Ethics, alterity, andorganizational justice

Damian ByersandCarl Rhodesn

Introduction

Despite the depth and radicality of Levinas’s

rethinking of ethics – of its meaning, terrain, and

relationship with philosophy – it is nonetheless

true that those interested in his ethics are left for

themselves to elaborate what might be the

processes of justice that can be built on the

foundation of this ethics of responsibility and

radical alterity (Hudson 2003). Even less does

Levinas explore the implications of his thinking

for the just conduct and administration of

organizations. In this paper, we move towards a

consideration of some of the most central of these

implications. In particular, our concern is with

articulating the conditions of possibility for an

organizational justice that extends from a Levi-

nasian ethics whose primary foundation is in

being for the Other.1 In so doing, we propose a

conception of organizational justice grounded on

the promise of a mode of organizing that does not

violate the particularity of people, each one Other.

It is our argument that the decisive conditions for

non-violent organizational justice reside in the

realities of the cultural practices of the institution

as manifested in the conduct of people in relation

to multiple Others – practices that must seek

justification based on the absolute alterity and

unknowability of all of the Others. The main

burden of our paper is to point to the character-

istics that might mark a way of organizing that

pursues non-violent justice, at least as it might

follow from Levinas’s elaboration of genuinely

ethical relations.

The importance and radicality of Levinas’s re-

thinking of ethics arises from his establishment of

the relation of the self to the Other, and the

primacy of the Other over the self, as ‘the question

of ethics’ (Jones 2003: 227). This Other, however,

is not that which is an object of knowledge that

can be identified in terms of categories, not

something that can be known or represented; it

is instead what Levinas calls ‘the face’. It is the

‘face’ that ruptures subjectivity from egoism

(Desmond 2007) and renders ethics in terms not

of exchange or reciprocity, but in terms of

‘response, help, solicitude [and] compassion’

(Hansel 1999: 122). While the ethical relation,

for Levinas, is located in the encounter with the

Other, it is ‘a mistake however to believe that

everything in ethics is reduced to the relationship

with the Other. For this is the point at which the

third person and all the others present themselves’

(Hansel 1999: 122). It is in the presence of all of

these Others that the duality of the ethical self/

other relation becomes itself disturbed by the

multiple demands for infinite responsibility. It is

the troubled situatedness of ethics in such social

contexts that characterize ethical relations in

organizations.

Work organizations are also rendered into the

domain of the ethical in terms of their relation to

the drive to sustain the self in being – a necessary

precondition for being able to be ‘for the Other’ in

any material and effective way. To provide for the

Other requires that there be something acquired,

which in turn can be given, and this acquisition

rests upon the development and exercise of power.nRespectively: with AstraZeneca Australia; and Professor, School of

Management, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

r 2007 The AuthorsJournal compilation r 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA 239

Business Ethics: A European ReviewVolume 16 Number 3 July 2007

Self-interest is not purely and simply a violation

of the Other. Work organizations have their own

distinctive and legitimate ethical purpose: that of

gathering and organizing the exercise of power so

that needs – of ‘others’ – can in some way be

provided for. Maximizing this power – without

waste, special pleading, and in the interests of the

production of genuine goods – is a necessary

implication of recognizing, in the one for the

Other, the other Others who are also ‘the

stranger’, ‘the neighbour’. They, too, all of them,

must be recognized and attended to. This drive –

the drive to find structures that express this

imperative – is the drive for justice. It is an

account of how this drive might be realized in

organizations that we develop in this paper.

Authority and post-metaphysical ethics

In bringing Levinas’s thinking to a consideration

of ethics and justice in organizations, we are

drawn to a post-metaphysical account of ethics.

Indeed, Levinas’s distinct and profound contribu-

tion to the movement of Western philosophy is

surely his repositioning of ethics as first philosophy

(Levinas 1990). These terms are by no means new;

in fact, they invoke the tradition of modern

thought at its core: ‘first philosophy’ is an

invocation of beginnings both historically from

Descartes, and systematically or structurally

where ‘first philosophy’ is metaphysics, under-

stood as the discourse of first things, foundations,

and axioms. First philosophy is the discourse that

settles the issue of authority: of what is first and

why, the rights of the first things over all others,

the establishment of authorizing structures and,

by extension, of authorized speakers. We know

that the tradition that ordained metaphysics, the

‘science of being qua being’, saw metaphysics as

first within the order of authorization, and ethics

as secondary.

Levinas’s repositioning is no simple reversal in

the order of already familiar terms. It is the

rejection of a whole way of thinking – about the

meaning of objectivity and the nature and source

of authority, about the law under which a moral

individual would bring itself and the character of

conformance with authority. The problem that

Levinas sees at the heart of the metaphysical

tradition can be crudely put as follows: in its

instability as a being in time, the ‘subject’ senses

its own lack of self-sufficiency – it possesses

neither itself nor the elements of the world that

provide its nourishment and security. Beholden to

the imperative to maintain and preserve itself in

being, the ‘subject’ determines upon establishing

control and security. Stabilization is to be sought

in something external – the world, the object, law,

concept, and structure – because the subject

itself is unstable and insufficient. But far from

being ‘objective’ or ‘real’ in their supposed

independence, indifference and ‘externality’, all

such ‘grounds’ are marked by a fundamental

adequacy to the needy ‘subject’. There is a

reduction to the self here that Levinas identifies,

where the self that seeks its own preservation in

being is an ego, an autism. To cast this ordering of

self in terms of universality and objectivity is a

reduction to the same. It is nothing other than an

attempt to empower and legitimize the will to self-

preservation.

Levinas’s ‘post-metaphysical’ ethics presents a

thoroughly different account of legitimation,

where the ego of metaphysics, revealed in its

autism, is replaced by a truly ethical subject –

ethical in its abandonment of the assumed

certainty of monologue, ethical in its sacrificial

opening to the Other who is not yet another of

me, ethical in its subjugation not to a law, a duty,

or a principle, but to the other person concretely,

face to face, in ‘proximity’. A question that this

opens for a consideration of ethics is: what

happens to ‘authority’ with the turn to a post-

metaphysical ethics? And, for organizations, the

question is cast as: by what legitimacy can an

organization be considered in relation to the

‘good’ or the ‘ethical’ when the certainty of ethical

ground cannot be revealed in terms of truth,

objectivity, reason, and so forth? The answer to

this question can be approached directly – the

legitimacy of one’s subjugation of oneself to some

rule that would remain external but be for me,

although not available in the form of a concept or

universal principle, is the Other, face-to-face.

Thus too, a post-metaphysical ethics of organiza-

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tions can only be legitimized in the primary

authority of the Other as radical exteriority.

The concept of the Other that Levinas presents

appears via the schema of the ‘idea of infinity’

(Levinas 1969: 48). The Other is exteriority,

transcendence, in the bonds of relation, and yet

in such a way that these bonds ‘do not unite the

same and the other into a Whole’ (Levinas 1969).

This relation is one where the Other, although of

course thought of (‘conceived’), is present in an

utterly unique way. The idea of infinity is

exceptional in that that which is presented in its

idea surpasses its idea. In short, the idea of the

infinite is the idea of an entity that exceeds

adequation in a concept or regime of signification –

the Other is non-representable in that it overflows

the capacity to think it. Indeed, should such a

representation be assumed, its achievement would

be to obliterate alterity in the name of knowledge.

The known is possessed, offering no resistance

to appropriation and ordering via hand or

technological prosthesis.

But the Other is not possessed; beyond the

domain of the concept or the generalization, the

Other resists possession, resists my powers. Of

course, this resistance is not that of a contra-

power exercised against me as a blind force of

nature like a hurricane. It is a sovereign ‘no’; a

‘no’ that is not a force of resistance, but

paradigmatically ‘the very unforseeableness of his

reaction’ (Levinas 1969: 199). The Other opposes

me not with a greater force within an economy of

the same, but with the very exteriority of his or

her being to any whole, and economy authorized

by me. Clearly, this is a relation earlier (and later)

than any regime based on principles, ordered by

general rules, and operated via a calculus of

reason. This point critically usurps common

practice of ethics in the context of management

and organizations, when, as many commentators

have suggested, business ethics is mobilized

through sets of rules, codes, or administrative

procedures (see Parker 2002, Roberts 2003, Clegg

& Rhodes 2006) informed by a ‘means-end

rationalization’ (Parker 1998: 289). Whereas such

systems might make a claim to ethics, where they

begin and end in rationally applied principles, they

are, in a Levinasian sense, not in any way ethical.

Deprived of law or general principle, what kind

of response would be ‘right’ in the ethical

encounter? Post-metaphysical ethics is no relati-

vism, no scepticism. It finds a direction pre-

figured in a strict phenomenology of the face. The

epiphany of the face is the most original authority

of all. It is the condition for the possibility of any

objectivity at all, because objectivity is nothing

other than being for the Other(s) as well as myself –

‘the condition for theoretical truth and error is the

word of the other’ (Levinas 1969: 51). The Other

is the most original (and strictly the only)

exteriority. The Other exceeds my powers of

representation, and the ‘idea of infinity’, the idea

of the Other, does not come from our ‘a priori

depths – it is [. . .] experience par excellence’

(Levinas 1969: 196).

What does this mean regarding the issue of

authority? If, on pain of pathology, authority is

always to be sought outside, then authority is

established only in communion with the Other.

Legitimation cannot be grounded in a play of

internality – checking for consistency, for exam-

ple, or internal coherence, or the application of

transparent and available general principles to

particulars. There is no rule book for ethics.

Rather, legitimation is something received. Only

by that which is received from outside am I

genuinely commanded; only as such is my own

spontaneity limited. For Levinas ‘[t]his relation-

ship established over the things henceforth

possibly common [objects, but also principles,

laws and theories], that is, susceptible of being

said, is the relationship of conversation’ (Levinas

1969: 50). This conversation is a welcoming of the

expression of the Other, it is the ability to receive

from the Other beyond the capacity of the I,

beyond ‘the idea of the other in me’ (Levinas 1969).

This means, in Levinas’s words, ‘to be taught [. . .]

conversation is a teaching’ (Levinas 1969: 51; see

also Lim 2007). In relation to business ethics, this

suggests again that actions grounded in ethics are

not those that abide by the internal logic of a code

or generalized principle, but rather those that seek

legitimation primarily from welcoming the Other

in all their unknowability.

One more aspect of the phenomenology of the

face needs to be drawn out in order to turn the

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discussion of the reconfiguration of authority in a

properly ethical direction. The face resists my

powers, but the face is defenseless and ‘destitute’

(Levinas 1969: 200). This is the basis for Levinas’s

articulation of the fundamental stance towards

the Other, and in which ethics consists:

The comprehension of this destitution and this

hunger establishes the very proximity of the other

[. . .] thus the epiphany of infinity is expression and

discourse [. . .]. The face opens the primordial

discourse whose first word is obligation, which no

‘interiority’ permits avoiding’.

(Levinas 1969: 200–201).

Given that the disclosure of being (objects) in

truth is only possible within the relation to the

Other characterized by discourse and expression,

and given that the relation to the Other is the

ethical relation, we can begin to see the meaning

and radicality of the Levinasian reversal: before

the opening upon ‘beings’ is the opening to the

Other. Such an opening not only places the Other

as primary but, in so doing, entirely disrupts

any prior conception of being. It is only starting

from here that a post-metaphysical business or

organizational ethics can be considered.

Ethics and relations in organizations

Given Levinas’s insistence that the ethical relation

is the relation with the Other, received from the

Other, it is only from such a relation that we can

begin to think of ethics in organizations. Indeed,

as we will argue, when ethics is considered in

terms of both the proximity and radical exter-

iority of the Other, the possibility of an ethics of

organized work is severely threatened. When

Levinas characterizes work as being a matter of

‘actions, gestures, manners, objects utilized and

fabricated’ (Levinas 1969: 175) so as to be

anonymously identified with money (Levinas

2007), then workers are understood in terms only

of their use-fullness. They are couched precisely in

a relationship of interchangeability such that any

one worker can be replaced by another, providing

that they can do the same work of the same value.

The works of a person are ‘delivered over to the

anonymous field of economic life’ (Levinas 1969:

176) where all persons are identifiable as the same

through labour. When this work is ‘organized’,

the other person is totalized by the practices of

management, and within its knowledge structures.

Moreover, this anonymity does not attest to

‘unknowability’ in the ethical sense of infinite

alterity, but rather renders others ‘unknown’ in

terms of not being particular – of not being Other.

It is through interchangeability and anonymiza-

tion that, in a Levinasian sense, the radicality of

the alterity of the Other is reduced to the same.

This is a knowledge that achieves a distancing of

the self from the Other such that all others can be

regarded simultaneously. This means that while all

others are able to be known, this knowledge

cannot account for the particularity of the Other

because such particularity can only be acknowl-

edged as unknowable in proximity to the face of

the Other. This is a treatment of the Other that

seeks to fix it from a far-away gaze, and to capture

it in systematic abstractions that fail to look in the

face of the Other, instead, always seeing the self.

For Levinas, ethics requires the Other to be

considered as being radically different from the

same and not containable within it. This Other

can never be reduced to the I and is radically

separated from oneself and one’s knowledge

rather than a subject of it. Hence, when manage-

rial knowledge pursues the totalization of the

Other through interchangeability and compar-

ability, it at once resurrects a sense of complete-

ness on that part of the ego, as well as claiming to

capture (and hence annihilate) the infinity of

alterity. For multiple others to be regarded as

being the same (i.e. interchangeable) as consti-

tuted within what is known by the self, they

become contained as a matter of a knowledge held

by the self and thus part of the self. As for a given

person, his or her particularity and non-substitut-

ability – the very stuff of ethics – is immediately

violated. When comprehension, intelligence and

knowledge are a ‘way of approaching the known

being such that its alterity with regard to the

knowing being vanishes’ (Levinas 1969: 42), then

forms of managerial knowledge that appropriate

the Other as knowable are an immediate debase-

ment of ethics.

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Hansel (1999) has noted that an important

implication of Levinas’s thinking for institutions

resides in how ethics is abdicated by ‘oppressing

human beings in an impersonal totality’. He adds,

therefore, that there is a need to ‘remain vigilant

to prevent human rights – or, more precisely, the

rights of the other man in his uniqueness – from

being flouted by the abstraction of the system’

(p. 122). In organizations, such rights are nowhere

to be found when ‘[a]t worst employees are viewed

as numbers and not as people, let alone ‘faces’ in

the Levinasian sense’ (ten Bos & Willmott 2001:

781). While such ‘numbering’ is a somewhat

extreme and reductionist account of work rela-

tions, it nevertheless holds that organizational

practice commonly anonymizes workers in less

overt ways. For example, as Introna (2003)

illustrates, well-established management practices

of judging, monitoring, and surveilling employees

reflect an organizational logic that ‘starts with a

category and ends with a judgment relative to that

category [. . . and . . .] through this move the

‘‘Otherness’’ of the Other, the exceptional, is

neatly bracketed and ‘‘covered over’’ ’ (p. 212).

The paradox that this reveals is that the ways in

which such practices make the Other ‘present’ as

an object of knowledge circumvent an ethical

encounter with the Other through the ‘supposedly

‘‘just’’ economy of the category’ (p. 213).

The critical ethical point is that a conception of

work based on the interchangeability of persons

inevitably reduces the Other within the same,

within the category – such a reduction is a

violation of the rights of that person. This is a

violation of a person’s primary right to be

regarded as particular, unique, and unknowable

(Levinas 1987). This original right is not earned

through the merit of any individual’s action or

virtue, nor is it granted by reason; it emerges from

each person’s transcendence beyond any order of

nature or social structure within which we are,

necessarily, situated, and involved. This utter

dissimilarity of the individual is what places him

or her beyond any order of comprehension and

possession and this is the very meaning of the

original phenomenon of the Other.

When an individual, present to an organization

as a particular self, becomes reduced to being a

member of a category or a type, his or her most

basic human right is violated. Indeed if, following

Levinas, ethics requires the Other to be considered

as being radically different from the self so as to

account for its absolute particularity, strangeness

and unknowability of the Other, then the organi-

zation of people’s work, and the rendering of

people as knowable within structures managerial

knowledge and the interchangeability of money,

appears to be the very anathema of ethics. Indeed,

the organization of work might be considered as

primarily violent – not violent so much as in

‘injuring and annihilating persons’ but in terms of

‘interrupting their continuity, making them play

roles in which they no longer recognize them-

selves, making them betray not only commitments

but their own substance, but making them carry

out actions that will destroy every possibility of

action’ (Levinas 1969: 21).

Opening the possibility of an ethics

of work

The picture of the possibility of a Levinasian

ethics of organization painted above is a bleak

landscape. It is a picture, however, that is not

entirely irredeemable. Indeed, as we will now

explore, a reflection on Levinas’s ethics does not

necessarily preclude the ethical possibilities of

organized work. We can start to consider this

within Levinas’s scepticism:

There is an abyss between labor, which results in

works having a meaning for other men, and which

others can acquire – already merchandise reflected

in money – and language, in which I attend my

manifestation, irreplaceable and vigilant. But this

abyss gapes open because of the energy of the

vigilant presence which does not quit expression. It

is not to expression what the will is to its work; the

will withdraws from its work, delivering it over to

its fate, and is found to have willed ‘a lot of things’

it had not willed. For the absurdity of these works

is not due to a defect in the thought that formed

them; it is due to the anonymity into which this

thought immediately falls, to the unrecognition

of the worker that results from this essential

anonymity.

(Levinas 1969: 297)

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While this statement seems to reinforce the idea

that work is necessarily a violent anonymization

of the Other, there is still a fissure that opens up

other possibilities. This fissure can be located in

the possibility that work might not involve the

withdrawal of the will as a form of unrecognition.

Thus, if there is to be an ethics of work (and of the

organization of work), it requires the contestation

of will such that particularity is not ignored

through the violence of anonymization. Indeed, in

the above passage, Levinas is not proposing that

ethics is external to work, but rather that there is a

conception of work that desires to externalize the

recognition of alterity and particularity that ethics

requires.

As the passage continues, there opens up a

potential for disavowing interchangeability

through the act of ‘rebuke’:

In political life, taken unrebuked, humanity is

understood from its works – a humanity of

interchangeable men, of reciprocal relation. The

substitution of men for one another, the primal

disrespect, makes possible exploitation itself.

(Levinas 1969: 298)

The point to be taken here is that humanity might

only be understood in terms of an anonymizing

form of work if there is no rebuke. It is thus that

we can conceive of a politics of work where

rebuke and critique are rendered possible so as to

subvert violent anonymization of knowledge.

Such a form of rebuke is not to be considered in

relation to the achievement of a better knowledge

of an object – indeed, it is the presumption of such

taxonomic knowledge that created the ethical

violation in the first place. Instead, rebuke

suggests a form of knowing that radically usurps

such knowledge. Rather than ‘elaborating a

psychology’, which involves ‘the determination

of the other by the same’, for knowledge, rebuke

would mean ‘the act of unsettling its own

condition’, the unsettling of its own certainty.

This is an attestation to the Other such that the

other ‘eludes thematization’ such that the self is

shameful of ‘the consciousness of [its] own

injustice’ in refuting the identity of the Other by

representing it (Levinas 1969: 86).

It is the Other who interrupts and punctures the

egological totality that renders that Other within

the same, and in its sheer excessiveness announces

its profound separation from the self. The ethical

relation is nothing more – nor less – than a

‘rational’ recognition of this separation. First, the

Other exceeds the regime of the universal and the

general – the regime of the principle. Second, the

Other confronts me as ‘destitute’ and vulnerable,

but also from ‘on high’. The ethical relation is

utterly particular and irrepeatable, but also

incapable of preemption and foreclosure. It is

the face-to-face; it is a relation of infinite

obligation and sacrifice, never of exchange. It is

in relation to such obligation and sacrifice that a

Levinasian ethics of organization can be consid-

ered. Such an ethics would eschew the thematiza-

tion of the Other through rebuke and critique

where:

[i]f philosophy consists in knowing critically, that

is in seeking a foundation for its freedom, in

justifying it, it begins with conscience, to which the

other is presented as the Other, and where the

movement of thematization is inverted. But this

inversion does not amount to ‘knowing oneself’ as

a theme attended to by the Other, but rather in

submitting oneself to an exigency, to a morality.

(Levinas 1969: 86)

The question that emerges for ethics in relation to

organizations is the extent to which such a

submission is possible. Such a possibility can be

considered in terms of Levinas’s ‘ontology of

labour’. It is here that the ethical contravention of

work described above might be rebuked so as to

situate work within ethical relations.

Relations of work are necessary for ethics.

Levinas (1969) develops an account of labour that

places it at the very heart not only of the

transformation of the uncanny element into an

environment conducive for dwelling. Here, it is

labour that not only ‘transforms nature into a

world [ . . . and . . . ] makes accessible a world’

(Levinas 1969: 157), but more fundamentally is

the expansion of the primordial ‘now’ into a

deeper futural dimension that is the pre-condition

for acceptance of responsibility. Labour is neither

an accidental feature of certain socio-economic

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arrangements, nor a curse that might signify

fallenness from a truer state; labour is ‘access to

the world’ (Levinas 1969: 158) that enables the

goals of need to be met such that the elements of

the world can be brought back to the ‘dwelling’ of

home and human welcome. Furthermore, work is

a project or task not limited to the achievement of

particular ends, but rather, it is a predicament

called up by the uncertainty of the future that can

be mitigated by possessions (Caygill 2002: 60).

Work – understood as relations between those

engaged in labour together – is essentially human,

and therefore must be susceptible to ethical

regulation. How then can such a form of

regulation be considered?

Ethics and organizational sociality

In terms of ethics in organizations, while the

relation of the face-to-face is necessary, it is

inadequate by itself. This inadequacy emerges

from the social character of organizations – how

relations of work and organization exceed the

dyadic face-to-face relation. The questions this

poses are: how is the unbounded and infinite

obligation that I have to the (one) Other to be

rendered compatible with the equally incalculable

being and claim of the other Other, the third

person? How are the rights of all the others to be

respected within the infinite relation of the face-

to-face? The implication for organizations is that

even if we accept that an ethics of organized work

can only be rendered from a consideration of the

absolute particularity of face-to-face relation with

the Other, this does not account for the presence

of the other Others, and therefore is not sufficient

by itself for an ethics of organization.

But how does one move from the ethics of the

face-to-face to justice for the many? Levinas

(1969) presents a number of strands in the

argument here. First, the encounter with the

Other is an encounter in language, and language

cannot subsist within the self-sufficiency of a strict

‘I-Thou’ relation. The fact of language means that

the relation with the Other is not a private or

clandestine relation. Second, although the Other

presents as a stranger s/he is presented to me as an

equal whose equality ‘consists in referring to the

third party’ (Levinas 1969: 213), whom the Other,

despite his or her own destitution, already serves.

In encountering the Other, the other Other comes

to join me. Third, I myself am an Other for the

Other; I too am destitute before the Others; I, too,

am equal with Others; I am one of the many who

are neighbours of my neighbours, colleagues of

my colleagues. My engagement with the Other

(discourse) is necessarily an engagement with

all the Others. The neighbour of my neighbour

disturbs the intimacy of the relation between me

and the Other and ‘cries out for justice, demands

measure and knowing’ (Levinas 1991: 158). Thus,

my responsibility – infinite even in the face of the

Other one – is divided before all of the Others. As

Peperzak puts it, ‘[i]t is no longer an unlimited

care for only this one neighbour [. . .]. My

neighbour and the third person obligate me

simultaneously’ (Peperzak 1993: 229).

For organizations, to consider ethics without

moving on to a consideration of justice is both

naı̈ve and dangerous because, while ethics might

acknowledge the ethical travesty of an assumed

human interchangeability, it offers little by way of

acknowledging the multiplicities of human rela-

tions or of suggesting normative responses to

those problems. But justice too is problematic

when it is considered as a set of general require-

ments established to respect and preserve the

universal rights of all people. Undoubtedly, this

problem arises when considering how the universal

applicability of the order of rights, expressed

unavoidably in general principles, violate the

absolutely unrepeatable particularity of the Other,

and in their imposition upon the individual enact a

regime of violence that repeats the problem it

purports to be addressing. Where the operation of

the general principles lays out a response to the

Other in advance, blind to the ways in which the

individual exceeds what is captured in the general

principle, the particularity of the Other is still not

respected. Hence, despite their professed commit-

ment to justice, such principles can in their

operation institute an order of violence, in which

justice and the ethical is obliterated.

The antidote proposed by Levinas to the

problems of the violence of justice, however, is

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not to eschew just principles in their entirety, nor

is it an abandonment of law. Indeed, for Levinas,

the content of such principles can retain an ethics

when they are delivered to a face, by a face – ‘by

me’. For justice not to be primarily violent, it

must be connected back to the relations between

people, with such relations ‘being folded back to

the asymmetry of the face to face’ (Llewelyn 1995:

140). Hence, the Levinasian ‘solution’ lies in

recognizing that the attempt to achieve justice is

grounded in the more primordial encounter with

the Other in the face-to-face: ‘[f]raternity precedes

the commonness of a genus’ (Levinas 1991: 159).

Justice for the Other – and for me – consists in

recognizing this order of things, and giving it its

due in the application of these general principles.

Justice is not reducible to legality, regulation, and

the judging of the particular under the general

rule – to be so, justice would amount to little more

than a degradation of the ethical encounter with

the Other. As Levinas puts it, ‘[j]ustice is

impossible without the one that renders it finding

himself in proximity’ (Levinas 1991: 159) and it is

this proximity that ‘suppresses the distance of

consciousness’ (Levinas 1991: 89) and disturbs

knowledge and thematization so as to invoke the

immediacy of alterity – the face. Principles are not

necessarily unethical, but rather it is the case that

they require manifesting through the face-to-face

relation. If this was not the case, then justice

would be a ‘comparison of the incomparable’

(Levinas 1991: 158) that would reduce ethics to

ontology. Furthermore, given that this relation

opens upon the infinite incalculability of the

Other, a certain undecidability necessarily enters

into all such renderings of justice. In relation to

organized work, this means the establishment of a

space where the ontology of labour can operate

with fecundity and particularity.

Non-violent organizational justice

Our discussion so far takes us in the direction of

considering justice in organizational settings as

requiring an ethics of the face-to-face while also

responding to the anxiety that emanates from the

ever-present possibility of that justice violating

such an ethics. This recognizes that justice ‘no

matter how necessary, is always a deficient

modality of the ethical relation’ especially as, ‘at

the level of justice, the situation of a plurality of

others compels us to objectivate, compare, uni-

versalize’ (Horowitz & Horowitz 2003: 184). This

begs justice never to forget its origins in ethics,

never to forget its own violations and never to be

sure of its own righteousness. It is this inevitable

betrayal of ethics by justice that, while not

suggesting the abandonment of a quest for justice,

lays bare justice’s inadequacy and its need for

ongoing negotiation on ethical terms – on the

terms of the Other.

The betrayal of ethics by justice suggests that

organizations cannot secure for themselves an

ethical future state through their actions. More-

over, the establishment of an ethical discourse

that claims, if followed, to guarantee or predict

ethics (e.g. in the form of codes of conduct, or

statements of values, administered through bu-

reaucratic procedures) is nothing more than an

objectified administrative arrangement that, when

applied to the concrete Other, violates ethics.

Similarly, principle-based ethics incorporating

deontological and teleological approaches (see

Whetstone 2001), although not directly adminis-

tered through bureaucratic power, involves the

generalization of the principle, which, when

applied, is also a case of the violation of the

particularity of the Other. Contrary to such rule-

and principle-based approaches, ethics in organi-

zations can only emerge through an openness to

the Other that is not pre-determined by such pre-

emptiveness. In other words, the task is not to be

ethical, but to manage the tension between ethics

and justice through organizational practices that

reject an eschatological foreclosure of the future

in the present, and that also reject those ethical

discourses that do the same. These are practices

that recognize that indeterminacy and risk are

valued as signs of an organization still alive to the

exercise of its power in relation to the rights of all

Others.

It is in the space between ethics and justice that

organizational practice can pursue ethics. But,

this is a space filled with anxiety and lack of

ethical closure. The problem here is that the

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246r 2007 The Authors

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originary and undeniable right of the Other to be

recognized in its utter uniqueness by no means

ensures the actual possibility of the Other’s

enjoyment of that right. Indeed, the Other’s

situatedness within a setting of ‘natural and social

determinism’ (Levinas 1987: 119) is quite at odds

with their right to the exercise of their own

incalculable uniqueness. From this knowledge,

my response as an ethical subject arises: my being

for the Other as an ethical subject means my

‘freeing the person from these pressures and [. . .]

subordinating them to the exercise of his rights’

(Levinas 1987: 119). Hence, along with the

recognition of human rights goes the requirement

to establish the material, political, and legal

conditions for the actual exercise of those rights –

in our case in relation to organizations. The

extent of this right unfolds so far as to entail

‘the right to fight for the full rights of man, and

the right to ensure the necessary political conditions

for that struggle’ (Levinas 1987: 120). All this

stems from, and expresses, the phenomenon of the

transcendence of the Other, and the recognition of

the inhumanity of the conditions in which the

human Other is encountered – conditions that

include those present in organizations. The

burden of ethical responsibility is that of ‘dimin-

ishing the violence to which they [the Others] are

exposed in the order, or disorder, of the determin-

ism of the real’ (Levinas 1987: 121).

The ethical anxiety introduced above also arises

from the fact that acting ethically towards the

Other brings profound risks. Is it indeed not

the case that, in responding to the incalculable

vulnerability of the ‘one’ Other, do I not vio-

late the rights of the other Others? Or in turning

to the other Other, do I not belie the depth of the

original demand of the first Other? As Levinas

puts it, ‘is the freedom of the one not, for

another’s will, the latter’s possible negation, and

thus at least a limitation?’ (Levinas 1987: 122). It

is in the context of this ‘possible war between

multiple freedoms’ that we encounter the specific

sense of, and need for, justice. With this, we

depart from the speculation or temptation to

construe, as a consequence of the ethical dimen-

sion, the world open to each incomparable one as

a utopia ordered according to the incomparable

one’s needs and desires – the order of justice, as

the rational resolution of innumerable absolute

freedoms, is necessarily a limitation and hence,

unavoidably, a kind of violence.

Violence is present even when the order of

justice responds precisely and consciously to the

ethical status of the other Other, before it goes

astray and loses itself in a mechanics or calculus

according to pure principle. This straying is an

ever-present threat, embedded in the very task of

justice, which, in needing to attend to the needs of

‘all of the Others’, the Others not present, and

maybe not yet even living, must pursue a way of

granting an equality to all – and so must overlook

the particulars in virtue of which every one

possesses its very identity, its incomparability.

Hence, the generation and use of ‘universal

principles’, and the image of justice as a set of

scales held in an artificial and self-imposed

sightlessness. It is therefore right to ask whether

‘the limitation of rights by justice is not already a

way of treating the person as an object by

submitting him or her (the unique, the incompar-

able) to comparison, to thought, to being placed

on the famous scales of justice, and thus to

calculation’ (Levinas 1987: 122), hence the essen-

tial harshness of justice, of lawful law. While

ethics demands justice, as the concrete recognition

of the other Other, there is nonetheless still

recognized, in the exercise of justice, a dignity

that even justice offends: ‘the dignity of goodness

itself’ (Levinas 1987: 122), the unfathomable,

immeasurable dignity of the one in their utter

particularity and transcendence. Justice cannot be

otherwise than the subjugation of the transcen-

dent to an order of distribution in the light of

recognition. But this distribution is nothing if not

made concrete; it is a distribution of what is

available, and what is available is of different

value according to the particularities of all the

individual other Others.

Because justice can never be the guarantee of

what is properly due to each one in virtue of their

particularity and unique need, and because the

need of the particular is prior in time and in

justificatory order, never satisfied by any order of

justice, peace is always precarious and uncertain.

The order of justice seeks its stability not in the

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resolution of the need to which it is always

responding, but, Levinas says, ‘in the powers of

the state, in politics, which ensures obedience to

the law by force’ (Levinas 1987: 123), we add here,

in the powers of the organization that seek to

regulate work and workers. No wonder that

ethical intent can become lost to sight, and that

such regulations can usher in the most brutalizing

of regimes that make a mockery of the human

rights – again organizations are central sites of

such brutality.

Ethical organizing principles and the

exercise of power

Despite the unavoidability of the harshness and

violence that the exercise of justice entails, justice

is itself a necessary requirement of the ethical

relation in organizations. But, justice is never

primary. That which authorizes justice is not

internal to the order of justice, but external to it

such that the requirement is for a vigilance for

justice to uphold itself in its ethical limitations

(Levinas 1987). In other words, while justice

might be internal to an organization, ethics must

always come from the outside; it must be received.

It is the capacity to recognize and uphold this

externality that is the only way of maintaining the

justness of an order of justice – an externality

which is nothing other than the transcendence of

the Other in their incalculable uniqueness. The

recognition, from within an order of justice, that

it is not self-justifying, that its original authority

lies outside the order of justice, is what prevents

an order of justice from being transformed into a

regime of sheer calculation. What, then, can this

mean for the ethics of organizations?

The ethical integrity of an organization cannot

be secured in codes of practice or ethics. It is often

the case that such codes are nothing more than a

response to a legal requirement imposed by

broader institutional fiat. These are often experi-

enced by organizations as an imposed and

burdensome cost of doing business that is

observed on pain of legal sanction, and express

no ethical self-determination at all. It is a

violation of language to consider such codes as

having any genuine ethical meaning. But not all

codes are of this kind. Some do arise from a prior

determination on the part of the organization to

decide and adhere to practices that are genuinely

grounded in ethics – such as transparency in

decision making, or arm’s-length commercial

arrangements. Insofar as these principles express

a commitment to fairness in the exercise of the

organization’s power, codes can have an origin in

ethics. However, when this informing basis is

forgotten and the principles outlined in the code

function as mere formal requirements on or

limitations to the action of individuals, they cease

to establish and secure the organization as

ethically sensitive.

Beyond ethical codes, however, if justice con-

cerns fair distribution among all, then the ethical

‘quality’ or status of an organization is reflected

and established in the complete set of principles

that govern the exercise of power that accrues to

the organization, not just those explicitly classified

as ‘ethical’. These principles are necessary to the

operation of any large and distributed organiza-

tion. Practically, these ‘complete principles’ have

as their domain of application the specification of

the relations between members of the organiza-

tion. These include human resource policies

concerning performance management, remunera-

tion and reward, flexible work arrangements, the

distribution of work and hence opportunity for

growth and advancement. How can these princi-

ples be exercised in a way that pursues an ethical

being for the organization? On the one hand,

these principles must be exercised in a way that is

‘blind’ to the particularity of the individual.

A culture of exception is precisely the obliteration

of a culture of justice. And yet no individual is the

same as any other – and hence the operation of

principles must fall unequally upon different

people. But the response to this unfairness cannot

be the institution of a culture of ‘exceptionalism’,

for that is to violate the being of the other Others.

Levinas points us in another direction than

exceptionalism – the fundamental insufficiency of

any order of principles must be accepted, and the

derivative status of its authority be recognized. In

practice, this means that the original authority

must be kept always in view – and that is the

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248r 2007 The Authors

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authority that arises in the face to face, the

‘proximity’ (Levinas 1987: 124), in which this

being for the Other is originally constituted, the

epiphany of the Other’s absolute difference from

all the Others, and its utterly particular vulner-

ability and transcendence beyond any order of

conceptual representation and command. Hence,

while justice requires rules and principles, they

must always be rendered, by me, before the Other

in proximity, face to face, in a relation of honour.

Justice should not here serve as an excuse for

distancing or blinding me from the Other, nor one

of ethically absolving me from the exercise of

power. On the contrary, it is from proximity that

justice can be enacted from the position of its

ethical origins. Where this does not actually

happen, I must nonetheless always be ready and

willing for it to be so. I must render the rule in

person, to the Other, and to all the Others. I must

do this in order to constitute the original ground

of authority from which all justice springs and

without which it is a parody of justice. This

original authority is the ‘prior non-indifference of

one for the Other, in that original goodness in

which freedom is embedded, and in which the

justice of the rights of man takes on an immutable

significance and stability’ (Levinas 1987: 125).

The rendering of the principles for all the Others,

in recognition of the harshness and violence that

is unavoidably a part of their application is not to

be turned away from, and not to be resolved

through, exceptionalism. It is to be resolved

through the continual review and re-articulation

of principles that take place in ongoing conversa-

tion between the members of the organization

dedicated to a promise of ethics. This has

implications for the practice of the organization:

no principle is set in stone; none provide a stable,

reliable ground for ethics. The source of justifica-

tion for any order of justice lies outside that

regime, and is fundamentally incommensurable

with its terms and procedures. This requires

continual vigilance in order to return the order

of justice to its original authority.

Organizational justice can only ever be pursued

from the fundamental right of persons to be

regarded as unique and particular – to be

regarded as a one of a kind. The incalculability

and invisibility of this original ethical ground of

justice means that no order of justice is ever

secure, and no set of principles ever adequate.

Whatever principles express the particular form of

justice embraced by the organization, such principles

are never sure of themselves. When the implications

of this are embedded in an organization’s day-

to-day operations, relations between people, its

regime of policies and strategies and its culture,

then justice might be alive in an organization.

Note

1. Following Alphonso Lingis’s English translation of

Levinas (1969), in this paper we use the initial

capitalized ‘Other’ in place of the French autrui –

‘the personal Other, you’ (p. 24).

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