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Business Ethics Quarterly Special Issue on: Organizational Ethics of Life and Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2022

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Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 510 - 515
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Business Ethics

[N]ow that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.

Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

I have such a feeling of solidarity with everything alive that it does not seem to me important to know where the individual ends or begins.

Albert Einstein, Letter of October 1944 to Mrs. Born, in J. Berger Photocopies: Encounters (1997: 72)

Guest Editors

Mar Pérezts, Emlyon Business School; OCE Research Centre

Marianna Fotaki, Warwick Business School

Yuliya Shymko, Audencia Business School

Gazi Islam, Grenoble Ecole de Management; IREGE

Overview

A fundamental question of organizational ethics revolves around how life and death are collectively organized (Elias, Reference Elias1985; Agamben, Reference Agamben1998). Life and death do not just “happen”; they have specific, socially embedded modes of realization and depend on social processes of justification. The social organization of life and death poses ethical questions of whether, when, and how (business) organizations take part in and shape matters of living and dying (Banerjee, Reference Banerjee2006, Reference Banerjee2008; Le Theule, Lambert, & Morales, Reference Le Theule, Lambert and Morales2020; Punch, Reference Punch2000; Reedy & Learmonth, Reference Reedy and Learmonth2011).

Usually taken for granted and rarely interrogated, questions of life and death have suddenly become topics of near-universal discussion in the light of global disruptions caused by social, economic and political upheavals, including the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, economic recession, famine, and ongoing and new wars. These give rise to life-threatening processes of forced migration and refugee crises, public health threats (COVID-19, access to vaccines and other forms of care), and have significant environmental ramifications (global warming, mass extinction, toxic and nuclear pollution). Consequently, as organizational ethics scholars, we must examine how our ideas operate within complex social and natural worlds, for what ends, and which support they render to different forms of being and of living.

The impact of dominant organizational paradigms varies across social groups and non-human forms of life, leading to new inequalities and amplifying pre-existing ones across geographical and political differences (Biehl, Reference Biehl2005; Bauman, Reference Bauman2014; Fotaki & Prasad, Reference Fotaki and Prasad2015). Many inequalities around life and death precede the current crises and are exacerbated by them, including the COVID pandemic (Oxfam, 2022; Shymko, Quental, & Navarro Mena Reference Shymko, Quental and Navarro Mena2022). Inequalities reverberate along fault lines of gender, race, class, location, and ethnic or national identity (Branicki, Reference Branicki2020; Jagannathan & Rai, Reference Jagannathan and Rai2022; Levin, et al., Reference Levin, Owusu-Boaitey, Pugh, Fosdick, Zwi, Malani, Soman, Besançon, Kashnitsky, Ganesh, McLaughlin, Song, Uhm and Meyerowitz-Katz2021). Some carry the burden of facing life-or-death confrontations directly in their organizations, enduring such confrontations on a daily basis. They occur at individual and professional levels but also collectively, as policy makers and citizens make decisions that shape who lives and who is left to die (Candrian, Reference Candrian2014; Mechanic, Reference Mechanic1989), bringing out Malthusian ghosts that many had thought vanquished.

Understanding the organization of life and death requires radically reconsidering the ethical foundations of organizing and its relations with principles of care (Fotaki, Islam, & Antoni Reference Fotaki, Islam and Antoni2020; Antoni, Reinecke, & Fotaki, Reference Antoni, Reinecke and Fotaki2020), collective solidarity (Vachhani & Pullen, Reference Vachhani and Pullen2019; Mandalaki & Pérezts, Reference Mandalaki and Pérezts2021; Shymko, Quental, & Navarro Mena, Reference Shymko, Quental and Navarro Mena2022), accountability and relationality (Painter-Morland, Reference Painter-Morland2006, Reference Painter-Morland2007; Fotaki, Reference Fotaki, Neesham, Reihlen and Schoeneborn2019a).

If the current moment is a “dress rehearsal” for a century of an ongoing crisis, we must begin to explore new imaginaries in the present moment. Organizational ethics scholars can seize the opportunity to examine the ethical implications of such reorganization, avoiding the temptation of “looking away” (Courpasson, Reference Courpasson2016) and succumbing to the fatalist “fantasy of inevitability” (Levine, Reference Levine2001). In taking on grand challenges (Carroll, Reference Carroll2000) imagination is crucial (Fotaki, Altman, & Koening, Reference Fotaki, Altman and Koning2020; Komporozos-Athanasiou & Fotaki, Reference Komporozos-Athanasiou and Fotaki2015; Roux-Rosier et al., Reference Roux-Rosier, Azambuja and Islam2018). Where imagination appears, it is often precisely in the context of global crisis (e.g., Levy & Spicer, Reference Levy and Spicer2013; Wright et al., Reference Wright, Nyberg, De Cock and Whiteman2013) and in unexpected places (Quental & Shymko, Reference Quental and Shymko2021), where prefiguring new forms of organizing is literally a matter of life and death. We might fruitfully explore these at the intersection of ethics and moral imagination (Werhane, Reference Werhane1998, Reference Werhane2008) with questions about the values underpinning moral imagination for the post-pandemic world. However, to achieve this, we must better understand how organization binds our lives together in assemblies of embodied, social beings that are both agentic and vulnerable (Butler, Reference Butler2012, Reference Butler2015). Fostering an ethics of care seems fundamental in counter-balancing abstract, and disembodied notions of morality to re-connect organizational ethics with the needs for a livable (work)life. Organizational processes and tools, including ways of measuring and quantifying life processes, threats and activities (cf, Islam, Reference Islam2022; Pérezts, Andersson, & Lindebaum, Reference Pérezts, Andersson and Lindebaum2021), are infused with underlying ethical stakes that ultimately shape our understanding of issues around life and death.

Scope

The purpose of this special issue is to explore the organizational ethics of life and death, to imagine modes and forms of organizing that shape our relatedness, i.e., how we share the world we live in with others, both human and non-human (Allen, Reference Allen2020). In line with the disciplinary and thematic scope of the Business Ethics Quarterly, we invite scholars from a variety of perspectives to consider the roles of (business) organizations and organizing in the ethics of life and death, as it plays out in light of growing inequalities and recent global phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, refugee crises, the rise of authoritarianism, global political conflicts, wars, and climate change. Such roles can include engaging in the ethics of care and politics of inclusivity, redefining “essential” or “front line” work, managing relationships between bodily health and work, or ethically relating to non-human forms of life. Considering such roles can help organizational scholars reimagine organizations and/in/for/with society by stressing the ethical dimensions of organizing for life. By shedding light on the ethics of life and death implicit within all human efforts at organizing, we hope to foster scholarship on how ethics may be understood as “co-extensive with life in its full development” (Henry, Reference Henry and Davidson2012: 96; Pérezts, Fay, & Picard, Reference Pérezts, Faÿ and Picard2015).

Examples of questions

We welcome both conceptual and empirical work, including but not limited to policy, organizational and individual levels:

  • • What do global disruptions—and the diverse reactions to them—tell us about our ways of living together?

  • • How can the ethics of life and death best draw upon various ethical approaches, such as ethics of relationality, ethics of care, feminist, critical and embodied ethics?

  • • From a normative perspective, what justifications are used to defend ethical questions around life and death? (e.g., Who/what is left to die? Who/what is left exposed? Who/what remains forgotten (including human populations and non-human entities)?

  • • How to overcome the normative shortcomings of approaches that privilege certain stakeholders while leaving others unrecognized (Derry, Reference Derry2012; Painter, Pérezts, & Deslandes, Reference Painter, Pérezts and Deslandes2021)?

  • • How do organizational processes of biopower (Fleming, Reference Fleming2014; Foucault, Reference Foucault2008) and death (i.e., necropolitics [Mbembe, Reference Mbembe2019, Reference Mbembe2020]), necro and gore capitalism (Banerjee, Reference Banerjee2006, Reference Banerjee2008; Valencia, Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018) challenge organizational ethics today, including within the conceptual frames legally sanctioned rules of dominant institutions (Maitland, Reference Maitland2002; Pérezts, Reference Pérezts and Estévez2021)?

  • • What can we learn from studying “spaces of death” such as border zones or refugee camps (Bauman, Reference Bauman2014; Biehl, Reference Biehl2005; Fotaki Reference Fotaki2019b; Human Rights Watch, 2020; Estevez, Reference Estevez2021)? How can we use these spatial manifestations of dying and living divides to reimagine organizational ethics of life and death?

  • • What are the politics of recognizing the dangers to life posed by specific forms of work (e.g., frontline work, Hughes, Reference Hughes2019)?

  • • What are the ethical implications for governance of life and death, including issues of surveillance, curtailment of individual and collective rights, and privacy?

  • • How do the ethics of organizing biological or “bare” life relate to socialized, political visions of life? What are the ethical stakes of distinctions between biological and social life (zoe versus bios, nature versus culture, needs versus interests), and should such distinctions be maintained or surpassed?

  • • During global crises, what are the ethical duties of companies to protect life in- and outside of the communities within which they operate? How should we evaluate the ethics of profit making in situations of life and death (e.g., access to medical treatment, markets in armaments, food security)?

  • • Can temporal and historical perspectives on past epidemics or other deep social crises help us reimagine more ethical forms of work and organization that affect life and death differently (Islam, Reference Islam2020)?

  • • How can the logic of relationality and the shared predicament of the fragility of human life (Fotaki, Reference Fotaki2019b) inform organizational ethics? How can organizational ethics integrate the fragility and inter-dependence of human and non-human bodies into its theorizing?

  • • How do organizational ethics researchers integrate the mission of knowledge creation with sensitivity to the precarious lives and well-being of the most vulnerable? How can ethics research best respect the value of life in the context of unequal class, race, gender and geopolitical access to vital resources?

The special issue is inspired by, but not limited to the aforementioned topics. Scholars are invited to address informal queries to the Guest Editors to assess the fit with the special issue of their proposed contribution.

Submission Process

Manuscripts must be prepared in compliance with the journal’s instructions for contributors: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/information/instructions-for-authors-submission-guidelines. Submissions that do not conform to these instructions, in terms of manuscript style and referencing, will not be reviewed.

Manuscripts should be submitted after April 1, 2023 and no later than May 31, 2023, using BEQ’s online submission system: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/beq. When submitting be sure to choose the option that indicates that the submission is for this special issue.

All papers will be initially reviewed for suitability by the guest editor team. Selected submissions will undergo a double-blind review by external referees following the journal’s standard editorial process. By submitting a paper for consideration, authors consent to be called upon as reviewers. Authors also agree, in the event that a submission after review receives an invitation to revise and resubmit, to resubmit within three months of that invitation.

Presubmission Virtual Workshop

A few months before the special issue submission window opens, the guest editors will organize a virtual workshop (via appropriate web conferencing software) designed to provide developmental guidance to prospective submissions. Participation in this workshop is not a precondition for submission to, nor does it guarantee acceptance in, the special issue. The workshop will be organized in one virtual plenary followed by virtual paper development roundtables that bring together paper authors with senior scholars for in-depth feedback and advice. The workshop will be virtual to promote sustainability and equality of opportunity to participate.

To be considered for the workshop, please send a proposal or extended abstract (up to 3,000 words, references included) to  by October 31, 2022.

Key Dates

  • Presubmission virtual workshop application deadline: October 31, 2022

  • Decisions/Invitations to participate in virtual workshop: November 15, 2022

  • Presubmission virtual workshop convenes on: Monday, December 12, 2022

  • BEQ special issue submission window: April 1–May 31, 2023

  • Publication: late 2024 (est.)

More Information

For further information on the special issue, contact guest editors at .

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