Organizing Corporeal Ethics: A Research Overview (State of the Art in Business Research)

This book explores the meaning and practice of corporeal ethics in organized life. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied, and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it.

Pullen and Rhodes show how corporeal ethics is fundamentally based in embodied affect, yet practically materialized in ethico-political acts of positive resistance and networked solidarity. Considering ethics in this way turns our attention to how people’s conduct and interactions might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Pullen and Rhodes outline the ways in which ethically grounded resistance and critique can and do challenge self-interested organizational power and privilege. They account for how corporeal ethics serves to destabilize the ways that organizations reproduce practices that negate difference and result in oppression, discrimination, and inequality.

The book is suitable for students, scholars, and citizens who want to learn more about the radical possibilities of how political actions arising from corporeal ethics can strive for equality and justice.

Alison Pullen is Professor of Gender, Work and Organization at Macquarie University, Australia.

Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.