Ethics, morality and the subject: the contribution of Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Foucault to 'postmodern' business ethics

Mihaela Kelemen and Tuomo Peltonen

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2001, vol. 17, issue 2, 151-166

Abstract: This paper discusses a 'postmodern' alternative to business ethics in the light of two authors: Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Foucault. Despite their different usage of the concepts 'ethics' and 'morality', both offer an approach to ethics that avoids the problems of a self-enclosed subject inherent in liberal as well as in communal theories. Bauman and Foucault demonstrate how the continuation of social dialogue suffers from the postulation of fixed individual and organizational identities. Managers and other participants cannot formulate ethical rules on their own, but neither can they come together as a community without tensions and difference. Instead, embodied engagement in the reciprocal play of interpretations and influences keeps us ethically attuned to the limits of reason.

Date: 2001
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