I use this paper to reflect upon the ethics and politics of Critical Management Studies (CMS) research. I highlight a potential for problematic power relations in CMS and, drawing upon Foucault's (1976) `five methodological precautions' for analysing power, I explore these power relations as an effect of the micro-constitution of `subordinate' and `superior' subject positions within the research process. Through detailed analysis of a research interview transcript I illustrate how the researched's `subordinate' and researcher's `superior' subject positions may be constructed as an outcome of normal and well-intentioned CMS research.
Fournier and Grey (2000) suggest that those inhabiting the contested terrain of Critical Management Studies (CMS) share a commitment to identifying inequality and subordination in organizations and to the associated possibility of emancipation, however this is conceived. Despite their additional claim that one crucial distinction between critical and non-critical management studies is the 'philosophical and methodological reflexivity' of the former (Fournier and Grey 2000: 19), our review indicates limits to this reflexivity in CMS's empirical practices -indeed, we argue these may even be counter-productive with regard to its political allegiances. To encourage wider discussion of these issues, we provide a tripartite framework of understandings of research ethics drawn from within and outside the management academy, and interrogate the opportunities and limitations of each for enriching CMS research.
Noting that from its very inception Organization laid claim to having a central interest in the ethics and politics of organization, in this article we review contributions to the Journal over the past 20 years in order to consider the ethical thinking that has developed. We suggest that there is a common thread of ethical interest that characterizes much of this work--one that clearly differentiates it from more conventional approaches to business ethics. While business ethics has as its locus of interest the ethicality of organizations themselves, central issues that have emerged in Organization concern how individuals might (or might not) maintain a valued experience of themselves as ethical subjects despite the behaviour of organizations, and how organizational arrangements might be politically contested in the name of ethics. We explore this in relation to a question that unites much of the study of ethics in Organization: how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference? We consider this question in terms of the issue of ethical subjectivity and the relation between an ethics of consensus and an ethics of difference. The article concludes much as the Journal started--with the proposal that ethics remains a pressing challenge for critical scholarship and practice.
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