Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy

Citation

Bazin, Y. (2013), "Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy", Society and Business Review, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 193-195. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-04-2013-0037

Business ethics textbooks are now such a classic in our academic field that it is becoming hard to distinguish one from another. They tend to present more and more similar approaches and references to canonical topics. What Mollie Painter‐Morland and René Ten Bos offer us in their Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy is different. Whether you agree or not with the take of continental philosopher, it is refreshing to be confronted to new perspectives. Not only are the obvious subjects tackled (stakeholders, whistle‐blowing, CSR, sustainability, etc.) their wider approach has led them to re‐examine and shed a new light on others such as agency, organizational culture, decision‐making and leadership. Moreover, its chapters' structure renders it easy to use in classrooms. This is definitely a textbook that will be (and should be) used in business schools.

The book opens on a refreshing humble introduction by the editors exposing the aims and limitations of their work. Humble yet ambitious in their will of challenging the mainstream literature with the complex approaches of continental philosophers. What sets this book apart from the other seems to be its critical crossing. As the authors tell us:

This is why you should understand the idea of “crossing” not necessarily in the sense of crossing a bridge, or making a link, but rather as a willingness to take a critical stance, to “cross” positions that may have remained unquestioned thus far, and to formulated a dissenting position if you come to the conclusion that you in fact disagree with a specific standpoint (p. 2).

This sentence summarizes the ambition of the book, and to our opinion every chapter achieves this challenge.

The first chapter examines the concept of agency in corporations. Confronted with the difficult of notion of responsibility, business ethicists try to answer the question “who should be held accountable for this?” Instead of applying an anthropomorphic view of organizations that would consider them as decision‐makers, Mollie Painter‐Morland builds on Deleuze and Guattari to understand the complex interactions between individuals and corporations that take place within a wider context of desiring‐production inherent to the capitalist system.

On stakeholder theory (chapter 2), David Bevan and Patricia Werhane criticize the mainstream approach by considering Emmanuel Levinas's thinking. In this perspective, regarding an entity as a stakeholder is a reduction, a firm‐centric totalization in which the Other is only seen through the stakes it holds toward the organization:

Levinas brings us to reconsider the thematization or totality of codes of ethics, rules of stakeholders engagement, good corporate citizenship, and ethical principles. Instead he argues that responsibility arises in the emergent complexity of the encounter with the Other (p. 53).

For this continental approach, reducing another party to the “stakeholder” label is an attempt to control and subjugate it.

The third chapter tackles the meaning of organizational culture in the context of business ethics, building strongly on Enron's case. Considering the increasing attention that is directed toward strengthening of an ethical culture in corporations through codes, rules and regulations, Hugh Willmott mobilizes the thinking of Michel Foucault on freedom to challenge the general assumption that this tendency is good. To him, “ethical conduct is related to taking moral responsibility rather than simply mobilizing the capacity of self‐direction to ensure conformity with organizationally prescribed norms and values” (p. 63). For Foucault, compliance does not strengthen actors' moral capacities, it even weakens their ability to take responsibility. Acting ethically cannot be reduced to rules following; as Willmott formulates it: it is a capacity and preparedness to take responsibility that should be encouraged.

The following chapter, also written by Hugh Willmott, describes in detail the case of Enron, from the legitimacy of its organization to its business methods and its staff. The main point accomplished there seems to be the demonstration of normality that Enron was displaying; far from being a monster, it appears to have been a model.

Building on Derrida's work on undecidability, Mollie Painter‐Morland shows in the fifth chapter the complexity of moral decision‐making. After a presentation of classical approaches (consequentialism, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.) she shows how moral responsibility and ethical obligations cannot only rely on rules and regulations:

Derrida's description of aporias also casts doubt on the clear‐cut way in which alternative are framed […] Undecidability is not hesitation in the face of opposing options, but it is an unsettling of the oppositions themselves (p. 138).

On corporate responsibility standards (chapter 12), Andreas Rasche also uses Derrida's notion of aporia on rule‐following to challenge the idea of decision‐making that would be moral only by complying to a set of standards.

On the sixth chapter, Carl Rhodes tackles the notion of organizational justice. He uses Levinas's understanding of justice to shed a new light on mainstream approaches such as distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. As he says:

[…] this reveals a very different perspective: one that does not so much attend to whether people perceive they are being treated justly, but focuses on how one might be able to be just to others (p. 142).

In this, Levinas offers a reversal of the pleonexia phenomenon – a greed that desires one to have more than one's fair share – by focusing on a positive, other‐oriented justice.

Analyzing rewards, incentives and compensations in organizations (chapter 7), Mollie Painter‐Morland links executives compensation systems with the broader organizational context to understand their consequences. Decrypting the classic rhetoric justifying enormous payouts, she builds on Nietzsche and Foucault to analyze how they carry implicit valuations that have strong behavioral results.

On chapter 8, Sverre Spoelstra and René Ten Bos offer an interesting take on leadership. Willing to face the “Hitler problem”, they try to offer an understanding of leadership that does not imply that leaders are inherently moral:

In other words, what some leadership scholars portray as leadership is rarely a description of the way business leaders actually behave. Instead, it offers images of the way leadership ought to look (p. 182).

To understand this tendency, they build on Slavoj Zizek who explains how leadership inherently has to encompass a moral component.

Whistle‐blowing is also a complex moral issue. Building on Jonas's work on responsibility, Mollie Painter‐Morland and René Ten Bos offer a wider view than just considering whistle‐blowers as heroic. To them, their reasons and moral guidelines are problematic and lead to an accountability dilemma.

The tenth chapter aims at broadening the spectrum of ethical issues in marketing. Instead of adopting a classic societal point of view, Janet Borgerson roots her analysis within the field of marketing and its four Ps. She puts the question of bad faith at the center of her analysis, using Jean‐Paul Sartre to explore its dynamics and consequences:

Explorations, descriptions and interpretations of bas faith call attention to closures that may result in a process of self deception regarding the contingency of human existence and undermine responsibility in the face of this contingency (p. 239).

CSR is only tackled in chapter 11 by René Ten Bos and Stephen Dunne. Yet surprising, this shows how much this book challenges the canonical approach to business ethics. Instead of focusing on “how much” CSR is necessary, they focus on the role questioning could play in the CSR debate. Building on Heidegger's work, they show how destructive questioning would be of value in this. René Ten Bos then continues to challenge canonical topics such as sustainability (chapter 13 with David Bevan) with Latour and globalization (chapter 14) with Nancy's notion of mondialization and Sloterdijk's notion of sphere.

Business Ethics and Continental Philosophy is an important book on several levels. On a personal level, the reader will find many insights to deepen his/her reflections and offer new points of view. For scholars, it brings a new set of ideas to strengthen one's analysis on ethical issues. Moreover, teachers (and their students) will find in it a perfect textbook to examine both mainstreams approaches and a continental perspective on them. There are many other potential uses for this brilliant book but, as Mollie Painter‐Morland and René Ten Bos say in the introduction, “reading books is a uniquely personal activity” (p. 1).