This article deals with epistemological thoughts about business ethics. My intention is to consider business ethics as a research subject in anthropology and not to judge the relevance of the morality or ethics: in other words, the integration of activities in a “common good” category. The article examines the philosophical ground of this notion and explores whether business ethics is related to this philosophical background. While, from an anthropological point of view, it is better to draw a value judgment from the notion of “business ethics” (applicability, truthfulness, intentionality, and so on), the argument presented here is that it is better to consider “business ethics” as a category of work management at the meeting point between theory and practice, and to observe in situ how this notion is used, articulated and circulated in the daily life of a workplace.
Résumé Pour l’ethnologie de l’entreprise, l’immersion par l’occupation d’un poste de travail est une méthode privilégiée. Comment un ethnologue, dans cette situation d’enquête particulière, arrive-t-il à mener sa recherche lorsqu’il est pris dans un conflit social ? L’auteur montre, à partir d’une expérience ethnographique dans une entreprise de transports en commun, à Marseille en 1995, que la « neutralité » (par rapport aux acteurs de la grève) n’est obtenue que par l’engagement, par l’acte de se déclarer gréviste. Cependant, cette « neutralité » est d’emblée instrumentalisée, du fait de l’incompréhension de la posture de l’ethnologue par les informateurs. Cette situation devient intenable à son apogée, mais n’en demeure pas moins heuristique.
Gallenga, Ghislaine - Rhetorical aspects of interpersonal communication in work context: power and speech in a credit firm agency.
The anthropological study of rhetorics in firms allows an approach of power. The actors' speeches show how the power/speech articulation works through interactional situations, in which the everyday enunciation of the power structures of the firm faces the negotiated validation, within interpersonal communication, of individual authority as a legitimate pole of exercising power. Three rhetoric situations are analysed in terms of their context: address, reference and onomastic innovation. Ordinary conversations display subtle strategies of symbolic imposition or resistance whereby the hierarchy norms are neutralized without being actually thrown into question.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.