The Dilemma of Postmodern Business Ethics: Employee Reification in a Perspective of Preserving Human Dignity

Abstract

Management practices prevailing in business organizations receive considerable criticism for often treating the employee as one of many resources or an instrument to achieve the organization’s goals. As employee reification has so far been largely investigated in the scientific literature from the perspective of neo-Marxist approach, this article seeks to broaden the discussion by showing how social teaching of the Catholic Church can serve to solve the problem of reification. Although there is no doubt that universal norms of business ethics can serve as protection of the employee dignity from the individual’s reification tendencies, moral relativism operating in postmodern life tends to call into question any universal moral norms. Therefore, this article discusses how responses to challenges posed by moral relativism can be obtained by applying methodological approaches proposed by the neo-Marxist classics Lukács, Honneth, and Catholic Social Teaching. The similarities and differences of these approaches are identified, and attention is also drawn to the possibilities and limitations of their application in business ethics practice. It is also demonstrated how understanding of human dignity and the attitude to a virtue, offered by social teaching of the Catholic Church, broadens the discussion on addressing the dangers posed by the person’s reification in organizations.

Moral laxity – the cognitive gap between true and pseudo corporate social responsibility

“…First, in our paper, we argued that CSR evolves over time, but still, we have an uncertain understanding of it due to lack of a widely agreed definition of what CSR is and precise conceptualization of it (Frankental, 2001; Wan‐Jan, 2006; Graafland and Zhang, 2014) that reflects the dynamics and complexity of the nature and context of the problem (Sheehy, 2015). Second, drawing upon postmodern philosophy to bridge the moral laxity gap is another limitation of this study, because the postmodern approach itself has limits in providing a universal ethical principle (Vveinhardt, 2022; Mansell, 2008). Although CSR’s formulation is somewhat inevitable, however, the sense of responsibility goes beyond the rule-based ethics (Mansell, 2008) which places a burden on researchers in the postmodern approach, including us, to come up with a concrete solution.…”

Employee Experience, Occupational Health, and Organizational Supportive Factors: From an Integrated Perspective

“…These elements have different orientations. For example, some elements focus on coercive control, e.g., punishment, system monitoring, and rules, while some elements focus on the support for employees ' development of attitudes and commitment, e.g., ethical training and ethics codes (Weaver et al, 1999;Michaelson and Tosti-Kharas, 2019;Teresi et al, 2019;Hauser, 2020;Vveinhardt, 2022). In the framework of Merchant and Van der Stede (2012), the organization control system is categorized into personnel and culture control practices, action control practices, and result control practices.…”

Ethical Business Decision-Making in Organizations: A Theoretical Perspectives

“…Business ethics are the set of principles and values that guide how people and organizations act in the business world. Fairness, accountability, integrity and regard for others' rights are a few of these (Joseph, 2023;Veinhardt, 2022). Ethics must come first for any business that hopes to survive and thrive.…”