Financialisation and the ethical moment: Levinas and the encounter with business practice

Abstract

Purpose

The paper seeks to examine the tension between a Levinasian ethics and routine corporate activity in multinational business worlds. It investigates the calculative regimes around financialisation and places these against the absolute ethical responsibility to the other and the third, and the issues of justice and politics this produces.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on the notion of the deconstructive moment and uses this to investigate the ethics of key decision making by a medium‐sized international telco, Telecom New Zealand, in the construction of a submarine cable.

Findings

The paper details the irreconcilable ethical conflict between the acutely human responsibility of corporations and the sophisticated, dehumanising regimes of calculation which they both mobilise and in which they are embedded.

Originality/value

The authors utilise the notion of the deconstructive moment to investigate the ethics of corporate practice. They also show how this can be related not just to the other but to other others and to wider issues of justice.

Citation

Lewis, M. and Farnsworth, J. (2007), "Financialisation and the ethical moment: Levinas and the encounter with business practice", Society and Business Review, Vol. 2 No. 2, pp. 179-192. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680710757394