Ethics: Critique, Ambivalence, and Infinite Responsibilities (Unmet)

This article aims to give an overview of critical management studies (CMS) and authors' engagement with ethics. Parker, in the introduction to the edited collection Ethics and Organizations, gives a number of reasons for what he suggests is a rise in interest in the issue of ethics in organization studies in recent years. These include the movement toward theoretical perspectives that challenge faith in epistemological or ontological foundations, thus raising ethics and politics to a new centrality; greater attention to issues, such as equal opportunities and corporate social responsibility, which raise the profile of ethical issues in organizations; a cultural or humanist turn in wider theories of organization and management; and a greater politicoethical reflexivity amongst (critical) organizational scholars in terms of their research practices and products. In their different ways, the critical traditions of Marxism, critical theory, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism have each sought to counter imposed ethical universalism.