The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity

Eduardo Ibarra-ColadoStewart R. Clegg

Carl RhodesMartin Kornberger

ABSTRACT. This paper examines ethics in organiza-

tions in relation to the subjectivity of managers. Drawing

on the work of Michel Foucault we seek to theorize

ethics in terms of the meaning of being a manager who is

an active ethical subject. Such a manager is so in relation

to the organizational structures and norms that govern the

conduct of ethics. Our approach locates ethics in the

relation between individual morality and organizationally

prescribed principles assumed to guide personal action. In

this way we see ethics as a practice that is powerfully

intertwined in an individual’s freedom to make choices

about what to do and who to be, and the organizational

context in which those choices are situated, framed and

governed.

KEY WORDS: ethics, Foucault, power, subjectivity

Eduardo Ibarra-Colado is Head of the Department of Institutional

Studies at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Campus

Cuajimalpa and professor of Management and Organization

Studies. He obtained his Ph.D in Sociology with Honors at the

Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. He is a National

Researcher of the Mexican National System of Research-

ers, and regular member of the Mexican Academy of Sci-

ences. One of his best recognized books is La universidad en

Mexico hoy: gubernamentalidad y modernizacion [The

Mexican University Today: Governmentality and

Modernization], which won the Autonomous Metropol-

itan University Annual Research Competition for the best

research in Social Sciences and Humanities in 2003. He has

published a large number of contributions in the fields of

Organization Studies and Higher Education Studies in

Mexico and Internationally. He is currently working on a re-

search Project on Corporate Ethics, Corruption and

Governance, paying particular attention to the case of Mexico.

Stewart R. Clegg completed a first degree at the University of Aston

(1971) and a Doctorate at Bradford University (1974).

Stewart is currently a Professor at the University of Technology,

Sydney, and Director of ICAN Research (Innovative Col-

laborations, Alliances and Networks Research), a Key Uni-

versity Research Centre. He also holds Chairs at Aston

University, University of Maastricht and Vrije Universiteit,

Amsterdam. He has published extensively in many journals

and has contributed a large number of books to the literature,

including the award-winning Handbook of Organization

Studies (London: Sage, second edition 2006, co-edited with

Cynthia Hardy, Walter Nord and Tom Lawrence). His most

recent book is Managing and Organizations: an intro-

duction to theory and practice (London: Sage, 2005, with

Martin Kornberger and Tyrone Pitsis), and he has a number of

volumes in press at present.

Carl Rhodes is Associate Professor in the School of Management at

the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He has

researched and written widely on issues related to ethics, learning

and culture in organizations. Within this he has explored at

length research methodologies based on narrative and discourse

approaches. Current research projects focus on the practice of

ethics in management, and the relationship between organiza-

tions in popular culture. Carl is author of Writing Organi-

zation: (Re)presentation and Control in Narratives at

Work (Benjamins, 2001), co-author of Reconstructing

the Lifelong Learner (Routledge, 2003) and co-editor of

Research and Knowledge at Work (Routledge, 2000).

His next book Management Ethics-Contemporary

Contexts (co-edited with Stewart Clegg) will appear in 2006.

He has published in journals such as Organization,

Organization Studies, The Leadership Quarterly, and

Qualitative Inquiry.

Martin Kornberger received his PhD from the University of Vienna

and the University of Innsbruck. After enjoying two years as

postdoctoral research fellow he is currently working at the

University of Technology as Senior Lecturer in the School of

Management and the School of Design. He is also a lecturer at

the School of Management at the University of St Andrews,

Scotland. His current research interests include business ethics as

practice, strategy, and creative professions such as architecture,

design, and digital production.

Journal of Business Ethics (2006) 64: 45–55 � Springer 2006DOI 10.1007/s10551-005-3325-z

Introduction

Being ethical has emerged in the early 21st century

as one of the major challenges for organizations. In

addressing this challenge, for researchers and man-

agers alike, it is important to understand the way that

ethics are constituted in organizations. There is a

relationship between the actions of individuals and

the ethicality of organizations. Sometimes this rela-

tionship is understood in terms of ethical norms and

rules (formal and informal) and the way that the

members of the organization adhere to them. Seen

this way being an ethical individual means acting in a

way that is detached from personal privileges, pas-

sions, and emotions (du Gay, 2000) and adhering to

agreed ethical standards that can be ‘‘managed’’.

Such an ethics focuses on how prescriptions (should)

govern everyday actions (see Beyer and Nino, 1999;

Jackson, 2000; Stevens, 1994; Warren, 1993). Other

writers see management that uses ethical rules and

norms as, perversely, antithetical to the possibility of

business ethics (Barker, 1993; Sims and Brinkmann,

2003; Thorne and Saunders, 2002). Instead, ethical

conduct is seen in such situations to emerge directly

from the individual (Soares, 2003). Here, being eth-

ical requires being a person whose individual moral

responsibility leads one to be ‘‘morally assertive’’ so

as to mediate corporate priorities (Watson, 2003).

The individual is responsible for ethical behaviour

and so organizations should avoid restricting indi-

viduality through rules and instead create an

‘‘empowering ethics’’ that enable people to realize

and meet their ethical responsibilities (Kjonstad and

Willmott, 1995; Styhre, 2001).

In this paper, we turn to the ethical theorizing of

Michel Foucault and relate it to a consideration of

ethics in organizations. Specifically, we use Fou-

cault’s work in order to develop an understanding of

ethics and management in a way that mediates

between an understanding of ethics as an individual

responsibility and ethics as organizationally deter-

mined. The means through which a manager acts in

relation to both ethics and organizations are the

central issue. Thus, in this perspective, the subjectivity

of managers is located at the centre stage of ethical

discussion. Subjectivity is a means through which to

think of individual people not as being distinct or

self-contained but as necessarily social; however a

person might consider themself to be an ‘‘individ-

ual’’, such a consideration is always done in relation

to others (Mansfield, 2000) and to social institutions,

such as organizations. It is in this sense that we seek

to theorize ethics in terms of what it means for a

manager to be an active ethical subject. Being active

entails managing subjectivity as an ethical enterprise

in relation to organizational structures and norms.

Thus, ethics are not the property of the individual,

despite the organization, nor something that orga-

nizations control either formally or informally –

instead they are a complex and mutually constituting

relationship between the two.

Foucault’s work is valuable because his concern for

ethics is principally about how people constitute

themselves as moral subjects of their actions (Fou-

cault 1984d) while, at the same time, being ‘‘disci-

plined’’ by institutions into being particular types of

people (Foucault, 1975). For Foucault ethics is a

‘‘conscious practice of freedom’’ (1984a: 284)

through which people develop a notion of ‘‘self’’ that

can be considered ethical. Such practice, however, is

not free in the sense that it is done in the absence of

constraint, but rather in the sense that the ethical self

emerges in relation to (or even against) those social

and organizational rules and norms which seek to

determine or dictate what a person should or should

not be. On this basis, our approach seeks to locate

ethics in the relation between individual morality and

organizationally prescribed principles assumed to

guide individual action (Chan and Garrick, 2002;

Kelemen and Peltonen, 2001). We argue that a

complex interaction exists between these elements –

an interaction through which individual managers

must negotiate their own ethical conduct. The paper

examines the manager as a moral subject in relation to

subjectivity at work. Such an ethics involves re-

imagining and re-inventing the different ways in

which people are self-constituted in relation to the

institutions and procedures within which they

operate (O’Leary, 2002).

Foucault’s ethics

In turning to Foucault as a means to understand

ethics and organizations, it is worth noting the

intellectual context and lineage in which his work is

situated. In this sense, Foucault’s work can be

regarded as a response to the traditions of Marxism

46 Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al.

and phenomenology that dominated French intel-

lectual life in the immediate post Second World War

period. In relation to Marxism, this was a response to

a teleological conception of history unfolding to a

predetermined outcome. In terms of phenomenol-

ogy, it was a response to a notion of truth as existing

prior to the human subject (Danaher et al., 2000). In

this context Foucault’s work, following the philo-

sophical lineage of Nietzsche and the methodologi-

cal/historical legacy of Bloch, (Delacampagne,

1999), provides a historical critique of the presumed

objectivity of scientific truth, and examines how

subjectivity is created through the relations between

language and power (Mansfield, 2000).

Foucault is also part of an intellectual lineage back

to Kant – while he breaks from Kantian transcen-

dentalism, he retains a privileging of ‘‘critique’’ in

relation to knowledge. As he puts it: ‘‘criticism is no

longer going to be practiced in the search for formal

structures with universal value, but rather as a his-

torical investigation in to the events that have led us

to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as

subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.’’

(Foucault, 1986: 46)1. It is in Foucault’s later work

that this concern with critique and subjectivity

emerged in relation to the analysis of the self for-

mation of an ‘‘ethical subject’’ (Rabinow, 2000). In

this context, that Foucault’s work can be brought to

bear on a consideration of business ethics, because he

provides a way of thinking about the very means

through which people at work constitute them-

selves, as subjects, in relation to ethics.

For Foucault, ethics is centrally about what it

means to be a person in the world – it is understood

in terms of ‘‘how we constitute ourselves as moral

subjects of our own actions’’ (Davidson, 1994: 118).

As Foucault himself defined it, ethics is:

a process in which the individual delimits that

part of himself that will form the object of his

moral practice, defines his position relative to

the precept he will follow, and decides on a

certain mode of being that will serve as his

moral goal. And this requires him to act upon

himself, to monitor, test, improve, and trans-

form himself. There is no specific moral action

that does not refer to a unified moral conduct;

no moral conduct that does not call for the

forming of oneself as an ethical subject; and no

forming of the ethical subject without ‘‘modes

of subjectivation’’ and an ‘‘ascetics’’ or ‘‘prac-

tices of the self’’ that support them (Foucault,

1984b: 28)

Following such a definition, we can see a close

relationship between ethics and being a person in the

world. Foucault alerts us to ethics as an active process

through which people assert particular moral prin-

ciples and then act to follow them. The important

distinction that Foucault makes is that moral action

requires a person to regard themself as a particular

type of ‘‘ethical subject’’ whom s/he wishes to

become and is free to try to become. As Foucault

explains: ‘‘For what is ethics, if not the practice of

freedom, the conscious practice of freedom? ...

Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But

ethics is the considered form that freedom takes

when it is informed by reflection’’ (Foucault, 1984a:

284). Foucault’s ethics provides an invitation to a

practice of freedom that ‘‘seeks to open possibilities

for new relations to self and events in the world’’

(Bernauer and Mahon, 1994: 154).

Foucault’ concern with freedom is not in relation

to a self-contained individual who can do as s/he

pleases, but rather a subject whose freedom is both

located and constituted in relations of power. It is this

focus on power that enables a relation to be estab-

lished between individual morality and organiza-

tional ethics. Foucault’s work has been concerned

with how particular social discourses (including

ethical ones) discipline the self into particular modes

of being. To this end, one of the significant effects of

Foucault’s work has been a consideration of ‘‘how, in

late modern times, we can still consider ourselves to

be free beings in a world that, despite its dominant

rhetoric, seems on close and lucid inspection so often

to deny the reality of that freedom’’ (Fillion, 2004:

115). Reading Foucault this way suggests a need to

‘‘contribute to the creation and construction of

spaces where we can be free within and against the

constraints of the particular regimes of truth we

inhabit’’ (ibid, p. 122). In Foucault’s own words,

these ‘‘regimes’’ can be understood as the systems of

‘‘ordered procedures for the production, regulation,

distribution, circulation, and operation of state-

ments’’ (Foucault, 1980a: 132). Such procedures

provide the discursive architecture through which

different ways of understandings the world are

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity 47

sanctioned – through ‘‘statements’’ which include

ethical positioning. Thus, while persons necessarily

operate within powerfully determining and institu-

tionalized regimes of truth, Foucault concerns him-

self with the possibilities of freedom, not outside of

those regimes, but rather in relation to them and in

relation to their intersections (Dumm, 1996).

By drawing on Foucault, we suggest that an

important issue for a consideration of ethics and

management is how managers constitute themselves

as the moral subjects of their own actions within

those ‘‘regimes of truth’’ in which they find them-

selves at work (Foucault, 1980a). Management, as a

practice, has built-in ‘moral technologies’ (Foucault,

1975) that attempt to govern the dispositions making

up managerial identity (Chan and Garrick, 2002).

Such a conception does not involve grand claims

about business ethics or corporate morality, but in-

stead concerns itself with how a manager defines

their ethical position in relation to everyday practice

(Bernauer and Mahon, 1994; Chan and Garrick,

2002; Keleman and Peltonen, 2001). The moral

predicament that managers face concerns the way

that they bring morality to bear on their interaction

with organizational rules and requirements (ten Bos

1997). The processes of self formation at work show

how the identity of the manager might be ethically

constituted. Indeed, one interpretation would have

Foucault saying that by actively seeking to control

the ethical behaviour of individual managers, orga-

nizations unwittingly restrict freedom and hence the

possibilities for ethics.

Following Foucault (1984d, see also Davidson,

1994), the ethics of management emerges through

four interrelated questions – the answers to which

can be thought of as forming the basis of ethical

subjectivity.

• Ethical Substance – Which aspects of manage-

rial behaviour are considered to be con-

cerned with ethical judgement?

• Mode of Subjection – In what ways do manag-

ers establish their relationships to ethical rules

and obligations?

• Practices of the Self – In what practices do

managers engage in order to consider them-

selves ethical?

• Aspirations for the Self – What are the ethics of

the idealised managerial that managers aspire to?

How such questions might relate to a particular

manager can be expected to vary just as they will

between organizations. Further, one might expect

that in the name of ethics, organizations will seek to

answer these questions on behalf of managers. In this

sense, when ethics is invoked in organizations as an

attempt to govern the behaviour, comportment, or

even attitudes of employees, such an invocation is

less about ethics and more about attempts to deter-

mine (or at least limit) individual opportunities to

think and act. Or, to put it differently, individual

ethical action is undertaken in relation to power as it

is instantiated in the relations between people. These

issues of the relationship between organizational

attempts to govern ethics and their effects on indi-

vidual ethical conduct are central to understanding

how ethical conduct gets played out. Such rela-

tionships can best be understood in terms of Fou-

cault’s concept of ‘‘governmentality’ (Foucault,

1978; Chan and Garrick, 2002, 1981, 1984a).

[...] ‘governmentality’ implies the relationship of

the self to itself, and I intend this concept of

‘governmentality’ to cover the whole range of

practices that constitute, define, organize, and

instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in

their freedom can use in dealing with each

other. Those who try to control, determine, and

limit the freedom of others are themselves free

individuals who have at their disposal certain

instruments they can use to govern others.

Thus, the basis for all this is freedom, the rela-

tionship of the self to itself and the relationship

to the other. [...] the concept of governmentali-

ty makes it possible to bring out the freedom of

the subject and its relationship to others –

which constitutes the very stuff [matiere] of eth-

ics (Foucault, 1984a: 300).

The value of the concept of governmentality lies in

the possibilities it offers for examining the connec-

tions between power and ethics, which enable a

connection between a political component (the

governing of others, i.e. management) and a sub-

jective component (the governing of oneself).

Governmentality concerns ‘‘the government of the

self by oneself in its articulation with relations to

others’’ (Foucault, 1981: 88) – it breaks the com-

promise that is set up in the proposed duality

48 Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al.

between individual and organizational ethics. This

concern with governmentality is contrasted with

that of sovereignty – that is the juridical right to

exercise legal authority over a particular state or

territory. With governmentality, the focus shifts

towards how ‘‘thought operates within our

organized way of doing things, our regimes of

practice, and with its ambitions and effects’’ (Dean,

1999: 18). Importantly this proposes a mode of

governing that exceeds formal authority. In terms of

organizations it also suggests that the ethical conduct

of people at work is not limited to formal regulatory

regimes, but is also governed by particular knowl-

edge structures which seek to define moral character

and conduct in particular ways. Thus, it is through

governmentality that we can anlyse the politico-

cultural relations woven by individuals, groups,

organizations, systems of organizations and institu-

tions in order to produce these spaces of practices

and mentalities under certain modes of rationality.

Self creation

Freedom, in the context of governmentality, is

important to the Foucaldian notion of what it means

to be a self in the world. For Foucault, one’s relation

with oneself, and thus to the operations carried out

in relation to one’s body and soul, is a practice of

conscience and knowledge as secularized practices of

self-knowledge (Foucault, 1976, 1981, 1982a); in

other words, the modes through which one acts

upon oneself to carry out transformations in one’s

behaviour, with the aim of situating oneself and

achieving one’s personal realization. Foucault writes

of the forms and transformations of ‘‘morality’’ and

the moral practices that lead to the arts of existence.

These assume the establishment of certain modes of

conduct through which individuals become partic-

ular ‘‘types’’ of people by assuming certain ways of

life (Foucault, 1984b, 1984c). Foucault refers to

these processes as the technologies of self that enable

individuals to produce themselves, govern their own

behaviour and that of others. It is in this way that

governmental regimes are not necessarily restrictive,

but can also enable the emergence of particular types

of ‘‘self’’.

For Foucault, technologies of self determine ways

of being, both in the individual sphere as well as at

the level of work, politics and society (Foucault,

1982b). Among these ways of being, there are two

that are especially relevant for understanding the

governance of conducts in modern times: first, self-

examination, as an effort at self-acknowledgement

and the objectification of oneself in relation to

oneself; second, the confession that, supported by the

will to know as expressed in the first, assumes the

obligation of verbalizing to others the truth regard-

ing oneself (Foucault, 1980b; 1982c). For instance,

the role of confession in organizations has been

operated by personnel counseling and group

dynamics technologies that facilitate the re-fabrica-

tion of identities. It is by considering such practices

that Foucault is able to consider the self not as being

singular and determined but rather as something that

is actively and creatively produced in a reflexive

relation to one-self, to others and to society.

Foucault’s notion of the self’s relation to the self

can be seen in the contemporary spread of ‘‘consul-

tation’’ practices, best represented as ‘‘psy[sci]ences’’

(Rose, 1989, 1996) – psychology, psychiatry, psy-

chotherapy and so forth. Foucault argues that the

development of these disciplines provide practical

advice to guide oneself, achieve success and find

happiness. Such texts are certainly a key part of

management theory and practice from its early

inception as a science of engineering design, oriented

to the new men of modernity, the disciplined factory

workers (e.g. Foucault, 1982b, 1984b; Taylor, 1911).

As Foucault pointed out, these are

[...] texts written for the purpose of offering rules,

opinions, and advice on how to behave as one

should: ‘‘practical’’ texts, which are themselves

objects of a ‘‘practice’’ in that they were designed

to be read, learned, reflected upon, and tested out,

and they were intended to constitute the eventual

framework of everyday conduct. These texts thus

served as functional devices that would enable

individuals to question their own conduct, to

watch over and give shape to it, and to shape

themselves as ethical subjects... (Foucault, 1984b:

12–13)

The self’s relation to itself is one whereby people are

able to reflexively consider themselves as ‘‘selves’’

that can be modified or even improved. In this sense,

various forms of self-reflection are geared to enable a

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity 49

person to define both who s/he is and who s/he

aspires to be. In this sense, the individual is consti-

tuted as a moral subject on the basis of self-ordering

knowledge that permits one to discover oneself as

responsible for one’s own acts, and consequently, as

a free individual that may shift the limits that define

one’s being, modifying certain behaviours in order

to constitute oneself in another way. Such a form of

self-subjection is also assisted by highly diverse

expert knowledges, especially those centring their

attention on individual behaviour and interior con-

duct. Their recommendations assist individuals to

find themselves, providing rules of conduct with

which to act as they should. Without the existence

of such knowledge outside of the individual, no

notion of self would be possible. Conduct is guided

through a certain moral code that establishes basic

norms for judging one’s vocation and aptitude, and

for understanding intentions and actions.

In terms of the notion of subjectivity described

above, contemporary management practices, such as

teamwork and empowerment, are illustrative cases

in point (Styhre, 2001). Teamwork, for example, is

not commonly considered to be a mechanism of

power, although, recent theory has suggested the

contrary (Barker, 1993; Sewell, 1998). As Sewell

notes, teamwork is usually associated with the

rhetoric of empowerment, trust and enhanced dis-

cretion and sometimes it is thought of as ‘‘giving

away’’ power. There is, indeed, a flood of popular

management books whose message is cast in terms of

this normative rhetoric, as analysis by Barley and

Kunda (1992) demonstrates, texts often espousing

single-answer solutions for harried managers. These

include TQM (Total Quality Management), BPR

(Business Process Reengineering), kaizen, organiza-

tional learning and lean production. What all of

these methods have in common, Sewell (1998)

suggests, is a reversal of the highly individualistic

approach to the employee that earlier perspectives

such as scientific management had championed.

Rather than isolate, observe, and individually mea-

sure the times taken by individuals for doing stan-

dardized tasks and discouraging them from

communicating with others while doing so, the new

approach encourages communication and sociability.

In so doing, teamwork does not abolish politics but

relies on what Barker (1993) terms ‘‘concertive

control’’ – a horizontal mode of surveillance.

Following Foucault, this new form of govern-

mentality constitutes subjectivity in different ways

(Foucault, 1983; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994;

Townley, 1993, 1994), and frames possible ethics

differently. According to Sthyre (2001) such man-

agement techniques represent technologies of the

self that shape individual’s striving to be empowered,

intelligent and creative employees. Such govern-

mental techniques do two things: they constitute

subjectivity and they frame the limits in which ethics

is discussed and enacted. Thus, while such practices

are not a form of domination from which workers

might be liberated, they still enact forms of gov-

ernmental power that ‘‘no longer involve a coercive

practice, but a practice of self-formation of the

subject’’ (Foucault, 1984a/1997: 282). As Sthyre

(2001) shows, kaizen, for example, triggers a work

ethic that values creativity, flexibility and coopera-

tion. Whether individual conduct is ethical or not is

a question that can only be answered within the

(discursive) frame developed by empowering man-

agement techniques. A ‘‘bureaucratically’’ ethical

subject (see du Gay, 2000) adhering to rules would

look ‘‘unethical’’ in this new context. Thus, it is

power relations and their embeddedness in man-

agement techniques (including techniques to resist

them) that first frame possible ethical positions for an

individual. For a manager operating in such a con-

text, the possibilities for them to be regarded as (and

to regard themselves as) ethical are circumscribed by

the practices and relationships that they find them-

selves in organizationally – even when those prac-

tices might be resisted or subverted.

Culture and ethics

To be a person imbued with subjectivity means

relating one’s self to some form of self-knowledge

as well as knowledge by and of others. As we have

illustrated in our discussion so far, a key part of this

concerns how a person comes to regard themself as

a subject. Importantly, however, being able to

think of oneself as a subject is not done indepen-

dently, but in relation to others who also have a

self-regard as subjects and who might seek to

influence one’s own subjectivity. In this sense,

power is extremely important for clarifying the

ethical relations between different people. Such

50 Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al.

relations are typically associated with behaviour in

the workplace, a field of force delimited by the

rules of calculation and the procedures that govern

the behaviour of individuals and delimit their col-

lective action in such contexts. Power is exercised

over subjects in order to manage their conduct and

govern their action within an organized space. But

its focus is not so much on the individual subjec-

tivity as on the relation between people and how

to shape these relations. In other words, ethics not

only constitutes the subject in relation to itself but

also through governing possible relations between

subjects.

In contemporary times, a key way in which

organizations have sought to govern relationships

between members is through culture. Peters and

Waterman (1982), for example suggested that

organizations should be governed by a shared, clear

and compelling normative order that they referred

to as a ‘‘strong culture’’. Such an approach, how-

ever, is problematic because it does not account for

the possibility of an active ethical subjectivity, in-

stead always assuming that individual action is

(over)determined by the organization. Thus the

language of corporate culture programmes appears as

a means of controlling the choices and identities

open to employees (Willmott, 1993). At one ex-

treme, this suggests that everything must be subor-

dinated to the greater good of the corporate culture

and that only within its frame can organization

members find freedom and value. Despite such

claims of what organizational power might aspire to

be, in practice, the relationships between people and

organizations are more complex. Chan (2003), for

example, stresses the contingent character of power

relations in which there is no place for determinism

because history is written daily by the relations,

events, and accidents that characterize everyday life

activities. Thought of in this way, strong culture are

not easily engineered, and function mainly as an

argument (the power of saying) to question actions of

the other, those ‘‘abnormals’’ who do not accept the

values ‘‘of’’ the organization. In practice, culture

consists of loosely negotiated, tacit ways of making

sense that are embedded in specific situations in the

organization rather than an all enveloping structure

that somehow contains all who are members. Being

a member doesn’t necessarily mean accepting the

formal rhetoric of an organization; indeed, one can

imagine few people whose acceptance of organiza-

tionally sanctioned cultural values is complete and

unquestioning as empirical case studies of ‘‘divided

mangers’’ have shown (Knights and Murray, 1994).

Despite the constraints that organizations might

place on people’s ethical conduct, these never totally

determine an individual’s personal stance. As Bevir

(1999) explains, ‘‘because different people adopt

different beliefs and perform different actions against

the background of the same social structure, there

must be an undecided space in front of these struc-

tures where individual subjects decide what beliefs to

hold and what actions to perform for reasons of their

own’’ (p. 358). Ethics are located within such a

space, we suggest. In this sense we each regulate a

position within the cultural spaces created for and

around us. Because culture is overwhelmingly situ-

ational, it will usually be quite fragmentary, forming

around certain emergent issues and then dissolving,

unfolding in process. Ethical judgements are always

situated, and, as such, rarely accord with either

formal rules or strong cultures as their surrogate,

except perhaps in ideological or values inspired

organizations, such as those with faith-based reli-

gious values or sectarian political ideologies. Orga-

nizations present people with boundless opportunities to

reinvent themselves ethically (Schwartz, 1999), even if

the accomplishment is somewhat more difficult. In

organizations, the power exercised through net-

works of relations among people is not something

separate from the ability to fashion oneself as an

ethical subject.

Seeing people as active and ethical subjects

operating through power and governmentality,

rather than as being at the mercy of organizationally

dictated ethics, enables a consideration of organiza-

tional ethics in relation to both individuality and

organizational control. The ability of a person to be

regarded, and to regard themselves as an ethical

subject depends on their relationship to others as

well as the ways in which regimes of governmen-

tality constitutes these relations in organizations. For

instance, Taylorism produced subjects who saw

themselves as possessive individuals vying against

others regarded the same, competing to maximize

production bonuses. Thus, ethics is ‘‘part of both the

history of subjectivity and the history of govern-

mentality’’ (Davidson, 1994). On the basis of our

discussion, we suggest that ethics cannot be con-

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity 51

sidered as being either organizationally driven or

individually driven; rather, the individual (regarded

as such) is a result of the governmental conjuncture

of self, others, and organizations. As such, ethics are

not a result of the actions of a self-contained human

essence that is restrained by organizations. Such a

view would, itself, be an effect of a specific ethical

constitution by a particular regime of governmen-

tality. Instead, the ethical subject is one who seeks

creative relations in the world (Bernauer and

Mahon, 1994), especially those that enable them to

be reflexive about their own and others constitution.

Concluding comments

The approach to Foucault’s ethics we have discussed

in this paper has important implications for the study

of ethics in organizations. Ethics cannot be consid-

ered only in terms of the organization but must be

considered in terms of the relationship between

governmental practices and the way they enable

people to fashion themselves into being particular

types of subjects. Further, understanding ethics is

concerned with the ways that people exercise free-

dom in relation to those practices. In this sense,

business ethics becomes a practice of ‘‘re-forming

structures of recognition constitutive of subjectivity

and uncovering new ways of acting and being ... [by]

... engaging with organizational realities of power

(and possibly of change)’’ (Chan and Garrick, 2002:

693).

Ethics are not something controlled by organiza-

tions through rules, codes of conducts and govern-

mental practices, because that control will always be

mediated through at least a modicum of freedom to

be reflexive as one constitutes ones self as a governed

subject. Conversely, relying solely on a notion of

absolute or transcendental ethical freedom is no way

to view ethics because individuality can only ever be

achieved in relation to others and to the possible

disciplinary and governmental regimes socially

enacted. It is in the relationship between the indi-

vidual and the organization that persons, as they are

constituted organizationally, become organization-

ally ethical. Of course, they may bring extra-

organizational learning to the situation (Bible class,

Koranic teaching, the Torah, or whatever). This

situatedness of practice has important implications

for understanding the ethics of organizational man-

agement. Indeed, this suggests a research program

that abandons analyses of whether management and

managers are ethical or unethical, per se, and that

eschews a theory that uses ethics as a mechanism of

power that passes judgment on the ethics of others.

Instead, what can be imagined is a research agenda

that is concerned with understanding the present,

and with appreciating how people make sense of

situations as ethically charged and to which spheres

of knowledge they make reference to in so doing.

The issue to be raised, we suggest, is power’s

constitutive effect on ethics. Thus, we argue that

power be considered as central in any discussion of

ethics in organizations; not in terms of whether

power’s exercise be judged as ethical or not, but

rather in terms of how power enables different forms

of ethics. Thus, power should not be regarded as

something to which ethics can be analytically ap-

plied, but rather ethics should be considered as being

embedded in the power relations that constitute

organizations. Here ethics is powerful in that it

influences, and is influenced by, people’s sense of self

and ethicality. We are not dealing with a meta-

physical ethics that floats, transcendentally, high

above the mundane world of practice; instead,

through Foucault, we suggest an approach that res-

olutely sees ethics as a form of practice enacted by

managers and embedded in organizations. We pro-

pose that ethics resides in what people actually do

when they engage with ethics and how that doing is

manifested in relationships between self, others and

organizations. Ethics are a socially constructed real-

ity, and it is through an analysis of the process of

construction that we might reveal the practice of

ethics. By understanding ethics as practice we seek to

understand how this ethical reality is actually fabri-

cated.

By way of conclusion, we suggest that Foucault’s

theorization of ethics vis-a-vis freedom and gov-

ernmentality has the potential to open up new pos-

sibilities for theory and research since it makes it

possible to consider administration as an act of

government, and organizations as spaces for relations

between forces in which diverse modes of existence

and ethical projects confront each other (Clegg et al.,

2002; Pitsis et al., 2003). Rather than considering

ethics as being locked in a confrontation between

52 Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al.

individuals and organizations, it enables a consider-

ation of ethics in terms of the mutually constitutive

relationship between the two. Ethical practice, for

Foucault, concerns an ‘‘aesthetics of existence’’ – in

this sense to be an ethical subject requires a ‘‘practice

of the self’’ – a procedure of self-creation and self-

transformation. It is this shift of attention away from

‘‘an ethics discourse grounded in maxims and

practical reason (ethical saying) to an ethics discourse

premised on human existence as an aesthetic phe-

nomenon (ethical showing)’’ (Chan and Garrick,

2002: 695, italics in original) which is important. A

person exercises critical judgment in relation to those

beliefs and practices that s/he encounters – including

those beliefs and practices that others might claim as

moral. As management practices in organizations

have demonstrated so long, such claims have no

transcendental basis, however.

Acknowledgments

This article is part of a larger research project into

the nature of business ethics as practice that is part-

ly funded by the Australia Research Council and

the Austrian Science Fund FWF. Martin would

like to thank Stephan Laske, Silke Seemann and

other colleagues at the University of Innsbruck for

their input on this project.

Note

1 Although not the specific focus of this paper, it is

worth noting that numerous contemporary European

thinkers other than Foucault have reflected on Kant’s

critical philosophy and developed quite different projects

as a result (e.g. Arendt, Lyotard and Habermas). Amongst

these, it is Habermas’ Kantian notion of critique that is

most antithetical to that of Foucault. While Foucault

develops a ‘critical ontology’ of self-formation and self-

legislation, Habermas takes on the Kantian project of cri-

tique more wholeheartedly and uses it to develop his

conception of ‘‘critical theory’’ (Hutchings, 1995).

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Eduardo Ibarra-Colado

Jefe del Departamento de Estudios Institucionales,

UAM-Cuajimalpa,

Mexico

E-mail: eic@estudios-institucionales-uamc.org

Stewart R. Clegg

School of Management,

University of Technology,

Sydney,

Australia

E-mail: stewart.clegg@uts.edu.au

Carl Rhodes

School of Management,

University of Technology,

Sydney,

Australia

E-mail: carl.rhodes@uts.edu.au

Martin Kornberger

School of Management,

University of Technology,

Sydney,

Australia

E-mail: martin.kornberger@uts.edu.au

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity 55