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Managerial Control of Employees’ Intercorporeality and the Production of Unethical Relations

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Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to intercorporeal ethics studies by enlarging their political understanding. Intercorporeal ethics revolve around the idea that, within organizations, our embodied interaction with each other is a conduit to enact genuine ethical relations of autonomy, mutual recognition, respect, care and responsibility. However, how intercorporeality can also be a means for organizations to shape and control their members’ ethical relationships in pursuit of corporate interests remains to be examined. We explore this political perspective on intercorporeality by combining insights from Merleau-Ponty and Nussbaum. We analyze how the deployment of a lean management program in a financial institution produces unethical relations of objectification between employees by influencing their embodied interactions. Our study thus enlarges the political understanding of intercorporeality by showing the processes through which the embodied experience of one another is conditioned not only by our corporeal sensibility but also by managerial prescriptions. This provides a more nuanced understanding of intercorporeality as a basis to counter control and domination in organizations.

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Notes

  1. Nussbaum’s (1995) seven modes of objectification are (i) instrumentality—treating the object as a tool of one’s purposes); (ii) denial of autonomy—treating the object as lacking in autonomy and self-determination; (iii) inertness—treating the object as lacking in agency and perhaps also in activity; (iv) fungibility—treating the object as interchangeable with objects of the same type or of other types; (v) violability—treating the object as lacking in boundary integrity or as something that is permissible to break up, smash, or break into; (vi) ownership—treating the object as something that is owned by another or can be sold or bought; and (vii) denial of subjectivity—treating the object as something whose experience and feelings need not be considered.

  2. The quotations were translated into English by the authors.

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Acknowledgements

We thank David Courpasson (EMLYON Business School), Isabelle Huault (EMLYON Business School) and Karen Dale (Lancaster University Management School) for their useful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We are indebted to Dr. Gazi Islam, Section Editor, and the anonymous reviewers who, through their exemplary engagement, contributed greatly to the development of this paper.

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  1. Paris School of Business, Paris, France

    Géraldine Paring

  2. TSM–Research, CNRS, Université Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France

    Stéphan Pezé

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  1. Géraldine Paring
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Correspondence to Géraldine Paring.

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Paring, G., Pezé, S. Managerial Control of Employees’ Intercorporeality and the Production of Unethical Relations. J Bus Ethics 180, 393–406 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04907-z

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