Reorienting the site of ethics: The lived experience of ethical responsibility in organizations

In organizational life, the backgrounded nature of institutionalized practices render the origin of individuals "conduct of conduct" difficult to pinpoint. Often the embedded rational myths of organizational politics vie for a role in disciplining employees' actions and behaviors. However, more visible attempts by formal ethics programs to regulate the moral conduct of organizational members are revealed as equally calculating. Collectively, these appeals offer ways for us to conduct ourselves as we interact with organizational others. Their pervasiveness suggests that, absent a calculated source regulating our conduct, our interactions with others may take increasingly unethical forms. In response, critics of these standardizing efforts suggest the suppression of the emergent, interruptive, and dialogical qualities of talk about ethics results in an emphasis on being seen to be ethical. The unethical act of acting ethical, they argue, is no ethics at all.;A pre-foundational source of ethics based on response and responsibility offers an alternative viewpoint. Being responsible for elevates the conduct of individuals in such a way that the ethical impulse stands a chance against the threat of counterveiling institutional forces. Mikhail Bakhtin's and Emmanuel Levinas's respective philosophies of answerability and responsibility confirm and extend our understanding of the ethical dimensions of the relationship between the self and other. In essence, their theories reconceptualize the source of ethics and link communication to responsibility in a phenomenological world where uncertainty, ambiguity, and incompleteness are the hallmarks of ethical communication.;The purpose of this study is to explore case examples of ordinary political and ethical conflict in an organization to examine what goes on phenomenologically and what might be done to bring ethics to the fore. The narrative episodes illustrate how individuals grapple with the organizational enactment of an unfamiliar yet exacting sense of ethical responsibility. This project reveals the prospects for crafting a new ethical solution in the face of the politicization of ethical behavior in the workplace by introducing the notion that the foundational ethical happening in business looks less like an indifferent or resigned "Apres vous" and more like an ethically engaged "Wait a minute.".