We Are Boiling: Management Scholars Speaking Out on COVID-19 and Social Justice

Abstract

COVID-19 is the most immediate of several crises we face as human beings: crises that expose deeply-rooted matters of social injustice in our societies. Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our crises are laying bare. Contributors to this article draw attention to the way that the pandemic has highlighted long-standing examples of injustice, from inequality to racism, gender, and social discrimination through environmental injustice to migratory workers and modern slaves. They consider the fact that few management scholars have raised their voices in protest, at least partly because of the ideological underpinnings of the discipline, and the fact these need to be challenged.

‘Running Towards the Bullets’: Moral Injury in Critical Care Nursing in the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…We set out in this article to respond to recent calls to explore the experience of ICU nurses during the pandemic (Greenberg & Tracy, 2020; WHO, 2020). We took up the challenge to do so through the lens of moral injury (Čartolovni et al, 2021) and to do so empirically by giving a voice to the nurses who have given so much in recent years but have, for the most part, been unheard victims of a health system that takes advantage of people's willingness to do difficult and traumatizing labour for relatively low wages (Peredo et al, 2022) – exploiting nurses as ‘Willing Slaves’ (Bunting, 2004). We now offer theoretical and practical contributions of our study that we believe further the debate and deepen understanding of moral injury in frontline healthcare specifically and relation to work that traumatizes or injures more generally.…”

“…We do so by providing a voice to an essential but largely unheard (and in some cases, silenced) group of workers during the pandemic: ICU nursesamplifying their experiences of cumulative moral injury in an organizational context, focusing on the emotional and psychological consequences in the workplace. In doing so, we respond to calls within this journal to speak out against social injustices that the pandemic has brought into focus, telling the stories of an overworked and underpaid profession within the modern workforce (Peredo et al, 2022).…”

Theorizing as Mode of Engagement in and through Extreme Contexts Research

“…When this occurs, a researcher can become incited to direct their efforts at regulatory change and institutional activism to safeguard marginalized individuals and groups and promote their interests (Bapuji et al, 2020). We suggest that extreme disruptive events that have motivated researchers in this way include the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh (Chowdhury, 2017a), the Beirut port explosion (Creed et al, 2022) and, for some researchers, the Covid-19 pandemic (Peredo et al, 2022).…”

Feminist Theories and Activist Practices in Organization Studies

“…Transnational feminist frameworks provide the theoretical and activist resources to consider those living the most precarious and vulnerable gendered, racialized and classed lives and the ways in which organizations produce such inequalities, as well as considering the diversity of stakeholders which can also be resources for future change (cf. Ozkazanc-Pan in Peredo et al, 2022). This requires rethinking Western conceptions of modernity with its impact on the geopolitics of knowledge production and what counts as knowledge as deeply imbricated in the structures of its colonial domination over the rest of the world, discussed next.…”

“…The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed women further into precarity (Akhter, Elias, & Rai, 2022; Arruzza, Bhattacharya, & Fraser, 2019; Özkazanç-Pan & Pullen, 2020), particularly in geo-political contexts which experience land theft and climate vulnerability, and where violence to women is normalized. In a recent article, ‘We are boiling’, Ana Maria Peredo et al (2022) discuss how Covid-19 is the latest crisis that ‘expose deeply rooted matters of social injustice in our societies’ and that ‘Management scholars have not been encouraged to address the role that business, as we conduct it and consider it as scholars, has played in creating the crises and fostering the injustices our crises are laying bare’. Such injustice stems, Peredo et al argue, ‘from inequality to racism, gender, and social discrimination through environmental injustice to migratory workers and modern slaves’.…”