Abstract
Guest Editors:
Alison Pullen Swansea University (United Kingdom)
Carl Rhodes Swansea University (United Kingdom)
René ten Bos Radboud University (The Netherlands)
This special issue will bring together contributions from across the social sciences and humanities that pay attention to the embodied character of both ethics and organizations. We are interested in what might happen when an ethics founded in and through the human body is brought into encounter with the rationalized and routinized character of organizations (Pullen and Rhodes, 2010). Amidst what has been dubbed an ‘ethical turn’ in social theory (Garber, Hanssen and Walkowitz, 2000), we focus on the corporeal character of ethics as manifest in an ‘ethico-political’ practice (Diprose, 2002). Calling into question the controlling and rational nature of traditional ethical theorizing as an “ethics that is out of touch with the body” (Shildrick, 1997: 172), corporeal ethics is concerned with ethics that arises from the interaction between people, the embodied effects and affects of that interaction, and the indissoluble relation between thinking and feeling.
Whilst organizational ethics has attracted much attention (Jones, et al., 2005) the corporeal nature of such ethics has been relatively neglected. Although organization has been understood to be embodied, there has been little consideration of how this relates to ethical practice. Even though corporeal ethics engages a “reversal of the traditional principle on which Morality was founded as an enterprise of domination of the passions by consciousness” (Deleuze, 1988: 18) a rational, cognitive and ordered form of morality informs discussions of ethics in organizations. For organizations, the ‘man of reason’ (Lloyd, 1993) has not yet receded from his privileged place in how we understand the structured, ordered and relatively permanent organizations in which we live our lives. In light of this we attend to what corporeal ethics means for life in institutions and for the diverse ethical engagements which are prompted and possibly governed by bodily experiences with social and cultural forms of organising.
It is in organizations that affect is rationalized and commercialized through the ‘managed heart’ (Hochschild, 2003) and reduced to emotional capital. If this management of emotion and identity leads to an estrangement from personal feelings, does this control also alienate us from corporeal ethics? In addition, are there organizational reasons for legitimating only those affective displays which would benefit the organization instrumentally (Bauman, 1989)? At the same time, would organizations be a prime location that one might expect people to come in contact ethically, corporally and affectually? Alternatively, are there strong ethical moves to eviscerate corporeal ethics in favour of enabling the disinterested pursuit of ethics (Du Gay, 2000), divorced from a visceral ethics of the carnal body (Merleau-Ponty, 1968)? Or can the meaning of ethics only ever be founded in the incarnate face-to-face encounter with the other that precedes reflection, cognition and knowledge (Levinas, 1981)?
In response to such questions, we welcome empirical and theoretical contributions that engage with ethics, embodiment and organizations. Issues that may be addressed include:
How do ethics relate to the politics of (dis)embodiment in organizations?
Is there a place in organizations for a corporeal ethics that enacts an abundant force of generosity, or would such ethics become unethical through its impact on the social order?
Are generous organizational relationships matters that cannot actually be organized into programs, rules, codes or routines?
How do these ideas change the ways in which we think through resistance in organizations? Is ethical resistance possible?
Is it possible for organizations to be sites for an ethics that takes one outside of one’s self and into the realm of unassimilable difference?
Can tensions between embodied and disembodied ethical formulations be rendered visible in organisational practice?
Do embodied social encounters within organisation challenge particular modes of ethical subjectivity or objectivity?
How are critiques of mind/body dualism enacted ethically in organizations?
Footnotes
Submission
Papers should be no more than 8,000 words, excluding references, and will be blind reviewed following the journal’s standard review process. Manuscripts should be prepared according to the guidelines published in Organization and on the journal’s website: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc.nav?level1=600&currTree=Subjects&catLevel1=&prodId=Journal200981
For further information, please contact one of the guest editors: Alison Pullen (