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Ethics of Resistance in Organisations: A Conceptual Proposal

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Abstract

This study suggests a conceptual proposal to analyse the ethics of resistance in organisations, drawing on Foucault’s practising self as a refusal and Schaffer’s ethics of freedom in opposition to the legitimacy of managerial control and the ethics of compliance. We argue that ethics is already part of such politics in the form of ethico-politics on the basis of participation in political action in organisations. Hence, the practising self as resistance in the face of the status quo of managerial power in an ongoing dialectical process with others and for others comprises our conceptual proposal as an ethics of resistance. Acknowledging dialectics as the driver of the continuous reconstruction and co-construction of politics and praxis, we propose an ethics from the bottom up with a critical and radical perspective. Our contribution is based on opening up an ethico-political space for those who are ignored or suppressed in the ethics and organisations literature.

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Acknowledgements

The conceptual proposal suggested in this study is a significantly improved version of a chapter from the first author’s PhD thesis (Alakavuklar 2012). The former versions of the study were presented in the University of Leicester Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE) Annual Meeting (2012) in the UK and in the fourth Organisation Theory Workshop (2013) in Ankara, Turkey. The first author would like to thank to PhD supervisors Ömür N. T. Özmen and Şükrü Özen for their support. The authors would like to acknowledge Stephen Dunne, Norman Jackson, Erkan Erdemir, Ralph Stablein and Craig Prichard for their invaluable friendly reviews of the earlier versions, and section editor Raza Mir and anonymous referees for their very helpful guidance in the review process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

    Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar

  2. Department of Management, Monash University, Clayton, Australia

    Fahreen Alamgir

Authors
  1. Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar
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  2. Fahreen Alamgir
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Correspondence to Ozan Nadir Alakavuklar.

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This study does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Alakavuklar, O.N., Alamgir, F. Ethics of Resistance in Organisations: A Conceptual Proposal. J Bus Ethics 149, 31–43 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3631-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3631-2

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