Granting disorder a role in ethics

Olivier Babeau ()
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Olivier Babeau: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: An abundant literature in management and human science shows how deviances provide well-being and efficiency in a firm. The suppression of gaps to the rules, of hidden practices, has a negative impact on productive activity: as weird as it may seem, an enterprise survives thanks to its broken rules.According to the common approach of firm ethics, the development of an "ethical organization" depends in priority on a generalized transparency, that is to say the suppression of all deviances, which are clandestine by nature. Every single action kept hidden is suspect of wronging the other actors, of working to inequality, to the uncontrolled development of power grounded relations, of the sabotage of production process. Disorder is granted no ethical virtue; only order is.How is it possible to think simultaneously ethics and enterprise? By reconciling organization and ambiguity. The role of hidden practices in organization has to be rehabilitated. We have to renounce to the simplistic demand of transparency; to this idea that an exhibited, showed process is always better than secrecy. Transgression is both an ethical necessity and useful for daily functioning.

Keywords: transgression; Foucault; ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Published in C. Carter, S. Clegg, M. Kornberger, S. Laske & M. Messner. Business Ethics as Practice: Representation, Discourse and Performance, Edward Elgar publishing, pp.32-48, 2007

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00339907

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