space “where subjects decide what beliefs to hold and what action to perform for reasons of their own” (Bevir, 1999a: 358; see also Iedema and Rhodes, 2010). This is also the space in which subjects shape and craft their relations to self and others with respect to institutionalized demands.

In this conception of the morality–ethics relationship, “ethics” is reserved for the crafting of self-relations that occurs in addressing moral demands. As a critical practice, ethics thus involves: a genealogical questioning and destabilizing of current “regimes of truth” including “the hidden normativity of seemingly neutral human science knowledge and expert practice” (Kelemen & Peltonen, 2001: 160); a problematizing of the disciplinary practices which support the sedimentation of identities (Crane et al., 2008); and an attentiveness to self-fashioning that potentially leads beyond defined identities (see also Connolly, 1993; Bernauer & Mahon, 2006; O’Leary, 2002; Ziarek, 2001). Foucault’s perennial (ethical) concern lies with the possibilities of resisting (moral) domination and thereby preserving a space for the creation of new modes of being and relating self and others (see Crane et al., 2008). Crucially, Foucault (1997a: 284) conceives of freedom as “the ontological condition of ethics”, and ethics as “the considered form that freedom takes, when informed by reflection”. The process of self-crafting is not a creatio ex-nihilo but, rather, occurs in relation to the normative framing and the associated forms of power/knowledge (see also Butler, 2005). ⁸

Self-crafting practices are, we suggest, commonplace, but they are rarely thematized. In Moral Mazes, Jackall (2010) observes that managers’ relationship to “moral rules-in-use” is not predetermined or involuntary, nor is it fully conscious or calculating; but it is “always complex and most often intuitive” (2010: 13). Corporate managers are shown to inhabit a “polycentric world that [they] often find troubling, ambiguous and anxiety-laden” (2010: 13). Read through the lens commended by Derrida and Foucault, as briefly outlined above and developed below, this ambiguity and anxiety is indicative of how managers wrestle with the practical impossibility of completely conflating morality and ethics. Moral Mazes also indirectly illustrates how freedom, as the ontological condition of ethics, allows, and indeed necessitates, the making of decisions. On this point, Jackall notes how, in decision-making processes, corporate managers routinely, but not slavishly or automatically, determine “whether they feel “comfortable” with proposed resolutions to specific problems” (2010: 13), and observes that they do this by making “an assessment of others’ organizational morality” (2010: 13). Through processes of “voluntary self-rationalization” (2010: 238), generally involving an identification with the prevailing organizational morality, managers are seen routinely to reproduce, rather than transgress, “relatively closed social worlds” in which alternative moralities, such as those that prevail in other (e.g. domestic) contexts, are “bracketed” (2010: 238). In Foucauldian terms, the subscription of Jackall’s managers to a corporate “regime of truth” is manifest in how their freedom is routinely harnessed to affirm, rather than problematize, “the moral rules-in-use that [they] construct to guide their behaviour at work” (2010: 2). By virtue of complying with “organizational morality”, the managers act morally by following the “moral rules-in-use”. If the above distinction between morality and ethics is applied to interpret their decision-making, then Jackall’s managers did not (necessarily) act ethically as their decisions took a “self-rationalizing” (Jackall, 2010: 238) rather than a “considered form” (Foucault, 1997a: 284). Within the framing of the morality–ethics relationship favoured here, “moral action” is consistent with unquestioning compliance with the normative demands of the moral order. “Ethical action”, in contrast, involves a “negotiation of the relationship to such requirements and restrictions” (see Bevir, 1999b: 74) in which these demands are placed in question prior to being affirmed or transgressed.

Practice, Ethics and the Moral Order of Organization

Our conception of ethics invites consideration of its relation to the tradition of “practice theory”, a tradition that, as Nicolini (in press: 1) argues, comprises “a rather broad family of theoretical approaches connected by a web of historical and conceptual similarities”. In practice theory, analyses of organizational phenomena (see Miettinen et al., 2009; Chia and Rasche, 2009), in which we include our study of Ellsberg’s whistleblowing on the Pentagon, are demarcated by their departure from approaches that “privilege individuals, (inter)actions, language, signifying systems, the life world, institutions/roles, structures, or systems in defining the social” (Schatzki, 2001: 2). In Schatzki’s influential formulation, those working in the tradition of practice theory conceive of “the social” as “a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organized around shared practical understandings” (2001: 3, emphasis added; see also Schatzki, 2002, 2005). The former – embodied and interwoven – features of practice theory are appealing to us. But, because we conceive of processes of negotiating organizational moralities as situated within relations of power, we question the assumption of consensus implied by the unqualified reference to shared understandings. Accordingly, our analysis relates, and contributes most directly, to variants of practice theory that incorporate the working of power in conceptualizing practices (e.g. Rouse, 2001; May, 2001) and are attentive to the “‘breaking’ and ‘shifting’ of structures in everyday crises of routines” (Reckwitz, 2002: 255; Moebius, 2008).

There are few studies of ethics that engage with practice theory, although they are beginning to appear (e.g. Clegg et al., 2007a; Carter et al., 2007; Crane et al., 2008; Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006; Loacker and Muhr, 2009). In an early exposition of practice theory, Reckwitz (2002) notes that, within this framing, ethics is not “a question of the just, but of the ‘good’ life as it is expressed in certain body/understanding/things complexes” (2002: 259). From the perspective of practice theory, being “ethical” is not, we submit, about compliance with moral rules but, rather, is something of a bricolage of “interwoven practices” (Schatzki, 2001: 3) in which subjects shape their relations to self, others and things (nature) (see also Schmid, 2000). Practice theory conceives of subjects as positioned and embedded in an historical field (see Schatzki, 2001) where sedimented values and normative precepts (e.g. notions of right and wrong, good and bad, etc.) foster a sense of how subjects ought to conduct their lives and relate to self and others, and so limit and enable what, as subjects, they/we can be(come). In Foucauldian terms, such values and precepts form part of what we referred to earlier as a “prescriptive ensemble” (Foucault, 1986: 25; see also Clegg et al., 2007a) that lends social relations moral weight. ⁹

An implication of our framing of the morality-ethics relationship is that an investigation of the elements making up the moral order – in the form of normatively sanctioned “shared practical understandings” (Schatzki, 2001: 3) that comprise “organizational morality” (Jackall, 2010) – is necessary yet insufficient, for an adequate understanding of ethics as practice. If it is accepted that such understandings have a history and that they become established, institutionalized (normalized) and reproduced within and through relations of power, then the study of ethics as practice invites critical reflection upon the role of (hegemonic) power in (re)producing such understandings. ¹⁰

Drawing upon Foucault (1991), we attend to how “regime(s) of practices” (1991: 75) are historically contingent and become infused with relations of power that routinely work (from) within practices (see also Rouse, 2001). As Foucault (1981) shows – for example, in his study of the emergence of “sexuality” – the convergence of certain practices around historically specific understandings (e.g. of sexuality) constitute “regimes of truth” which provide specific legitimate ways of seeing things and of speaking, of defining “problems” and of dealing with “problems”. Power works not simply by limiting and constraining subjects, but also, in more subtle ways, by encouraging and “inciting” specific modes of being, specific ways of seeing and specific ways of doing. Practices are not, we contend, politically innocent or neutral. As May (2001) argues, echoing Foucault, “practices, because they involve our emotions and our intellect as well as our behavior, help to guide and reinforce certain ways of seeing the world and certain values associated with those ways of seeing” (2001: 154, emphasis added). May continues: “there are certain constraints on practices that work to limit disagreement and to foster agreement” (2001: 157) – constraints that are, as we shall show, exemplified in the demands for loyalty and secrecy placed upon Pentagon staff. What Schatzki (2001) calls “shared practical understandings” are, we submit, expressive of subtle forms of power that condition agreement or disagreement and frame it in specific ways (e.g. as desirable or undesirable).

What Foucault terms “governmentality” comprises “the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other” (Foucault, 1997a: 299). Yet, and to repeat, no codified morality or “system of ethics” ¹¹ is able to provide a final or definitive set of answers to the question of how to conduct one’s life and how to relate to self, others and nature. Morality can never fully supplant or occupy the “undecided space” of ethics and so determine how subjects craft their relations to self and others. Within this space, practices that question and problematize other practices we will term “critical practices” (Messner et al., 2008). Taking a variety of different forms, they are neither inherently “good” nor “bad”. Rather, they derive their moral value from discourses in which they are embedded. Acts of whistleblowing, for example, can be framed as heroic forms of resistance to collective evil (e.g. Alford, 2001), or they can be framed as traitorous or irresponsible acts of disloyal individuals. Such practices are, we submit, of ethical as well as political significance when their effect is to challenge sedimented values and the relations of power and forms of social closure which support them.

Central Elements of the Pentagon’s Moral Order: Loyalty and Secrecy

When analysing moral orders, it is important to appreciate that rules and values are not necessarily set forth in a coherent doctrine. More often, “they form a complex interplay of elements that counterbalance and correct one another, and cancel each other out on certain points, thus providing compromises and loopholes” (Foucault, 1986: 25). While keeping this in mind, we can identify some central elements of the Pentagon’s moral order – an order that, in Ellsberg’s account of it, articulates a comparatively coherent doctrine. A central element was the demonstration of loyalty to the office of the president. The demonstration of such loyal service was accomplished through a variety of (self)disciplining practices (e.g. recruitment, selection, induction and promotion procedures) and moral technologies (e.g. oaths of secrecy and “dissimulation in the interests of discretion”; Ellsberg, 2003: 14). Loyalty was also underpinned by the prospect of severe punishment for anyone who violated it. A second and related element was secrecy which Ellsberg (2003: 268) terms “[t]he unbreakable rule of the executive branch”, adding that:

You could not have the confidence of powerful men and be trusted with their confidences if there was any prospect that you would challenge their policies in public in any forum at all … – [This] was the sacred code of the insider. (2003: 268)

Ellsberg recollects, when working as a high level advisor in the Pentagon, how he fervently believed that providing the executive, and ultimately the president, with better information about the course of the war would contribute to bringing it to an end with honour, and so safeguard the reputation and global influence of the US. As a dedicated servant of the office of the president, Ellsberg gladly “put personal loyalty to the president (and to my career, my access to inside information and influence, however I idealized my purpose) above all else” (2003: xiv), including “loyalty to the Constitution … to the truth, to fellow Americans and other human lives” (2003: xiv). Ellsberg recalls that when working as a Pentagon insider, he

… had no particular objection to this. I shared the universal ethos of the executive branch, at least of my part of it: that for the Congress, the press, and the public to know much about what the president was doing for them, with our help, was at best unnecessary and irrelevant. (2003: 43–4)

Reflecting upon the “self-discipline in sharing information – the lack of ‘need to tell’” – Ellsberg observes that his work relied upon and contributed to

an apparatus of secrecy, built on effective procedures, practices, and career incentives, that permitted the president to arrive at and execute a secret foreign policy, to a degree that went far beyond what even relatively informed outsiders, including journalists and members of Congress, could imagine (2003: 43, emphases added).

It is plausible to surmise that a comparatively coherent and totalizing “organizational morality” (Jackall, 2010; see also Willmott, 2012) was embraced, or at least studiously complied with, within the Pentagon, and that it was widely (and un-cynically) believed that making the administration’s policies known to the public was not in the national interest. “At best”, informing the public was “irrelevant”; at worst, it was considered ill-advised as it would invite “individuals and institutions to intervene in matters that were too complicated for them to understand, and to muck them up” (Ellsberg, 2003: 44). Practices of deceit and dissembling were, as a consequence, routine and normalized; and any form of dissent was equated with disloyalty. Within this moral order, it became virtually unthinkable to communicate information, or even to offer judgements or to prepare policies, that might result in a (presidential) loss of face – for example, by suggesting that the war was unwinnable, or by proposing a course of action that would likely be interpreted as a failure or defeat (see esp. 2003: 83). For the Pentagon insider who is assessed to be sufficiently honest and honorable to be trusted with state secrets, making a promise to keep those secrets becomes “virtually part of one’s core identity” (Ellsberg, 2010: 774, emphasis added). This “trust”, Ellsberg notes, “has to be “earned”, before being conferred, by a long history of secret-keeping, building habits that are hard to break, that form part of one’s character” (2010: 774). Such observations, we suggest, speak directly to the “disciplinary power of ordering, categorization and ritualization of daily activities – the regime of truth – [which] rewards conformity and penalizes resistance in order to impose and enforce norms of behavior” (Crane et al., 2008: 302).

The mundane organizational morality of the Pentagon persuaded public servants like Ellsberg that the only morally responsible, and so ethically justifiable, course of action was to engage in practices – of loyalty and secrecy – which ensured that the public would continue to be “fooled and misled” (Ellsberg, 2003: 44). Such knowing exploitation of the public’s trust indicates the depth of contempt for the citizens who, ostensibly, politicians and their advisors are elected and appointed to serve – a contempt that was consequential not least because it “made it easier to accept, to participate in, [and] to keep quiet about practices of secrecy” (2003: 44). Such practices, as Jackall (2010: 4) notes, exemplify how “people [come to] bracket, while at work, the moralities that they might hold outside the workplace”. In effect, Jackall’s managers and the Pentagon insiders described by Ellsberg disavowed the morality to which “they might adhere privately and follow[ed] instead the prevailing morality of their particular organizational situation” (2010: 4). Such disavowal is, however, precarious since morality is inescapably open to challenge and reconsideration (see Rouse, 2001: 196–7), as Ellsberg’s whistleblowing demonstrates. Its preservation depends on what Foucault terms the “mode of subjection” (Foucault, 1986: 27), that is, the way in which individuals relate to the rules and the practices which reproduce or change that relation. For Ellsberg, breaching the normative order of the Pentagon involved questioning and eventually relinquishing participation in practices that maintained significant elements of his “core identity” (Ellsberg, 2010: 774). This included the “pride and self-respect” (2010: 774) that he derived from engagement in, and reproduction of, the organizational morality of the Pentagon.

Working through Undecidability: Responsible Decision-making beyond Rules

Having sketched Ellsberg’s self-transformation through practices that led him to problematize the moral order in which he was embedded, we now draw on Derrida’s understanding of responsible (ethical) decision-making as an event that emerges in the questioning of a “system of regulated and coded prescriptions” (Derrida, 1992: 22) in the face of ethical demands of heterogeneous others (see also Painter-Morland, 2010). This enables us to expand our analysis of ethics as critical practice by attending to how ethical subjectivity is constituted (or not constituted) in taking up (or not taking up) one’s responsibilities.

Intervening in Relations of Power: Truth-telling

So far, we have explored ethics as a critical practice primarily by reference to the call of the other. We now consider a second “dimension” which we associate more closely with Foucault’s thinking – that is, demanding responsibility/accountability from the power-full other. We explicate this dimension by reference to Foucault’s conception of parrhesia, ¹⁵ conceived as “the ethics of truth-telling as an action which is risky and free” (2010: 66). Foucault’s writings on parrhesia (Foucault, 2001a, 2005, 2010, 2011), we suggest, open up the possibility of situating ethics as a critical practice within specific relationships of power and regimes of truth where the “undecided space of ethics” (Iedema and Rhodes, 2010) is filled with oneself.

Discussion

Engaging a distinction between “morality” and “ethics” has enabled us to open an analytical space in which to appreciate how subjects enact their freedom as they (we) establish a “relation to the rule and recognize [ourselves] as obliged to put it into practice” (Foucault, 1986: 27); or, indeed, to subvert it. In our reading of Ellsberg’s leaking of the Papers as an example of ethics as critical practice, we have drawn on two traditions of ethical inquiry that stress responsibility for, and to, the other (Derrida), on the one side, and freedom and self-crafting (Foucault), on the other side. These traditions, which Ziarek (2001: 6) has called respectively the “ethos of obligation” (Derrida) and “the ethos of becoming” (Foucault), are often perceived as incompatible (Caputo, 1993: 53–62; Cordner, 2008). Notably, it has been argued that a Nietzschean-inspired focus on freedom and self-crafting “puts forward the claim of freedom but cannot accommodate an obligation to the Other or respond to any external claim” (Ziarek, 2001: 7). The incompatibility argument draws support from the contrast between Foucault’s insistence on the ethical priority of the “relationship with oneself” (Foucault, 1997a: 287) and Derrida’s appreciation of Leviansian “primacy of the other” (see Smart, 1995). In our understanding, however, the concern with, and openness to, the other (responsibility) is not incompatible with the concern with self-formation and self-crafting. Instead, these are two indispensable dimensions of any critical practice. They exist in a relation of tension to each other but they are also inextricably intertwined. Understood from this perspective, social relations are sites of struggle between (i) who we are asked to be/the ethical demands of various others and (ii) who we might/want be(come) in the actualization of our freedom.

Accordingly, we conceive of the (Derridean) demand (and ethical obligation) to respond to the Other and to take up one’s responsibility, and the (Foucauldian) ethical project of actualizing one’s freedom in a considered way, to constitute a productive tension from which ethics as critical practice unfolds. In this respect, our understanding of ethics as critical practice resonates with Ziarek’s (2001) articulation of an “ethics of dissensus” which “locates responsibility in the always asymmetrical relation to the Other and redefines freedom as an engagement in the experimental praxis aiming to surpass historically sedimented identities” (2001: 219) and the power relations that support them. In our analysis of Ellsberg’s leaking of the Papers, we have stressed how a sense of urgency to enact one’s responsibility emerged from an engagement with various others that led to a questioning of institutionalized normative demands such as “loyalty” and “secrecy”. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of decision, we argued that it was in working through, rather than in circumventing, undecidabilities, and in struggling with conflicting duties, that Ellsberg (re)invented himself as a self that was no longer willing to follow orders. In responding to the “call of the other”, the “historically sedimented identity” of the self (e.g. “loyal civil servant”) is opened and reconfigured/re-enacted. When Ellsberg no longer responded to organizational demands (represented by Secretary of State McNamara) “like [to] an order from god” (Ellsberg, 2003: 69) he gradually reinvented himself in a series of decisions culminating in the leaking of the Papers. In this process, the sedimented – and highly paid and prestigious – identity of a top-level adviser in the Pentagon morphed into the more precarious and ambivalent identity of a “whistleblower” or “truthteller”.

Illustrating our argument by reference to the Ellsberg case, we have shown how ethics as a critical practice emerges within relations of power and is contingent on the development of a critical self-relation that allows the subject to resist specific normative demands and to act and intervene in power relations that are perceived as “intolerable”. In the act of telling the truth, the self is radically exposed. It implies taking a risk and becoming responsible for one’s acts and for the truths one tells (see also Butler, 2005). The (self)transformative capacity of truth-telling, to which Ellsberg (2002: xiii) refers as “the greatest change in my life”, is, as our analysis has stressed, credibly understood not as the outcome of a heroic, individualized effort of self-stylization but, rather, as a process of (transformative) self-crafting which presupposes, rather than excludes, “respond[ing] to any external claim”. Others, whether in the form of those (e.g. Kissinger) who are critically addressed, or who act as “critical friends”, contribute to the formation of a critical self-relation. As we have stressed, Ellsberg’s metamorphosis occurred through participation in a range of countervailing practices that entailed “a crafting of one’s relations to others” (Rabinow & Rose, 2003: xxi), including relations to superiors and colleagues as well as to friends and others. In considering Ellsberg’s whistleblowing as an actualization of the ethics of truth-telling – as action that is risky and free – we have emphasized how such actions are not individualized acts of self-stylization. We have also shown how such interventions are at once embedded in, and transgressive of, the material context of power relations. Parrhesiastic acts, characterized by a personal sense of moral duty, may be both personally transformative and politically subversive (see also Mansbach, 2009; Simpson, 2012).

Conclusion

Our objective has been to flesh out theoretically and demonstrate empirically a distinctive understanding of “ethics” as a practical, questioning, self-crafting activity. We have located this approach within a broad practice-theoretic tradition but without subscribing to a consensus-orientation implied by the proposition that practical understandings are shared. As practice, ethics is aptly conceived as “morality’s anxiety … that which unsettles it” (Gros, 2005: 532). Such “unsettling” of (organizational) morality is evident in practices of whistleblowing that can “pierce the background noise, perhaps false harmony, or imposed silence of ‘business as usual’” (Bok, 1989: 213–14). In doing so, a challenge is posed to prevailing power relations which have established the moral order and are sustained by it. Ethics as the enactment of an interrogatory relation to the prevailing “morality in use” interrupts “shared understandings” and involves a critical (self) questioning of what one is and what one does.

When conceiving of ethics as a critical practice, there is no concern to judge organization(s), or organizational members, from the high ground of moral theory. Nor is there any interest in developing (universal) criteria for determining whether organizational phenomena, such as (Ellsberg’s) whistleblowing, are morally correct or ethically defensible. In considering morality as contingent and power-infused practice, our “ethics as critical practice” approach does not deny the possibility, and indeed necessity, of morality and the associated exercise of (moral) judgements. What it does deny is the transcendental grounding or guarantee of such judgements. Accordingly, the approach commended here eschews the assumption of centred, “autonomous” individuals as a condition of ethics in organizations (Alford, 2001; see Knights and Willmott, 2002, for a critique). It also departs from virtue-based studies that attribute ethical acts to character strengths of particularly “virtuous” individuals, and so heroize them as “saints of a secular culture” (Grant, 2002) “who stand out from the rest of us” (2002: 398). Our approach acknowledges how disciplinary practices establish and sustain “moralities-in-use” and the modes of being that conform with their demands. But it insists that normative demands, such as the demands for loyalty and secrecy that permeated the morality of the Pentagon, can never fully determine human action and so occupy the “undecided space of ethics” (Iedema and Rhodes, 2010).

Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers, a case of whistleblowing that “interrupted” widely shared understandings of the operation of US democratic government, has been deployed to illustrate how the grip of institutionalized normative demands upon subjectivity may be weakened through participation in countervailing practices. To question established practices – and the norms that they articulate and reproduce – is, we have argued, to engage in ethics as a critical practice. Such questioning does not rely upon, or appeal to, some alternative standard or yardstick but, instead, manifests an “ethical sensibility” (Connolly, 1993) that is responsive to the other, and has the courage to speak out when practices are perceived as “intolerable” (Foucault, 2001b). To engage in ethics as critical practice involves acting – as Ellsberg did – as a “specific intellectual”, in Foucauldian terms. This possibility is by no means restricted to an elite cadre of “intellectuals”, as it may include the actualization of the critical attitude in various practices and professional contexts. As Foucault observes,

[w]ithin these different forms of activity, I believe it is quite possible … to do one’s job as a psychiatrist, lawyer, engineer, or technician, and to carry out in that specific area work that may properly be called intellectual, an essentially critical work. […] a work of examination that consists of suspending as far as possible the system of values to which one refers when … assessing it. In other words: What am I doing at the moment I’m doing it? (Foucault, 1988: 107; quoted in Chan, 2000: 1071, emphasis added)

Conceiving of ethics as a critical practice invites a rethinking of established, morality-centric conceptions of ethics, including much thinking about “business ethics” and “professional ethics” (e.g. of executives) (Cooper, 2012). Instead of associating ethics with compliant enactment of a particular, privileged morality, the challenge is to engage in critical work within such mundane settings. When conceived as critical practice, ethics is an ongoing agonistic ²¹ struggle played out in relation to established moralities embedded within relations of power and domination.