A Crisis of Leadership Towards an Anti-sovereign Ethics of Organisation

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A crisis of leadership: towardsan anti-sovereign ethicsof organisationEdward Wray-BlissSchool of Management and Marketing, Deakin University, Australia

A common reaction to crises experienced within or brought about by business is to identify a corollary ‘crisisof leadership’ and to call for better (stronger, more thoughtful or, indeed, more ethical and responsible)

leaders. This paper supports the idea that there is a crisis of leadership – but interprets it quite differently.Specically, I argue that the most ethically debilitating crisis is the fact that we look to leadership to solveorganisational ethical ills. There is, I argue, a pressing need to conceptualise a business ethics that is notconstrained by the straitjacket of ofcial hierarchy – a need to denaturalise ‘leadership’ as the normal orrightful locus of ethical regulation and renewal in business organisation. To this end, I explore a Levinasianethico-politics of responsibility and proximity as the basis of an alternative, anti-sovereign, ethics of organisation.

Introduction

What seductiveness does ‘leadership’ hold for thosewho dominate the writing scene, that they mustkeep on repeating its name in a constant recyclingof a masculine self-image? (Calàs & Smircich 1991:593)

As Calàs & Smircich (1991) aver, we inhabit an agewhen thinking about organisation has becomeseduced by ‘leadership’: when policymakers, criticsand management academics struggle to conceive of improvements in the functioning of organisationwithout thinking ‘leadership’ or ‘leaders’. Leader-

ship, which we may regard as both mysticationand intensication of the more prosaic ‘manage-ment’, dominates the imagination of business aca-demics, policymakers and the public. Writing in themid-1980s, at a time when neo-liberal privileging of managerial self-regulation and market over stateintervention and community participation wasbarely a few years old, Meindl et al . (1985: 78)already identied ‘obsessions’ with, and a ‘highly

romanticized, heroic’ (79) view of leadership in theUS management academy. Leadership had, even by

then, come to be a concept that had ‘gained a bril-liance that exceeds the limits of normal scienticinquiry. The imagery and mythology typically asso-ciated with the concept is evidence of the mysteryand near mysticism with which it has been imbued’(78). Since then, leadership has both enhancedits near mystical allure and come to occupy anormalised taken-for-granted centrality in thinkingabout organisation. Writing specically aboutmanagement and managerialism, but with observa-tions that equally apply to the discourse of leader-

ship, Parker has summarised our current situationnicely:

If we have a difculty, with our jobs, our lives, ourgovernment or our world, then the answer is oftensupposed to be better management. It is increas-ingly articulated as a universal solution to whateverproblem presents itself. Management protects usagainst chaos and inefciency, management guar-antees that organizations, people and machines do

Business Ethics: A European ReviewVolume 22 Number 1 January 2013

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what they claim to do. Management is both a civi-lizing process and a new civic religion. Even if wedon’t share the faith in today’s management, weoften seem to believe that the answer is ‘better’management, and not something else altogether.(Parker 2002: 2–3)

Viewing organisation as if it is a function of topmanagement, of leadership, may, as Pfeffer (1977)argued over 30 years ago, be understandable as aphenomenological construction. As a discursiveresource leadership serves a number of functions:simplifying and containing the confronting complex-ity of organised life; reassuring the anxious, atom-ised, organisational subject of the importance of individual action; and legitimating the positions of privilege inscribed within existing organisationalhierarchies. Though perhaps understandable, the

near-universal privileging of leadership in conceptu-alisations of organisation nevertheless signals animpoverished sociological (Mills 2000 [1959]) andmoral (Werhane 1999) imagination. It is an imagina-tion that seems to have shrunk away from the inex-haustible , epistemological and ontological task of seeking to understand the supra-individual collectiv-ity of organising – the irredeemably complex inter-action of ideas, history, culture and agency thatconstitutes human organisation – and replaced itwith the reductive ction that organisations do, and

should, function as an expression of a sovereign indi-vidual will.

In recent years, the eld of business ethics itself hasbeen charged with reproducing this leadership/managerialist obsession (Letiche 1998, Kelemen &Peltonen 2001, Roberts 2001, 2003, Parker 2002,Jones 2003, Bevan & Corvellec 2007). According tocritics, the eld normally assumes that the businessorganisation is rightfully and naturally subject to themanagerial prerogative, including the prerogative tocodify and enforce ethics for the organisation. By

starting with such views as a set of core beliefs, Joneset al . (2005), for instance, have argued that the busi-ness ethics eld has substantially foreclosed upon aconceptually sophisticated understanding of thenature of power and politics in organisations. It haslargely failed to reect upon how problematic powerrelations are reproduced through rather than despitethe ‘normal’ process of management in hierarchical,bureaucratic organisation. Although the expression

of power may have changed – from overt dominationand physical coercion in the early factory; throughforms of soft domination, including experiments inindustrial paternalism; to the formalisation of imper-sonal, bureaucratic rule; and latterly to the subjec-tivising power of psychological discourse and

enculturation – the existence of power, as a system-atic attempt by managers and leaders to control thelabour of employees, has not wavered. Even thefavoured mechanism for ensuring ethical compliancein organisations – the managerially dened andenforced code of ethics – has been critiqued as anexpression of subordinating power (ten Bos 1997,Schwartz 2000). Through the delineation andenforcement of the code, the manager or leader iselevated as principal ethical agent, and the claims of other groups (be they employees, customers or the

wider community) to the status of active moral subjects is diminished. Instead of being encouraged toabide by their conscience and evaluate the demandsplaced on them by their organisation, or to worktowards some kind of fragile democratic consensuson the organisational mission, ethics is reduced to aprocess of obeying predetermined rules and codes.This, for critics, is an impoverished and restrictiveunderstanding of ethics (Kjonstad & Willmott 1995);one that, in effect, substitutes compliance and obe-dience for ethics (Bauman 1993).

Such is our apparent seduction by management,managerialism and leadership, however, that we ndfew explicit attempts to legitimise or rationalise man-agers and managerialism as the privileged inheritorsof morality in organisation. Rather, the managerialprerogative over ethics is now largely assumed. It is ataken-for-granted responsibility that seems to fallnaturally to the senior manager or leader. Suchvirtual monopolisation of organisational ethics byleadership/senior management is, however, highlyquestionable – as the above, lightly sketched, critique

has begun to show. There is, I argue here, a pressingneed to conceptualise an ethics that is not con-strained by the straitjacket of the ofcial hierarchy: aneed to denaturalise ‘leadership’ as the normal orrightful locus of ethical regulation and renewal inorganisation. My conceptual contribution towardsthis task here is made in three moves.

First, in Leadership Re-examined , I consider thedeep-seated cultural appeal of the notion of leader-


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ship. I explore forces – historical, ideological, philo-sophical and psychological – that have contributedto bringing us to this place of privileging leaders andleadership as the sovereign locus of ethics in organi-sation. As part of this intent, I draw upon writingsthat begin to cast this privileging of leadership as

embodying an ethics of imposition: as a relation of domination sanctied. My concern in this rstsection is to start to denaturalise leadership as aprivileged moral category.

I develop these thoughts in the second sectionEthics Re-imagined , where I unpack the conceptuali-sation of ethics and ethical subjectivity that is pre-supposed when we cast the gure of a leader as theembodiment of ethics. The discursive construction of CEO subjectivity, I suggest, resonates strongly withan enlightenment articulation of the ethical subject –

autonomous, rational, distant, detached, unemo-tional. This is, however, a conceptualisation of theethical subject that has itself been signicantly chal-lenged. I consider the work of Seyla Benhabib andEmmanuel Levinas in this regard. Through theseauthors’ work I explore ethics not as somethingwilled and orchestrated by a sovereign subject: some-thing that lends itself to a distanced, hierarchical andrationalistic relationship to the Other. Rather, I con-sider a conceptualisation of ethics that foregroundsthe proximate and corporeal; an ethics in which the

vulnerability of, and responsibility to, the Otherinvades the self, decentres sovereignty and forces theself to respond. Such an ethics foregrounds notionsof proximity (Levinas 1998) and responsibility to the‘concrete’ (Benhabib 1992 [1987]) other in front of us, but also a profound respect for the heterogeneityof voices and equally compelling ethical appeals thatthe multitude of ‘other Others’ make upon us.

Such a formulisation of ethics places a very highmoral burden on the self – one that, as Critchley(2008) has argued, could seem crushing. This leads to

my third section, Organising Ethics . Here I heedAgnes Heller’s caution that the ‘genius of morality,the saint, the moral hero, cannot serve as a yardstickfor human goodness’ (Heller 1988: 175) but ratherthat we need to create institutions and structures thatsupport the practice of ethics. I consider the possi-bilities and problematics of changing organisationsnot through hierarchical imposition of leadershipvalues but in ways that support a Levinasian concep-

tualisation of responsibility and proximity. I high-light the need for very considerably strengthenedcivil, community and labour groups to contest thesovereign power of the leader, on the one hand, anda sustained critique and reversal of stark incomeinequalities, on the other, as essential ethico-political

developments that may go some way towards com-pelling organisational responsibility, engenderingmoral proximity and reversing the ruinous investi-ture of business leaders with ethical sovereignty.

Leadership re-examined

If, as Calàs & Smircich (1991) have argued, we asscholars, students and subjects of organisation havebecome seduced by leadership, how has this seduc-

tion arisen? What force of character has leadershipthat it has so captured our imagination? Answers tothis question cannot be limited to a claim to thepurely rational-performative superiority of hierar-chical organisation over other congurations. Norcan the privileging of leadership in the theorising andpractice of large scale commercial organisation befully described as a product of the simple impositionof political power. Rather – sounding an echo of Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony – we canidentify a number of intersecting, long-standing, cul-

tural supports shoring up current constructions of leadership. Necessarily succinct given the connes of this paper, the analysis of such cultural supports thatI present here is no seamless counter-narrative of leadership. Rather, I wish merely to signal that theprivileged ontological status accorded leadership canbe shown to be the product of largely unacknowl-edged and unreected upon cultural histories andcultural patterning. This opens up the way for recon-sideration, in the following sections, of leadership’staken-for-granted status as the locus of ethical

authority in organisation.In Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), Boltanski

and Chiapello argue that the successful social repro-duction of organisation necessitates the existence of an inspiring ideological corpus that renders the roleattractive for current and prospective role holders.An important starting point in rendering manage-ment and leadership attractive is the origin story of modern management. Cooke (2003) has identied


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the ‘heroic’ as a dening aspect of dominant repre-sentations of the birth of modern management. Astandard account has modern management begin-ning on the US railroads from the 1840s onwards, aperiod typically presented as a ‘heroic, frontier-extending episode in the history of the United States’

(Cooke 2003: 1896). Cooke’s work powerfully con-tests the adequacy of this representation. He arguesthat a denied origin of modern management lies in afar less heroic past: namely in the management of slaves in the antebellum plantation economy of theUS. By the period when historical orthodoxy pre-sents professional management as just emerging onUS railroads, 38,000 managers were already manag-ing four million slaves in industries important to thedevelopment of American capitalism. Furthermore,these managers of slaves already understood them-

selves as professional managers. That is, they had amanagerial identity and consciousness; reinforced bytheir development and systematisation of practices(such as strict time discipline, the division of labour,the formulation of written rules and procedures, andthe routinisation of labour) that later came to beknown as classical and scientic management; andthere was a bourgeoning professional managerial lit-erature, advocating and examining specic manage-rial practices in areas such as, to cite one suchpublication, the ‘Moral Management of Negroes’

(Cooke 2003: 1910). Cooke’s work raises profoundimplications for our latter-day privileging of management and by extension top management/leadership. From Cooke’s historical research, thetaken-for-granted managerial prerogative – the pre-sumption of the authority of one class of person in acapitalist enterprise to order the labour and controlsignicant aspects of the life-world of others – cantrace its origins to the white-supremacist racism of the slave-worked plantation. By implication, Cookeshows how the discourse of leadership in contempo-

rary organisations is predicated upon assumptions of superiority, which now separated by time, forgetful-ness or, indeed, denial from their original racism,may be traced back to an abhorrent belief in theinnate superiority of certain types of people. Extend-ing such a point, Zygmunt Bauman (1993) hascharted wider processes of ethical subordination topresumed superiors in the history of modernity. ForBauman, monopolisation of power over morality –

the right to codify moral standards and enforce theseupon others – has long been naturalised throughdiscourses that authorise those who have acquiredpositions at the top of social hierarchies. Whetherthese are hierarchies of race (as in Cooke’s analysisof antebellum slavery in the US), sex, class, social

status, privilege or, indeed, hierarchies of formalbusiness organisation, those at the top accord them-selves the privileged status of rationality and moralautonomy. Drawing upon a variety of discoursesand expert knowledge, the rest of the population arecast in various states of deciency and delinquency – constructed as, for instance, too emotional, irratio-nal or uneducated to be trusted to manage their ownethics.

For some critics, to understand the cultural andpolitical power of leadership in present day organi-

sation, we must reach further back than a discussionof modernity to relationships characterising pre-modern societies. Jackall’s (1988) inuential ethno-graphic critique of morality in North Americancorporations, for example, characterises them aspatrimonial bureaucracies, essentially feudalist innature, with the CEO standing as sovereign. ForJackall, the constant attentiveness to currying thefavour of the ‘King’ and the higher ‘Barons’ satu-rates lower level managers’ subjectivity, displacingtheir own moral judgement. Schwartz (2000), in his

heavily cited text, makes a similar critique – drawingout disturbing parallels between the top-down man-agement of morality in the corporation and medi-eval feudalism. Such a pre-modern representationof corporate leadership has more recently beendeployed by McDonald & Robinson (2009: 225) intheir insider’s account of the fall of Lehman Broth-ers. In this account, CEO Richard Fuld is depictedas an out-of-touch Monarch with absolute author-ity, to whom only a select band of courtiers wereallowed to speak and these only to reect back what

the leader wished to hear. The authors regard thissituation as central to the eventual collapse of thisstalwart Wall Street organisation, a collapse that inturn helped to precipitate the much wider economiccrisis. For such writers, the privileging of leadershipin modern corporations represents enduring monar-chical, patrimonial or feudal forms of power, inwhich contesting moralities and realities are subju-gated to those of the sovereign. This is understood





to have disastrous effects for the organisation and itssubjects.

Shifting the analysis from earthly to heavenlykingdoms, Wray-Bliss (2012) has charted myriadintersections in North American society betweenmonotheistic religiosity and the iconic cultural status

of the CEO. The work invokes Weber’s (2001 [1930])seminal analysis of the religious ethos underpinningNorth American capitalism but departs fromWeber’s observation that capitalism has separatedfrom its original religious supports. Wray-Blissdocuments how evangelical and fundamentalistChristianity, liberal free-market economics, andpopular and academic representations of businessleaders have cohered to prepare the wider populousto accept monopolies of power at the top of contem-porary hierarchies. Such religiously inected sancti-

cation of the CEO in North American society isunderstood to be contributing to the diminishmentof the population’s capacity for effective questioningof hierarchy at times of crisis.

Roberts (2001, 2003) is also highly critical of the contemporary construction of leadership. ForRoberts, CEOs’ attempts to control the ethicalconduct of other organisational members from a dis-tance, through for example corporate ethics codes,‘depends upon the restriction of local moral sensibil-ity, displacing it with incentives to conform with

distant interests, even if these now claim to be ethicalinterests’ (2003: 259). Whether well intentioned orotherwise, conceiving of ethics as something theleader imposes upon the populace represents a ‘nar-cissistic’ desire to recast the moral sensibilities of organisational members so as to reect back the lead-er’s preferred image of the organisation. For suchreasons, Roberts concludes that ‘this new regime of ethical business is no ethics at all’ (2001: 110).

Narcissism gures too in Gabriel’s (1997) psycho-analytical reading of the seductiveness and danger of

leadership. For Gabriel, organisational membersinevitably project their early patterned childhoodexperiences of authority onto the leaders of organi-sations in which they work. Such projections or‘follower fantasies’ may centre, for example, uponorganisational members’ narcissistic desire forunconditional (maternal) afrmation or may rein-carnate the leader as a father substitute, evokingcomplex feelings of fear, respect, loyalty, jealousy

and suspicion [see also Sennet (1993) on this point].Gabriel’s work shows how the allure and appeal of leadership, its seductiveness again to use that term,may be so well seated in an individual’s psyche thatthe monopolisation of power and resources by thehierarchy is experienced as a natural and inevitable

order. Gabriel’s critique calls to mind the earlier psy-choanalytically informed writings of Erich Fromm.Written at a time when the author was acutelyattuned to the proximity and dynamic of fascismfrom which Europe was still seeking to escape,Fromm regarded individual’s unconscious subordi-nation to leadership as disastrous for democraticsociety (Fromm 1994 [1941]).

From the above, our obsession with (Meindlet al . 1985) or seduction by (Calàs & Smircich 1991)leadership may be understood to be the result

of a complex intersection of historical, cultural,political and psychological forces – the furtherexamination of which requires us to question thepresumed naturalness, normality and benecence of leadership.

Ethics re-imagined

In the context of such varied critiques of leadership,what may we say about ethics? First, although the

above implies the need for very considerable cautionin bequeathing ethics to leaders, it would be quitewrong to assume that no ethics exists at the level of organisational leadership. I do not wish to charac-terise (or caricature) management and the CEO asirredeemably immoral or, indeed, amoral. As MaxWeber astutely observed over 80 years ago, ‘(c)api-talism cannot make use of . . . the business man whoseems absolutely unscrupulous in his dealings withothers’ (Weber 2001 [1930]: 21–22). On the contrary,a spirit – an ethical spirit – of capitalism was always

(Weber 2001 [1930]) and still is (Clegg et al . 2006,Boltanski & Chiapello 2007) carried by those whomost advance it. And this spirit undeniably carriesmany virtues, not least those of hard work, dedica-tion to task and temperate self-control. Instead of demonising business leaders as lacking in all ethics orvirtue, I wish rather to explore what sort of ethicalsubjectivity is presupposed by the idea of the busi-ness leader.





To enable this, I will start with a brief, broadsketch, which I trust the reader will recognise, of theideal of the leader as articulated within contempo-rary business organisation. The leader is autono-mous and, as we have seen above, sovereign. Whereother organisational members are cast in roles of

varying subordination, the leader is the moral agent;his or her freedom to act upon the organisationalrealm is represented as necessarily and rightly greaterthan that of other subjects. To exercise this freedomresponsibly, the leader should strive to remaindistant from the immediate emotional pull of inter-personal relations and sentiment in favour of moreabstract conceptualisations of strategy, the greaterorganisational good, the long term. Though we mayask of our leaders a certain charismatic or transfor-mative zeal when expressing their ideas, such ideas

themselves should be formulated where possible onthe basis of cool reason and calm rationality,drawing upon the best available models, education,strategies and information – not on whim, emotionor impulse. Through their sovereignty and rational-ity, the leader has control of their organisation andalso of themselves, presenting an impeccable, fault-less, condent and contained exterior at all times.

Such terms – autonomy, sovereignty, distance,rationality, self-control and containment – accordstrongly with widespread interpretations of enlight-

enment constructions of ethics. Within such interpre-tations, ethics has been understood as that which isundertaken by autonomous subjects, based not ontheir personal, sentimental or intimate relationshipswith others but on moral reasoning and rationallyarrived at principle. In this respect, we might regardthe CEO as the organisational enlightenment ethicalsubject par excellence : they, after all, are discursivelyand politically constructed as the most autonomous,rational and distant of organisational members.Perhaps, in part, this helps explain why so many

writing within the realm of business ethics havefound it hard to conceptualise ethical renewal stem-ming from subjects other than a managerial elite. AsBauman (1993: 7) observes,

When viewed ‘from the top’, by those responsiblefor the ‘common weal’, freedom of the individualsmust worry the observer; it is suspect from thestart, for the sheer unpredictability of its conse-quences . . . And the view of philosophers and the

rulers could not but be a ‘view from the top’ – theview of those facing the task of legislating orderand bridling the chaos.

Such an articulation of ethical subjectivity – as distance, rationality, sovereignty and self-

containment – however, is far from uncontested. Gil-ligan (1997 [1982]), for example, has demonstratedhow the privileging of abstract, distanced, legislativeethics in Lawrence Kohlberg’s categorisation of moral development elevated masculinity and malegender privilege over more embodied, relational andcontextual articulations of ethics – those argued byGilligan to be more typical of women’s ethical subjectivity. Building on Gilligan’s insight, Seyla Ben-habib (1992 [1987]) has argued that the privileging of autonomy and abstraction in enlightenment concep-

tualisations of morality is traceable back to themisogyny of liberal political theory from Hobbes,through Locke and Kant. This misogyny is evi-denced, according to Benhabib, in the elevation of interactions in the public realm between independentmale heads of households to the status of ‘justice’and ‘ethics’ while relegating interpersonal relationsand emotions to the domestic–intimate sphere. ‘Anentire domain of human activity’, writes Benhabib,‘namely, nurture, reproduction, love and care, whichbecomes the woman’s lot in the course of the devel-

opment of modern bourgeois society is excludedfrom moral and political considerations, and rel-egated to the realm of “nature” ’ (276). The effect of this has been to marginalise women in the history of ethics and to obscure, more generally, the Other: thevery point or focus of ethics. Instead of ethics con-ceived as responsibility towards real individuals in allof their heteronomy and uniqueness, the privilegingof the autonomy of the moral subject – and the sub-stitution of legal-rational conceptualisations of dutyor fairness over those privatised concepts of care,

love and compassion – requires a distance betweenthe autonomous ethical actor and those for whomtheir acts may have effects. Instead of the intimacy of knowing and relating to particular others, the Otheris ‘generalised’. They are not construed as a specicindividual ‘with a concrete history, identity andaffective-emotional constitution’ (281); rather, theyare fashioned narcissistically by the masculine moralsubject on a model of bourgeois, disembodied, ratio-





nality and independence. Responsibility towardsthese generalised Others is rendered similarlyabstract, subsumed within categories such as thegreatest number or the moral law. The distance fromreal others, which such abstraction and generalisa-tion engenders, is deemed necessary, lest proximity

taint the privileged autonomy of the (masculinised)ethical self: misdirecting him from his moral duty andclouding his rationality with sentiment. Thus forBenhabib, under conventional moral philosophy,sovereign, autonomous, ‘man’ is more ethical themore they can distance and insulate themselves fromthe particulars of other individual’s needs. Ethics ismore compelling the more it can be articulated as arational universal duty or legislative policy and themore real others blur into generalisations, abstrac-tion and homogeneity. For Benhabib, an ethics that

denies proximity and the specicity of real individu-als while purporting to offer justice for an homoge-nised all cannot provide an adequate basis for ethicalaction in a world where everyone is patently not thesame and does not have the same needs, histories orhopes.

Taken as a critique of the ways that enlightenmentethics have been co-opted and interpreted so as tosupport political structures and cultures that con-tinue to subordinate the feminine, the emotional andpersonal, there is much that is compelling about Ben-

habib’s work. Whether such effects can be traceddirectly back to liberal political theory – almost as if patriarchal effects of contemporary political struc-tures and cultures were already there, in embryoform, in certain authors’ texts – is more debatable,not least because of the number of competing read-ings and interpretations of their work. Taking justone of these writers, Kant, for example, it is verypossible to read his writing, as Susan Neiman’s(1997) excellent study does, in ways that radicallycontest political subordination of whatever kind,

both past and present.Notwithstanding this caution, a central element of

Benhabib’s critique of enlightenment philosophynds signicant theoretical support in the works of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1998). For Levinas,the privileging of autonomy, sovereignty and dis-tance constitute the foundational core of enlighten-ment articulations of ethics – a core that has servedas no safeguard against inhumanity in the modern

era. The insistence on the primacy of autonomy andsovereignty of the ethical self elevates the self overthe Other. It produces a moral ontology that putsoneself before the Other, one in which the self standsin hierarchical relation to the Other. The subjectexercises sovereignty by judging what is moral from

their privileged position. The Other is subordinate tothis act of judgement and subordinate to the self’srationality, their moral categories, knowledge andvalues. In Levinas’s re-conceptualisation, ethicsdoes not stem from the autonomy of the moral self.On the contrary, the individual becomes a self, aunique being, precisely by being beholden to others.Uniqueness arises in the moments of realisation thatwe are uniquely answerable to the ethical demandthat another’s suffering makes on us. The ethical self here, then, is not contained, sovereign, autonomous

or sacrosanct. We exist as a moral being – a humanbeing – precisely by virtue of not being self-contained, sovereign or independent. To use imagesfavoured by Levinas, the ethical self is naked,exposed to the Other, lets the Other’s suffering orpain touch and hurt. Ethics is ‘the risky uncoveringof oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardnessand the abandon of shelter, exposure to traumas,vulnerability’ (48). If there is a hierarchical relation-ship articulated here, it is a reversal of that in previ-ous articulations of ethics. Here, the Other has

primacy, and the self is compelled to responsibility.It is not, then, distance and detachment that is thedening relationship of the ethical subject but prox-imity . Such proximity is understood as the sensorial,embodied experience of the fragility of the one infront of me and, through empathy, my profoundappreciation of my ever extending, innite responsi-bility to the multitude of ‘other Others’ behind them.

Folding the insights of Benhabib and Levinas backinto our discussion of the ethical subjectivity of lead-ership, what may we say about the gure of the

business leader? The leader, I have suggested, inbusiness discourse is imagined and constructed asautonomous, distant and self-contained. They arethe symbolic head of an organisation that itself islegally constituted as a sovereign entity. They standat the apex of a hierarchical structure that enshrinesthem in strict superiority over others. They are man-dated to limit the organisation’s exposure to thedemands of internal and external others. Autonomy,





distance, sovereignty, containment, limit – leader-ship, on this account may embody precisely thewrong kind of ethical subjectivity to effect organisa-tional renewal.

Organising ethics

Ending the last section with Levinas, I have arguedthat the formal, distanced and detached sovereigntyof leadership is an unsound place to look for ethicalrenewal in business organisations. I wish in thissection to consider how business organisations maytherefore be redrawn to better embody a Levinasian-inspired ethics. 1 It must be noted, however, that thenature of a Levinasian ethics offers no privilegedorganisational subject (such as the ethical leader or

even the heroic proletariat for example) who mightseem to naturally bear the ethical mantel. Nor doLevinasian ethics offer any easy salvation, straight-forward categorical imperative or formulaic utility judgement. As the title of Critchley’s (2008) engage-ment with Levinas suggests, a Levinasian ethics is‘innitely demanding’. Levinas’s own engagementwith organisation in his writings – principally theorganised atrocity of the Nazi holocaust that foreverfuels his exploration of ethics – places an unattain-ably high moral burden on the self. It is as if only the

pain of an innite self-persecution of moral respon-sibility can hope to atone for humanity’s provencapacity for indescribable inhumanity. This inniteethical demand risks chronically overloading the self with responsibility (11), placing a burden on the indi-vidual that perhaps only the saintly can bear. AsAgnes Heller has argued, however, ‘the genius of morality, the saint, the moral hero cannot serve as ayardstick for human goodness; the substantiveexception, sublime as it may be, cannot provide the formal norm that everyone should full . What every-

one should do must be in principle possible for every-one to do’ (1988: 175). For Heller, although there areindeed good, perhaps even saintly, as well as wickedpeople, they are ‘considerably outnumbered by thosewho are neither good nor wicked but who sometimesact properly and sometimes improperly’ (17). Animplication of this for Heller is that while we mayindividually strive towards embodying our own in-nite, personal responsibility to the other, collectively

and publicly we need to look towards making ourinstitutions ‘as good as is humanly possible’ so thatthe ‘opportunity for spreading evil would be minimal,and consequently the effects of evil actions would becurtailed’ (Heller 1988: 174). Ethics in organisationsthen is envisaged as a political project (McMurray

et al . 2010), one concerned with the structures andsystems of organisation – not solely with individualagency or, indeed, philosophical introspection. AsCritchley has argued, in his own linking of a Levina-sian ethics to a public politics, ‘(p)olitics is an ethicalpractice that arises in a situation of injustice whichexerts a demand for responsibility’ (2008: 92).

There is, however, a tension here – a tensionbetween the innite uncodied ethical responsibilityto the singular other and the potentially, and oftenactually, homogenising and totalising nature of poli-

tics (also Chia 1996, Van der Ven 2006): ‘(P)oliticsleft to itself bears a tyranny within itself; it deformsthe I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules, and thus asin absentia’ (Levinas 1998: 300). In the search forcollective justice, the singular is too easily and oftensubsumed. This tension, however, does not meanthat a Levinasian ethics is opposed to politics(Critchley 2002, McMurray et al . 2010). Rather,politics is understood as the attempt to articulateresponsibility not just to the one in front of me but

also to the multitude of others behind them. Levi-nas’s writings are a constant exhortation to remem-ber that the quest for justice, for the just polis , orindeed the just organisation, arises from and is satu-rated with the primary ethical relationship.

‘Everything I say about justice comes from Greekthought, and Greek politics as well. But what I say,quite simply, is that it is, ultimately, based on therelationship to the other, on the ethics withoutwhich I would not have sought justice. Justice is theway in which I respond to the fact that I am not

alone in the world with the other’. (Levinas 1988:174 quoted in Bernstein 2002: 254)

The challenge, then, when considering how busi-ness organisations may be practically redrawn tobetter embody a Levinasian ethics, is to articulateorganisational processes and practices that may shiftus towards greater organisational justice whileeschewing those that would seem to tend mostreadily towards totalisation or domination. Hith-





erto, I have argued that leadership (encompassingthe top-down authority of the formal hierarchy andthe imposition of a managerially codied ethicalcode) is not to be understood as the means of makingorganisations ethical, embodying as it does preciselysuch problematic totalisation. What organisational

changes and agents might then enact a Levinasian-inspired ethico-political renewal? I organise my ten-tative suggestions here around further considerationof two concepts drawn from Levinas’s ethics: respon-sibility and proximity .

Responsibility

In seeking to understand what went so monstrouslywrong with our ethical systems that enabled theextermination of six million Jews and millions of

others from every faith in acts of inhumanitythroughout the twentieth century and in attemptingto articulate a philosophical ethics strong enough tostand in the face of such proven potential for inhu-manity, Levinas re-examines and ultimately reversesa central tenant of our inherited ethical philosophy.Rather than my being in the world having phenom-enological and ontological primacy, a position of self-referential strength from which I chose toacknowledge and respond to others, Levinas (1998)articulates the foundation of ethical subjectivity as

‘otherwise than being’. For Levinas, the privilegingof the autonomy of the ethical subject – upon whichthe whole edice of enlightenment ethical philosophywas erected – paves the way for an ethics that assignsthe other a position of distance from me, which sub-ordinates them to my autonomy, my rationality and,ultimately, my survival. This furnishes me with thespace and opportunity to rationalise away, to talkmyself out of, responsibility to them. Contrary tothis, Levinas articulates an ethics that does not origi-nate in autonomy and is not reduced to rationality.

Instead he provides the philosophical foundations of an ethics that is sensorial and obsessive – one whereI feel the pang of responsibility towards the person infront of me before I rationalise it, before I thinkabout limiting my response, before even the otherperson asks me for help. Ethical responsibility is inthis sense not chosen by me, it is ‘a responsibilityagainst my will’ (11). ‘I am obliged without this obli-gation having begun in me, as though an order

slipped into my consciousness like a thief’ (13).Responsibility here ‘deposes’ me of ‘my sovereignty’(59). The face of the other ‘assigns me before I des-ignate him. This is a modality not of a knowing, butan obsession, a shuddering of the human quite dif-ferent from cognition’ (87). Responsibility under

Levinasian ethics is not the salve of charity or dis-crete acts of discretionary kindness. Such are theactions of a sovereign, autonomous power towardsthose it regards, and reproduces, as needy and sub-ordinate. Rather ethical responsibility ‘commands’me, it holds me ‘hostage’ (11). I am compelled toresponsibility, and this responsibility is innite. It isinnite in the sense that ethics is not a legalistic con-struct – a concern with meeting a previously set limiton my responsibility. Ethical responsibility has nopredetermined end. There is always more I can do for

the person in front of me, always one more steptowards them I can take. Ethical responsibility, thusconceived, is even ‘to take the bread out of one’sown mouth, to nourish the hunger of another withone’s own fasting’ (56). Ethics is also innite,however, in that I am compelled to this unboundresponsibility not just to the individual in front of mebut also to the multitude of others behind them, allof whom confront me with their humanity, none of whom deserve to be excluded from my ethical regard.Drawing upon such a conceptualisation, what politi-

cal shifts may compel business organisations toresponsibility – such that they have to respond andare unable to deny or, indeed, choose responsibilityas an act of voluntarism and discretion?

First, to be compelled or hostage to innite respon-sibility is not the tax-offset diverting of a fraction of prot to charitable causes. Such carefully calculatedvoluntaristic benevolence reinforces the power anddiscretion of the organisation as dominant socialactor – replicating at an organisational level the sov-ereign ethical subject’s primacy of self over the other.

One route towards compulsive rather than discre-tionary responsibility is legislative. Bakan (2004), inhis widely read critique The Corporation, reminds usthat following a long history of scurrilous behaviour,the legal regulation of this dominant organisationalform used to be far more restrictive in the US up tothe 1890s. Businesses could only be incorporated toserve a clearly and explicitly articulated social good;with restrictions stipulating incorporation only for





predened purposes, for limited durations and inspecic locations; with strict controls on mergers andacquisitions; and prohibitions on one companyowning shares in another. Although any immediatereturn to such a legislative arena would appearrather unlikely, Bakan offers a number of thoughtful

recommendations for strengthening the regulatorysystem. Several of these now seem rather prescientgiven the ongoing unfolding of the nancial crisisand the ideological, even existential, self-doubt thatthis has precipitated in proponents of deregulationand neo-liberal economics (with perhaps the moststriking example of the later encapsulatedin Allan Greenspan’s evidence to the House of Representatives on 23 October 2008). However,although legislative changes do indeed offer anessential route towards compelling business to

responsibility, they are not sufcient embodiment of the kind of Levinasian ethics of responsibility I amarticulating here. For the law ‘leaves out what isproperly moral in morality . . . It substitutes thelearnable knowledge of rules for the moral self con-stituted by responsibility. It places answerability tothe legislators and guardians of the code where therehad formerly been answerability to the Other and tomoral self-conscience’ (Bauman 1993: 11).

An alternate route towards compelling organisa-tion to responsibility is to signicantly rebuild the

relative political power of the others to which corpo-rations are responsible. I do not here mean a variantof those forms of stakeholder theory which, whilethey usefully acknowledge a range of others, stillenshrine organisational leadership and hierarchywith the high-privilege of rationing the responsibilityit deems is owed to each constituent. Instead, tobegin to approximate an organisational equivalenceof Levinas’s compulsion, even hostage, to responsi-bility would require a political landscape in whichthe interests of shareholders and the stock markets

dominating the managerial mindset are very signi-cantly contested by other well-mobilised interests.To explore one such interest group, employees, as anillustrative example, a compulsion to responsibilitywould not be the affectation of a democratic leader-ship ‘style’ or the voluntaristic and discretionarymanagerial choice to allow limited participation innon-strategic decisions when the labour market istight. As critics have observed, such practices repre-

sent more of an attempt at political incorporation ororganisational dressage than they do genuine shiftstowards labour within the employment relationship.

Rather, for corporations to be compelled togreater responsibility towards employees wouldrequire a signicant shifting of, to use Carter Goo-

drich’s (2010 [1921]) classic industrial relations ter-minology, the ‘frontier of control’ in the politics of the labour process. This would necessitate reversal of the orchestrated swing in political power to manage-ment from labour that has occurred as a conse-quence of the continual unfolding of neo-liberaleconomic and legislative policy in the US, UK, Aus-tralia and elsewhere since the late 1970s. It wouldrequire, too, a reversal in related neo-liberal eco-nomic and political policy that has enabled multina-tional capital to exploit global inequalities in labour

conditions. For business organisations to be com-pelled to greater responsibility to local and globallabour would necessitate robust and resilient organi-sations that powerfully represent employees’ andunemployed persons’ interests: unions, labour afli-ations and other such bodies. Such organised repre-sentation, however, would need to have particularqualities to advance a political manifestation of aLevinasian ethics of responsibility. The Levinasiannotion of innite responsibility – an unboundresponsibility not just to this person in front of me

now, but, without prejudice, to all those othersbehind them – would seem to push against localismand protectionism in labour representation: thelatter being a kind of politics of responsibility tothese workers but not to those or these employeesbut not to those who are unemployed. Such localismin labour representation ultimately allows corpora-tions to pitch the demands of a workforce in onelocale against another and thereby continue whatKlein (2001) evocatively called the ‘race to thebottom’ in globalised employment conditions. A

Levinasian-inspired politics would also push againstsome form of centrally orchestrated, traditionally ledbody that comes to stand in for and ultimately standin front of the faces and heterogeneous needs of actual individuals. As Critchley (2008: 13) hasargued, a Levinasian ethics suggests a kind of anar-chic rather than centralised politics. It is ‘the cultiva-tion of an anarchic multiplicity’, and the ‘continualquestioning from below of any attempt to impose





order from above’ (13). So envisaged, I suggest thatit would be through the intersecting demandsand political presence of multiple, well-mobilisedemployee and community afliations, unions andpressure groups that business organisations may becompelled to meet some of the innite responsibility

to the face of the employee. To be sure, such respon-sibility would not be easily discharged, no one-size-ts-all collective agreement is likely to appease,and it is certainly hard to negotiate employmentconditions and remuneration when faced withthe demands of multiple powerful constituents.However, ethical responsibility as envisaged byLevinas is never a task fullled or certainty achieved.It is instead the vulnerability and plaguing uncer-tainty of the subject who knows that whatever theydo, they could do more. In actuality, such a sense

of unfulllable responsibility may be poignantlyfamiliar to business leaders. CEOs are currentlycompelled to responsibility to the unending and insa-tiable demands of the stock market. Paradoxically,this may offer something of a model for a widerethico-political restructuring of contemporary cor-porate life, highlighting the need for civil society toconstruct employee, community and other aflia-tions strong enough to engender a gnawing, unend-ing need to respond.

Proximity

I have argued above that the sovereign, autonomous‘man’ of enlightenment ethics for Levinas enshrinesdistance from the focus of one’s ethical regard – adistance in which rationality and rationalisations cantoo easily replace or deect ethics. Ethical responsi-bility for Levinas is not that which is calmly reectedupon in the space one carves away from the imme-diacy of another’s demands. It is more proximatethan this. Ethical responsibility, as we have already

seen, is conceived of as compulsion. One does notcalmly reect upon one’s compulsion. One is com-pelled by it. Ethics enters my being not with thequality of cognition and knowledge of another’sneeds. It is experienced more intimately, as sensation.Ethics, forLevinas, is more immediate than a thoughtabout ethics. Like pain, taste or smell, which is sensedbefore it becomes a thinking about that sense,ethics isrst felt. The visceral pang of responsibility enters me

not through my deliberations of abstract duty butthrough the face of the ‘neighbour’. An ethicalencounter has something of the character of a face-to-face encounter, or at least one of a particular type,one in which my guard is not already up, my skinalready callous(ed). It is not reducible to face-to-face

encounters however. Ethical proximity is far closerthan mere physical proximity. It is an ‘exposure’ of myself to the needs of the other. It is my ‘nakedness’,a ‘stripping to the core’, a vulnerability. It is the needsof the other getting to the ‘underside of [my] skin’(Levinas 1998: 49).

From the above, the concept of proximity withinLevinas’s ethics encompasses a subtle range of mean-ings: from closeness, to pre-cognitive sensibility, tothe deposing of the sovereignty of the self now con-sumed by responsibility to the Other. In each of these

iterations, proximity is a concept used to radicallycontest distance from responsibility to the other.What implications may we draw from this concept of proximity for an ethico-political renewal of organi-sations? Previously, a number of critics have usedconcepts of moral proximity and role distancing toraise important questions regarding the functioningof the bureaucratic mode of organising (Arendt1958, Bauman 1989, Adams & Balfour 1998, Zim-bardo 2008). For such critics, bureaucracy enshrinesforms of physical, emotional and symbolic distanc-

ing that inhibit or displace individual moral account-ability and responsibility. However, contemporarypost-bureaucratic modes of reorganising and disor-ganising (atter hierarchies, core/periphery distinc-tions, outsourcing, subcontracting and offshoreproduction) do not seem to have brokered greatermoral proximity either. The outsourcing of manu-facturing and assembly labour to overseas sweat-shops and the home company’s tolerance of andproting from the poor working conditions therein,for example, has been critiqued as an ethically inde-

fensible denial of moral dignity (Arnold & Bowie2003). This denial is enabled by several forms of moral distancing: sweatshop workers are physicallyand geographically distant (their conditions of labour are neither seen nor felt); they are legally andinstitutionally distant (on the very periphery of theorganisation, where the home organisation’s legalresponsibility for their conditions of labour isminimal at best); and they are culturally distant





(Chinese, Asian, African, South American – they are‘Other’ than the ‘us’ working in the Head Ofce inthe North or West). This cultural, ‘racial’ or materialOtherness serves as it has in the long history of theNorth and West’s economic and political expansion(Said 1978) to legitimise ‘our’ differential regard for

‘them’. Far more proximate for the home organisa-tion and thereby more demanding of its attentionand concern are the faces of the major shareholders,institutional investors and stock analysts. The sweat-shop worker’s conditions of labour remain a distantand marginal concern unless or until they are mademore morally proximate for the home organisation.The work of pressure groups such as Oxfam, inves-tigative journalists and organisations such as Corp-Watch and Multinational Monitor have succeeded indoing this on occasion.

Notwithstanding the above important issue of moral proximity within the global structures of organisation, it is more local issues of proximity thatI wish to consider here. Specically, I consider theintersections between the rewards and subjectivitiesof contemporary leadership and the concept of ‘com-munity’. A number of social critics have charted theerosion of community organisation and communalidentication in North American society over recentdecades (Sennet 1998, Putnam 2001). In Americanliterature, we see the same concerns too. Pulitzer

prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy, forexample, evocatively speaks to the decline of com-munity in both his allegorical (e.g. The Road 2006)and realist (e.g. No Country for Old Men 2005)writings. In the latter, McCarthy has the centralcharacter, a sheriff, reecting upon modern life inAmerica.

I read in the papers here a while back some teacherscome across a survey that was sent out back in thethirties to a number of schools around the country.

Had this questionnaire about what was the prob-lems with teachin in the schools. And they comeacross these forms, they’d been lled out and sentin from around the country answerin these ques-tions. And the biggest problems they could namewas things like talkin in class and runnin in thehallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Thingsof that nature. So they got one of them forms thatwas blank and printed up a bunch of em and sentem back to the same schools. Forty years later.

Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson,murder. Drugs. Suicide. (McCarthy 2005: 196–197)

Drawing upon the concepts of postmodernity,liquidity and uncertainty, Bauman, over the courseof a series of texts, has sought to provide a theoreti-

cal understanding of related shifts in modern societyaway from collectivity and community towards aninsecure individualism. For an individual negotiat-ing such insecurity, it can seem that there is little tobe gained by tying your fate to others and thecommitments of time, concern, care or solidaritythat community involvement requires. ‘The kind of uncertainty, of dark premonitions and fears of thefuture that haunt men and women in the uid, per-petually changing social environment . . . does notunite the sufferers: it splits them and sets them apart’

(Bauman 2001: 48). What seems to make more sense,for those who can, is to pursue an individualised lifeand to accrue and protect the personal resources thatenable one to live separated-off from others, buff-ered from having to consider or respond to the inse-curities that plague them. There has been, arguesBauman (deploying Robert Reich’s term), a ‘seces-sion of the successful’ in contemporary society: anindividualised distancing from responsibility to andidentication with community and a systematic anddeliberate storing-up and protecting of individual-

ised wealth. Such subjects ‘cannot see what staying inand with the community could offer which they havenot already secured for themselves or still hope tosecure through their own exploits, while they canthink of quite a lot of assets which they might lose if they were to abide by the demands of communalsolidarity’ (Bauman 2001: 51).

Bauman specically names global business elites asexemplifying a process of secession, and we can seethis at work when we consider executive compensa-tion. US government census data recorded median

household income as $49,777 in 2009, with a house-hold dened as encompassing slightly over 2.5people on average. For the same year, Forbes calcu-lated the mean income (salary and stock awards orexercised stock options) of the top 500 US executivesto be US$8 million apiece. According to the USCensus Bureau 2009, income inequality is increasingin the US overall. In the corporate sector howeverthe picture is particularly graphic. According to





Business Week (cited in Flanagan 2003), the averageUS CEO made 42 times the average hourly worker’swage in 1980, 85 times by 1990 and 531 times asmuch by 2000 – gures that do not include all lucra-tive CEO stock options. Whatever moral viewpointsone may have regarding the merit or otherwise of

these compensation levels, I wish to focus upon theeffects of the above for the issue of proximity. Suchincome inequality means that senior executivessimply do not share the same habitus or habitat aseither the non-executive members of the corporationor indeed the overwhelming majority of the NorthAmerican or world’s populations. Instead of identi-cation with and sharing the fates of proximateothers, the organisational and personal lives of thesenior corporate executive take the form of a‘bubble’, a landscape of individualised and privatised

travel and accommodation, where interactions withthose outside of their own elite status consist only of service and exchange relationships (Bauman 2001).Folding such observations back into our discussionof proximity, such social, economic, physical andcultural distance from others has ethical effects. Theconclusion to be drawn, I suggest, is not that weshould demonise the senior executive as callous,demonic or without virtue (Wray-Bliss 2012). Theremay well be, as Bauman argues, ‘no question here of denying responsibility to the weak’, for the simple

reason that there ‘are no weak on this side of theclosely guarded gates’ (Bauman 2001: 61). Rather,the conclusion to be drawn – based upon Levinas’sinsistence on the centrality of proximity to ethics – isthat without the viscerally felt and experienced prox-imity to the Other, there is not the pain of ethics, thepang of conscience, the suffering in the face of anoth-er’s need. Without proximity to the Other, there is, atbest, an ethics that arises as an intellectual event, amoment of distanced and disconnected reection orintrospection. Such an intellectual ethics is more akin

to a gift of time, a charitable moment of choosing tothink of the imagined plight of non-local others. ForLevinas, such a non-proximate, intellectual anddistant ethics simply does not have the power tocompel responsibility.

This lack of proximity between the executive andothers does not, I suggest, sound a call for the manu-factured community and false solidarity of a corpo-rate culture. Nor does it call for a (religiously

inected) organisational mission statement orattempts to craft a sense of belonging through manu-factured workplace spirituality. Such developmentsenshrine, indeed strengthen, the power of the hierar-chy over the organisational population. Rather theconcept of proximity calls for an ethico-political

response of critiquing those developments in con-temporary corporate life that most strongly pushagainst an experiential and embodied connectivitywith others. This necessitates a sustained and con-tinual critique by Business Ethics scholars and othersof stark income inequalities inside the corporationand between the corporation and its ‘periphery’, aswell as a critique of the enlightenment ethical modelof autonomous and atomistic subjectivity enshrinedin such patterns of remuneration, regard and reward.

Conclusion

A common response to real and perceived crises inthe functioning and effects of business organisationis to identify a ‘crisis at the top’, to bemoan theleaders we have and to look to other leaders to steerus towards a better future. Although our experiencesof Enron, Lehman Brothers, WorldCom and the liketell us that there are, indeed, compelling reasons tocritique (and prosecute) particular business leaders, I

have contended in this paper that the more ethicallydebilitating crisis is that we (are exhorted to) defer toleadership to solve organisational ethical ills in therst place. Works spanning the last four decades of management academia (Pfeffer 1977, Meindl et al .1985, Calàs & Smircich 1991, Parker 2002) haveidentied an obsession with and seduction by lead-ership – and I charted such a critique by a number of scholars of the business ethics academy itself in theseterms (Schwartz 2000, Roberts 2001, 2003, Joneset al . 2005, Bevan & Corvellec 2007). In such a

context, the aim of this paper was to consider therationale and realpolitik for an ethics of businessthat did not reproduce the problematic ethical sov-ereignty of the leader.

In the section Leadership re-examined, I began thistask by embarking on a process of denaturalisingleadership as a privileged ontological category of organisation. I examined a number of works thatunderstood contemporary patterns of organisational





leadership not as a natural or technically superiormode of organising but rather as the unfolding of often unexamined and unreected upon culturallegacies. Included among those I examined were thepresent-day inection of the presumed superiority of white managers over the slave worked plantations of

the American South (Cooke 2003); legacies of supe-riority and subordination reminiscent of feudalism(Jackall 1988, Schwartz 2000) and (pre)modernity(Bauman 1993); the longer still cultural memoryof divine leadership and the moralities of self-subordination patterned into monotheistic religiouscultures (Wray-Bliss 2012); and deep-seated psycho-logical patterns learned from childhood experiencesof parental authority (Gabriel 1997).

Such accounts of the (unconscious) cultural appeal of leadership opened up the space too for

re-examining its often taken-for-granted ethical status – and in the section Ethics re-imagined, Iargued that contemporary discourses of leadershipenshrine and reproduce an ethics of autonomy, ratio-nality, distance and sovereignty. Drawing upon Ben-habib (1992 [1987]) and Levinas (1998), I began toshow how such an ethics may be signicantly con-tested as an adequate basis from which to recogniseand respond to the needs of the Other.

In the section Organising ethics, I identied someof the recongurations of organisation and leader-

ship that could start the process of shifting organi-sation towards a Levinasian-inspired ethico-politicsof responsibility and proximity. Among other pro-cesses, I highlighted: (i) the concerted redevelopmentof very well mobilised community and labour groupsas an essential mechanism for compelling a widerorganisational ethical responsibility; and (ii) a sus-tained critique and agitation against stark incomeinequalities – particularly between those of the lead-ership and the non-executive employee – as necessaryto move us towards an experiential and embodied

ethical proximity between organisational elites andthe rest of the body corporate.

To nish, I wish to return briey to the relation-ship between ethics and politics inscribed in thevery idea of ‘organising ethics’. Citing Levinas, Ihave argued that political shifts and concerns (forinstance, considering how one should redraw busi-ness institutions and organisations in the light of signicant and recurring crises) are not contradic-

tory to matters of ethics, even to an ethics conceivedas the uncodiable and innite responsibility to theOther. Rather, political considerations are an essen-tial manifestation of ethics when the intimate partyof two – the self and the other – acknowledges theexistence of the ‘third’. Though not contradictory,

however, there is as an important and undeniabletension here. For politics tends towards totalisation,to subsuming the unique Other within the same andto collapsing innite ethical responsibility to everyone within homogenising and generalising rules, cat-egories, policies or procedures. What I have soughtto do in this paper is to begin to advance a politicalresponse to the crisis that is organisational leader-ship that remembers that its life-giving core is theprimacy of the ethical responsibility to the other.The suggestions for ‘organising’ ethics that I have

advanced are intended not so much as specic nor-mative political goals, inescapable though normativepositions are in such discussions, but rather as sug-gestions for restructuring or reconguring organisa-tion itself so that it may better enable responsivenessto and proximity with those others who constituteand are constituted by it. Even though this is myintent, however, any such political response mustacknowledge that it differentially affects differentothers. Thus, my suggestions and critique in thispaper may be seen as ‘harming’ the current elevated

status and material privileges of our business leaders,even while I am seeking to advance moral proximityto other organisational members and wider constitu-ents. In advancing an understanding of organisa-tional justice for the many limitations of the inniteresponsibility to the one are entailed. This is whatdifferentiates (even a Levinasian-inspired) politicsfrom the innite ethical responsibility within theparty of two. Fully acknowledging and beingaccountable for the particular ethical compromisesthat my suggestions entail, I nevertheless advance

them here as the beginnings of a Levinasian-inspiredethico-political response to the crisis of leadership.

Note

1. One of the reviewers, and the editors, for this paperasked that I acknowledge the performative contra-diction in producing a coolly reasoned argument for





an embodied (Levinasian) ethics. Or, as Critchley(2002: 18) expresses it, ‘how is my ethical exposure tothe other to be given a philosophical exposition thatdoes not utterly betray this saying?’ Critchley iden-ties Levinas’s thinking but also his richly evocative,almost poetic, style of writing in Otherwise thanBeing (his ‘performative enactment of an ethicalwriting which endlessly runs up against the limits of language’; Critchley 2002: 19) as an attempt toengage with this contradiction. However, one canonly move so far in a static text towards hoping toevoke the embodied ethical: the ‘ethical saying’ is‘necessarily betrayed – within the ontological said’(Critchley 2002: 18). In previous works, I have con-sidered ways that we, as organisational scholars,may shift our research practices from an abstractand espoused to an embodied ethical relationshipwith those we research (Wray-Bliss 2002a, b). In this

present text, I fully acknowledge that these pages(though informed throughout by my sense of responsibility to the marginalised others of contem-porary organisation) are at best an attempt to iden-tify, evoke and encourage future organisationalconditions that may better enable (Levinasian)ethics to be expressed. This paper itself, however,cannot escape from being a very poor echo of,or incitement to, the immediacy of the ethicalexperience.

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A Crisis of Leadership Towards an Anti-sovereign Ethics of Organisation

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