Journal of Business Ethics (2006) 64: 4555 DOI 10.

1007/s10551-005-3325-z

Springer 2006

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity

Eduardo Ibarra-Colado Stewart R. Clegg Carl Rhodes Martin Kornberger

ABSTRACT. This paper examines ethics in organizations 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 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 noma de Me xico. He is a National Universidad Nacional Auto Researcher of the Mexican National System of Researchers, and regular member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. One of his best recognized books is La universidad en xico hoy: gubernamentalidad y modernizacio n [The Me Mexican University Today: Governmentality and Modernization], which won the Autonomous Metropolitan 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 elds of Organization Studies and Higher Education Studies in Mexico and Internationally. He is currently working on a research Project on Corporate Ethics, Corruption and Governance, paying particular attention to the case of Mexico. Stewart R. Clegg completed a rst 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 Collaborations, Alliances and Networks Research), a Key University 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

prescribed principles assumed to guide personal action. In this way we see ethics as a practice that is powerfully intertwined in an individuals 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 recent book is Managing and Organizations: an introduction 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 organizations in popular culture. Carl is author of Writing Organization: (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.

46 Introduction

Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al. ual, such a consideration is always done in relation to others (Manseld, 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 organizations control either formally or informally instead they are a complex and mutually constituting relationship between the two. Foucaults work is valuable because his concern for ethics is principally about how people constitute themselves as moral subjects of their actions (Foucault 1984d) while, at the same time, being disciplined 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 reimagining and re-inventing the different ways in which people are self-constituted in relation to the institutions and procedures within which they operate (OLeary, 2002).

Being ethical has emerged in the early 21st century as one of the major challenges for organizations. In addressing this challenge, for researchers and managers 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 relationship 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, passions, 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 ethical 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 individuality 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. Specically, we use Foucaults 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 determined. 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-

Foucaults 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, Foucaults work can be regarded as a response to the traditions of Marxism

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity and phenomenology that dominated French intellectual 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 phenomenology, it was a response to a notion of truth as existing prior to the human subject (Danaher et al., 2000). In this context Foucaults work, following the philosophical lineage of Nietzsche and the methodological/historical legacy of Bloch, (Delacampagne, 1999), provides a historical critique of the presumed objectivity of scientic truth, and examines how subjectivity is created through the relations between language and power (Manseld, 2000). Foucault is also part of an intellectual lineage back to Kant while he breaks from Kantian transcendentalism, 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 historical 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 Foucaults later work that this concern with critique and subjectivity emerged in relation to the analysis of the self formation of an ethical subject (Rabinow, 2000). In this context, that Foucaults 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 themselves, 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 dened 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 transform 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

47

forming of the ethical subject without modes of subjectivation and an ascetics or practices of the self that support them (Foucault, 1984b: 28) Following such a denition, 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 principles 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 reection (Foucault, 1984a: 284). Foucaults 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 established between individual morality and organizational ethics. Foucaults 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 signicant effects of Foucaults 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 Foucaults own words, these regimes can be understood as the systems of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements (Foucault, 1980a: 132). Such procedures provide the discursive architecture through which different ways of understandings the world are

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Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al. 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 determine (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 individual ethical conduct are central to understanding how ethical conduct gets played out. Such relationships can best be understood in terms of Foucaults 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 relationship of the self to itself and the relationship to the other. [...] the concept of governmentality makes it possible to bring out the freedom of the subject and its relationship to others ` re] of ethwhich constitutes the very stuff [matie ics (Foucault, 1984a: 300). The value of the concept of governmentality lies in the possibilities it offers for examining the connections between power and ethics, which enable a connection between a political component (the governing of others, i.e. management) and a subjective 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 compromise that is set up in the proposed duality

sanctioned through statements which include ethical positioning. Thus, while persons necessarily operate within powerfully determining and institutionalized regimes of truth, Foucault concerns himself 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 nd themselves 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 instead concerns itself with how a manager denes 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, organizations 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 managerial behaviour are considered to be concerned with ethical judgement? Mode of Subjection In what ways do managers establish their relationships to ethical rules and obligations? Practices of the Self In what practices do managers engage in order to consider themselves ethical? Aspirations for the Self What are the ethics of the idealised managerial that managers aspire to?

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity 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 knowledge structures which seek to dene moral character and conduct in particular ways. Thus, it is through governmentality that we can anlyse the politicocultural relations woven by individuals, groups, organizations, systems of organizations and institutions in order to produce these spaces of practices and mentalities under certain modes of rationality.

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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, ones relation with oneself, and thus to the operations carried out in relation to ones 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 ones behaviour, with the aim of situating oneself and achieving ones 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 particular 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: rst, selfexamination, as an effort at self-acknowledgement and the objectication of oneself in relation to oneself; second, the confession that, supported by the will to know as expressed in the rst, assumes the obligation of verbalizing to others the truth regarding 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-fabrication 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 reexive relation to one-self, to others and to society. Foucaults notion of the selfs relation to the self can be seen in the contemporary spread of consultation practices, best represented as psy[sci]ences (Rose, 1989, 1996) psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and so forth. Foucault argues that the development of these disciplines provide practical advice to guide oneself, achieve success and nd 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: 1213) The selfs relation to itself is one whereby people are able to reexively consider themselves as selves that can be modied or even improved. In this sense, various forms of self-reection are geared to enable a

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Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al. Following Foucault, this new form of governmentality constitutes subjectivity in different ways (Foucault, 1983; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994; Townley, 1993, 1994), and frames possible ethics differently. According to Sthyre (2001) such management techniques represent technologies of the self that shape individuals striving to be empowered, intelligent and creative employees. Such governmental 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 governmental 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, exibility and cooperation. Whether individual conduct is ethical or not is a question that can only be answered within the (discursive) frame developed by empowering management 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 management techniques (including techniques to resist them) that rst frame possible ethical positions for an individual. For a manager operating in such a context, the possibilities for them to be regarded as (and to regard themselves as) ethical are circumscribed by the practices and relationships that they nd themselves in organizationally even when those practices might be resisted or subverted.

person to dene both who s/he is and who s/he aspires to be. In this sense, the individual is constituted as a moral subject on the basis of self-ordering knowledge that permits one to discover oneself as responsible for ones own acts, and consequently, as a free individual that may shift the limits that dene ones 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 conduct. Their recommendations assist individuals to nd 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 ones 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 discretion and sometimes it is thought of as giving away power. There is, indeed, a ood 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, organizational 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 scientic management had championed. Rather than isolate, observe, and individually measure the times taken by individuals for doing standardized 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.

Culture and ethics To be a person imbued with subjectivity means relating ones 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 independently, but in relation to others who also have a self-regard as subjects and who might seek to inuence ones own subjectivity. In this sense, power is extremely important for clarifying the ethical relations between different people. Such

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity relations are typically associated with behaviour in the workplace, a eld of force delimited by the rules of calculation and the procedures that govern the behaviour of individuals and delimit their collective 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 subjectivity 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, however, is problematic because it does not account for the possibility of an active ethical subjectivity, instead 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 extreme, this suggests that everything must be subordinated to the greater good of the corporate culture and that only within its frame can organization members nd 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 specic situations in the organization rather than an all enveloping structure that somehow contains all who are members. Being a member doesnt necessarily mean accepting the formal rhetoric of an organization; indeed, one can

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imagine few people whose acceptance of organizationally 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 peoples ethical conduct, these never totally determine an individuals 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 structures 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 situational, 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 religious values or sectarian political ideologies. Organizations present people with boundless opportunities to reinvent themselves ethically (Schwartz, 1999), even if the accomplishment is somewhat more difcult. In organizations, the power exercised through networks 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 organizational 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 governmentality 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 governmentality (Davidson, 1994). On the basis of our discussion, we suggest that ethics cannot be con-

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Eduardo Ibarra-Colado et al. situatedness of practice has important implications for understanding the ethics of organizational management. 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 powers 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 powers 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 applied, but rather ethics should be considered as being embedded in the power relations that constitute organizations. Here ethics is powerful in that it inuences, and is inuenced by, peoples sense of self and ethicality. We are not dealing with a metaphysical ethics that oats, transcendentally, high above the mundane world of practice; instead, through Foucault, we suggest an approach that resolutely sees ethics as a form of practice enacted by managers and embedded in organizations. We propose 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 reality, 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 fabricated. By way of conclusion, we suggest that Foucaults `-vis freedom and govtheorization of ethics vis-a ernmentality has the potential to open up new possibilities 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

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 specic ethical constitution by a particular regime of governmentality. Instead, the ethical subject is one who seeks creative relations in the world (Bernauer and Mahon, 1994), especially those that enable them to be reexive about their own and others constitution.

Concluding comments The approach to Foucaults ethics we have discussed in this paper has important implications for the study of ethics in organizations. Ethics cannot be considered 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 freedom 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 organizations through rules, codes of conducts and governmental practices, because that control will always be mediated through at least a modicum of freedom to be reexive 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 individual and the organization that persons, as they are constituted organizationally, become organizationally ethical. Of course, they may bring extraorganizational learning to the situation (Bible class, Koranic teaching, the Torah, or whatever). This

The Ethics of Managerial Subjectivity individuals and organizations, it enables a consideration 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 selftransformation. 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 phenomenon (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 partly 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
Although not the specic focus of this paper, it is worth noting that numerous contemporary European thinkers other than Foucault have reected on Kants 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 selflegislation, Habermas takes on the Kantian project of critique more wholeheartedly and uses it to develop his conception of critical theory (Hutchings, 1995).
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55 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

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,