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Ethics and economy : after Levinas
... Ethics, for Levinas, is constituted by the act(s) of putting the needs of the Other(s) before your own and leaving your self-centered existence to do so without the pretense of reciprocity (also Aasland 2009;Morgan 2011;Rhodes and Westwood 2016;Soares 2008). His ethical phenomenology follows a poststructural lineage due to the excessive and nontotalizable nature of the relation that one has with the Other, and equally due to the idea of subjectivity that is constantly overwhelmed by this unknowability of otherness (Brown 2002;Herzog 2015). ...
... The idea of the third brings ethics into a broader social context than that of the one-to-one relationship with the Other. Encountering the Other thus always involves a presence of the third, as it implicitly reminds us of the other others for whom we have an ethical responsibility (Aasland 2009;Boothroyd 2011;Muhr 2008). ...
... They can be understood as the 'other others' or the Levinasinan concept of 'the third'. This takes the personal responsibility towards the Other to a broader social level (Aasland 2009) and also leads to the emergence of a sense of 'justice' that forces participants to divide their resources and attention between their own needs and wants and those of all others (also Rhodes 2012; Staricco 2016). We interpret various dimensions of this emergent sense of justice in RD and how it is used to subvert extant legislation during the events. ...
There is a rich tradition of inquiry in consumer research into how collective consumption manifests in various forms and contexts. While this literature has shown how group cohesion prescribes ethical and moral positions, our study explores how ethicality can arise from consumers and their relations in a more emergent fashion. To do so, we present a Levinasian perspective on consumer ethics through a focus on Restaurant Day, a global food carnival that is organized by consumers themselves. Our ethnographic findings highlight a non-individualistic way of approaching ethical subjectivity that translates into acts of catering to the needs of other people and the subversion of extant legislation by foregrounding personal responsibility. These findings show that while consumer gatherings provide participants a license to temporarily subvert existing roles, they also allow the possibility of ethical autonomy when the mundane rules of city life are renegotiated. These sensibilities also create ‘ethical surplus’, which is an affective excess of togetherness. In the Levinasian register, Restaurant Day thus acts as an inarticulable ‘remainder’—a trace of the possibility of being able to live otherwise alongside one another in city contexts.
... This 'call of Other' is the basis of our humanity;; all our thoughts and actions as humans stem from this 'call' (Gantt & Williams, 2002;; Overgaard, 2007). This prioritises heteronomy over autonomy, and Levinas is eliciting a great deal of interest in current philosophy of ethics, as it has generated an uneasy tension with the ideals of liberation that drove the Enlightenment and our current economic games (Aasland, 2009). Both attraction to Dostoevsky's character Father Zossima, who says in this regard: "everyone of us is responsible for everyone else in every way, and I most of all" (Dostoevsky, 1958, p.339). ...
... If we are to realise Bateson's (1997) dream of the necessary unity of mind and nature we need to dissolve the individualism that drives neoliberal capitalism (Aasland, 2009;; Aldred, 2010). Foucault (1980Foucault ( , 1982 indicted the 'psy' disciplines for their role in the fabrication of the individual subject by the industrial culture's technology of power. ...
... homo economicus needs upsurping with at least homo reciprocans, or preferably, require reciprocity (Aasland, 2009;; Aldred, 2010;; Ferro, 2013). Greed or need of urgent address;; a more ethical way of being centralized (Dean, 1999). ...
A review of the empirical literature on mental health outcomes, when a strict criteria of 'recovery' is taken, shows recovery rates in most 'real world' mental health services to be poor. At the same time trials from a large number of 'laboratories' are showing that very high recovery rates are achievable. This paper suggests the 'lab-clinic' gap may well be bridged by reviewing the philosophical foundations underlying the delivery of mental health services. In the 1930's the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that philosophical confusions by Freud had led him and his disciples into making "an abominable mess" (Wittgenstein, 1993, p.107). A number of Wittgensteinian scholars hold these confusions remain pervasive today throughout the 'psy' disciplines (e.g., Cioffi, 1990; Bouveresse, 1995; Winch, 2007; Heaton, 2010). A new paradigm for the 'psy' disciplines is emerging from these philosophical elucidations, which now has a body of empirical evidence supporting it. This not only shows much promise for dissolving the 'lab-clinic' gap in mental health, but also has strong implications for our ecological health. At the heart of this paradigm is a recognition of the necessary unity Batson (1997) identified between mind and nature. © This material is
... First, the application of Levinasian ethics to the corporation has been criticized by some scholars (e.g., Bevan and Corvellec 2007) because a corporation cannot open itself to the Other and their otherness (Bevan and Corvellec 2007) with infinite responsibility. Furthermore, the ethics of Levinas provide neither an ethics in the classical sense of the term (Aasland 2005; van de Ven 2005) nor a blueprint (Kalmanson and Mattice 2015;Ketcham et al. 2016). However, in this paper, we show that the ethics of Levinas can be operationalized in business, and CV is among the ways it can be done. ...
Global social, ecological and economic crises are contributing to the need for meaningfulness in different spheres of life, including work, as an increasing concern to employees. However, the current understanding of meaningfulness is bound by its normativity and thus does not meet the uncertainty present in today’s work. We utilize the Levinasian concept of “the Other” to provide a non-normative conceptualization of meaningfulness in the context of corporate volunteering (CV) and empirically explore work meaningfulness in CV projects in Poland and Finland. We find work meaningfulness to arise from proximity to the Other and the otherness of the Other. Our study contributes to the discussion on meaningful work in the fields of business ethics and management studies through a non-normative reconceptualization of meaningfulness.
... There seems to be a lack of language available for us that can provide an alternative understanding of trust. Language itself is a language for logic, rationality and clarity (Aasland 2009), and thus language too is less open to ambiguity and risk. We talk of sense-making, a perspective often used in connection to social constructivism (Weick 2001), and often takes precedence of that which presents itself as logical and simple. ...
Trust is a key term in social sciences and organizational research. Trust as well is a term that originates from and speaks to our human relational experience. The first part of the paper explores trust as it is interpreted within contemporary sociology and organizational research, and systematically questions five basic assumptions underlying the interpretation of trust in organizational research. The last part of the paper reviews selected phenomenological methodological studies of trust in work life situations, in a quest for how experiential trust can emerge and be studied in professional organizations. We suggest looking for the “in-betweens” or spaces of possibilities within organizational structures, roles and tasks for emerging, experiential trust.
250 years ago, Hans Nielsen Hauge travelled throughout Norway preaching sermons of empower-ment through a spiritual awakening imbued with an economic and social reformist entrepreneurial spirit. At the core of his message was an embrace of values deeply embedded in scripture but too often ignored by ministers and teachers. Both the spiritual and the economic components of Hauge's message required him to incorporate an educational strategy to ensure his message was understood and his proposed actions could be implemented. This paper explores elements from Hauge's legacy that inform a value-based approach to business education in Norway. Our work will illustrate how the legacy of Hauge implies epistemological and ontological perspectives that challenge traditional pedagogical approaches to business education. The paper then illustrates practical means to incorporate these approaches as they have taken shape in the formation of the Hauge School of Management.
This book contains 11 research papers (chapters) on Haugean and Puritan influence on entrepreneurship, economic growth and development, and development of the society
Research on Haugean and Puritan impact on the economy and society of Norway
En un mundo cambiante que ofrece nuevas situaciones de atención de la salud, la inadecuación de los modelos tradicionales de la bioética está demostrada. Una nueva ética debe basarse más en un paradigma relacional, dónde la intersubjetividad, se encuentra con 'el Otro' especialmente con su rostro como persona única, y donde la responsabilidad está en el centro, como explica el filósofo francéslituano Emmanuel Levinas. Su filosofía ayuda a la bioética en su búsqueda de fundamentos.
Through empirical research on academics and veterinary surgeons, this article focuses on identity and how it is reflected in, and reproduced by, anxiety and insecurity at work. Three analytical themes – perfection, performativity and commodified service – each of which generates anxiety indicates a loss of autonomy as academics and vets are subjected to competitive market forces as well as an intensification of masculine managerial controls of assessment, audit and accountability. We see these pressures and their effects as reflecting a commodification of service provision where the consumer (student or client) begins to redefine the relationship between those offering some expertise and those who are its recipients, partly achieved through the performative gaze of constant and visible rating mechanisms. Our empirical research also identifies sources of anxiety concerns in their attempts to achieve perfection against this background of uncertain knowledge and precarious contexts of the performative nature of professional expertise.
In this chapter the main point will be to indicate the contribution continental philosophy offers to the practice of ethics. Here I will consider the potentially abstract sounding concept of "the other," which has been particularly important in continental philosophy in recent years. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013. All rights are reserved.
Background: Bottled water labels enable the consumers to choose brands that can best fit to their needs and preferences. Anything inaccurate, however, may pose serious public health risks, especially to vulnerable individuals. In Ethiopia, regular monitoring of bottled water quality and labelling practices is still lacking. Objectives: This study assessed the labeling practices of water bottling firms in Ethiopia and compared the values of physicochemical water quality parameters measured in the laboratory with figures inscribed on the labels. Methods: Samples of 11 domestic bottled water brands (N = 165) were randomly purchased from retail stores and supermarkets in Addis Ababa at three different occasions (between July 2013 and May 2014) and analyzed for their physicochemical constituents. The written and graphic information on labels of bottled water products were examined and compared with the values measured in the laboratory. Besides, values of parameters determined in the laboratory were compared and contrasted against national standards and international guidelines to assess suitability for health and to evaluate their legal compliance. Results: A number of deficiencies were identified with regard to labeling practices. The incompleteness of the constituents displayed on the labels was a clear weakness. Only the concentrations of , , , and were appeared on the labels of all brands. On the other hand, ten, eight, and seven firms out of eleven manufacturers inscribed no information on their labels regarding the levels of total alkalinity, and respectively. The paired t-tests performed to compare the values measured in the laboratory and the manufacturer's labeling revealed that significant differences (P < 0.05) observed for the values of. In addition, there were discrepancies between the labeled figures and the values measured in the laboratory for , , , and. Moreover, there were inconsistencies when firms classify their bottled water products as 'Mineral water', 'Spring water', 'Purified Water', and 'Natural water' and a few of them were wrongly characterized. Conclusions: From this study, it can be claimed that some parameters were mislabeled or unlabeled and a few brands were inaccurately characterized. Despite the presence of basic legal instruments, it can be said that consumers' right are yet to be respected. To tackle the problem, regular monitoring by responsible authorities would be helpful. Besides, third-party labeling services could be used to boost the credibility of the labeling process. [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2016;30(2):78-85]
‘Business ethics’ can be problematized in a number of ways. The challenge to business ethics postulated in this chapter entails a questioning of received opinion regarding the temporal, geographical and intellectual predicates on which it is founded as an academic discpline and offered as a putative mode of engagement with the world. An examination of mainstream texts on business ethics suggest that, taken as a discipline, it emerged around the middle of the last century in the United States of America (Aasland, 2009) and draws on a variety of moral and ethical philosophical positions all of which can trace their origins to Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment interpretations of classical schools (Parker, 1998; Parker et al., 2005). Academic business ethics thus draws, predominantly, from one or more forms of deontological, utilitarian/consequentialist or virtue ethics (taken singularly or in combination). These ethical positions all assume the self as the location for an ethical standpoint, or moral considerations. In contrast, we want to outline an alternative position, based on Buddhist ethics, developing the question, ‘What would an ethical position entail that paradoxically cannot be located with the self?’
In this chapter we will focus on strands of two of the distinctive contribution that forms part of Robert Solomon’s legacy. The first speaks directly and explicitly to the field of business and business ethics. The second, perhaps Solomon’s most substantial and lasting potential contribution to applied ethics, arises from his work on a cognitive theory of emotions, or as some call it a cognitive structure of emotions (Ortony AG et al. (eds), The cognitive structure of emotions. Oxford University Press, New York, 1988), and his more contentious argument that “we are (at least sometimes, to some extent) responsible or our emotions and our emotional responses” (Solomon RC, Not passion’s slave. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003: vii). We will suggest that there is much to be learned in applied or business ethics from Solomon’s work on the emotions, because through this theorization the emotions become potentially instrumental or agentic in changing our mental models: in affecting the mind sets through which we each frame, focus, evaluate, and judge our experiences. In acknowledging the potential of this theorization we become more responsible for our actions as inspired by our emotions.
Although neo-liberal economists seem to accept that people live in a systematically produced and calculated state of virtual irresponsibility, the recent past of Central and Eastern European cultures (dictatorial regimes, the Holocaust, ethnic wars, ecological disasters, financial and economic crises) demonstrates the tragic consequences of shared irresponsibility for freedom and human life. To promote ethical conduct by creating a valid conceptual frame for a responsible professional (business and economic) practice, we shall rethink the essential features of responsibility, revealed by the twentieth-century phenomenologists Husserl, Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, Sartre, Lévinas and Hans Jonas. For proving the practical validity of the term, we will present a complex and to some extent contradictory case about the knowing-doing gap in the practice of CSR.
This paper interrogates the relation between reciprocity and ethics as it concerns participation in the world of work and organizations. Tracing discussions of business and organizational ethics that concern themselves, respectively, with the ethics of self-interest, the ethics of reciprocity, and the ethics of generosity, we explore the possibility of ethical relations with those who are seen as radically different, and who are divested of anything worth exchanging. To address this we provide a reading of Franz Kafka's famous novella The Metamorphosis and relate to it as a means to extend our understanding of business and organizational ethics. This story, we demonstrate, yields insight into the unbearable demands of ethics as they relate to reciprocity and generosity. On this basis, we draw conclusions concerning the mutually constitutive ethical limitations of reciprocity and generosity as ethical touchstones for organizational life while simultaneously accepting the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of exceeding those limits. In such a condition, we argue, ethics is not best served by adopting idealistic or moralizing positions regarding generosity but rather by working in the indissoluble tensions between self and other.
In this article research is viewed as a response to a questioning from outside. Knowledge develops in steps, each step understood as a response to the questioning of the previous step. Today’s research is a conglomerate of responses to the questioning of yesterday’s research. Under the current conditions the questioning of knowledge and research is more directed towards the individual than before. The researcher is challenged to answer the questioning directed to his or her research. From this it is argued that the ability of the researcher to respond implies a responsibility. The content of this responsibility depends on the discourse in question. In business management the responsibility implies going into the discourse of corporate social responsibility. In social work it implies to address the question of a best possible use of resources. This question, however, cannot be answered by others. It has to be based on the language of the practitioners themselves.
The introductory chapter explains that every ethics and consequently every managerial or corporate ethics is built on and
fundamentally determined by an ontological understanding of the entity that it deals with, whether this ontological understanding
is explicitly articulated or not. In the case of managerial and corporate ethics it is thus critical to work out a clear ontological
account of what the corporation in its very nature actually is. The corporation plays a prominent, if not overwhelming, role
as a logic for organising productive behaviour in the current epoch. There are numerous shortcomings in this logic with, among
others, significant ethical implications, which, as will be argued, cannot be remedied within the current pre-understanding
of the very nature of corporations and their management. Therefore, the task at hand is to get a deeper understanding of the
very nature of the corporation and its management. The project that is aimed at getting a deeper understanding of the very
nature of any phenomenon and, in this case in particular, of the phenomena ‘corporation’ and ‘corporate management’, is the
task of a branch of philosophy called ‘ontology’. Lastly, this chapter motivates the choice of Heidegger as a leading thinker
in the endeavour to ascertain both the very nature of the corporation and the very nature of corporate management. The reason
why Heidegger’s thinking qualifies for this task is because he is the thinker who is regarded as the most prominent philosopher
to ask both the question regarding ‘Being’ itself and regarding the very nature of entities. Furthermore, he was dedicated
to the project of both understanding and going beyond the Cartesian tradition, a way of thinking that dominates modern philosophy
and, as will be pointed out in Chapter Three, is at the foundation of the kind of phenomenon known as ‘the corporation’
KeywordsEthics-Ontology-Corporation-Cmanagement-Being-Hermeneutic phenomenology
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