TY - JOUR AB - 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. VL - 2 IS - 2 SN - 1746-5680 DO - 10.1108/17465680710757394 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680710757394 AU - Lewis Malcolm AU - Farnsworth John ED - Eric Fay ED - Philippe Riot PY - 2007 Y1 - 2007/01/01 TI - Financialisation and the ethical moment: Levinas and the encounter with business practice T2 - Society and Business Review PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 179 EP - 192 Y2 - 2024/04/25 ER -