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This paper serves two purposes. It is an introduction to the theme of this issue of Society and Business Review which is devoted to “Phenomenological approaches to work, life and responsibility” as well as a presentation of the authors' various contributions. The authors of this paper share the sentiment that management sciences and practices may drive us in a way such that the sense of life has been altered and people, contrary to Kant's definition of moral behavior, are treated as means instead of ends. Moreover, starting from a widely‐spread malaise in modern organizations, they argue how phenomenology can provide us with an approach that can be helpful in assessing our present situation as well as getting a renewed perception concerning work and life.

The authors demonstrate the relevance of Husserl's phenomenology in criticizing management techniques for they direct us to objectives that are abstract, calculable, not one's own, and distant. They single out Husserl's concept of epoche for its high relevance with the theme of this issue and its different papers.

The findings suggest Husserl's concept of epoche (suspension) can be considered as the starting point of a process allowing us to firstly take distance with our usual taken for granted assumptions regarding life and work (bracketing) and then to re‐establish a genuine connection with Husserl's “world of life”. In addition, they establish how epoche can be perceived as a hub linking and introducing the work of other researchers comprising this special issue and their various inspiring authors (Koselleck, Levinas, Henry).

By using a phenomenological perspective, this paper brings an original contribution to critical‐management approaches. It can contribute to a social responsibility renewal in the business arena by providing reflexive practitioners with clues that can trigger new and more human practices. Overall, this paper provides one as a human being an opportunity to analyze the causes of one's malaise and identify better ways to live one's life.

This paper aims to answer the following question: where does our capacity for epoche, for decentration, for suspending representations come from? This question is an important one if we accept, as phenomenology does, that this is how we can find the meaning of our life and our actions.

In order to answer this question the paper undertakes a critical genealogy of what those in the Western world consider to be the real, stressing how much Western thought overestimates the reality of what can be seen, measured, and calculated, and underestimates the experience of interiority by silencing the real dynamic of development of each person's lives.

Following on from Michel Henry's phenomenology the paper shows how epoche, decentring is precisely about paying attention to this very real dynamic of development of life with others. Suspending for a while the representations and calculations and allowing people to be guided by such dynamic is therefore totally justified. Moreover, because it is fully embodied, this dynamic gives us the power and strength to engage in reasonable and responsible action. Two experiences recounted by managers illustrate this point.

The paper shows that phenomenological epoche is not about speculation, it is not idealism, but a totally realistic, practicable choice.

This conceptual paper analyses cultural changes in the use of the concept of “play” in managerial ideologies and practices since the 1980s.

The paper uses Koselleck's approach to conceptual history in order to map how play is used in new ways by contemporary organisations. Organisational cultures characterised by “playfulness” and “fun” are used as technologies of self‐governance. It explores a variety of sources which show how this metamorphosis of play into a management tool has occurred.

The appropriation of play by management indicates a significant propensity in the contemporary culture of work. A more complex cultural process is unfolding in the ways in which play and work are recombined and intertwined: work organisations are increasingly places where people work more on themselves than they do on work. Work has become a central therapeutic stage set for engineering and managing souls, well‐being and even “happiness”. In an increasing number of cases, highly managed play settings make corporations resemble frenetic Dionysiac machines in which the Narcissistic modern self seeks an utopia of perpetual fun.

The paper proposes a novel approach to critiques of managerialism. Equally, it offers a new conceptual avenue for the historical analysis of managerial ideas. The result is an original interpretation of the way in which management practices function in their wider cultural contexts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper consists in rethinking today's management systems in order to look for ways of management which are better adapted to human life. It is assumed that a management practice which takes into consideration the characteristics of human life must be accepted by a large number of people and would be effective and sustainable. Today, the overdevelopment of science and capitalism forget individuals and condemn them to alienation. To cope with this problem, the paper tries to identify ways of management which respect human life more.

To do this, the paper studies the phenomenology of life of Michel Henry and Zen Buddhism in order to understand the profound sense of life, knowledge and community developed by their philosophy. It then examines Toyotism and Fordism under the two dimensions of knowledge and community to illustrate how their management system considers human life.

The phenomenology of life and Zen share some common ground as both consider the importance of experienced life which constitutes the individual's subjectivity. Living experience generates embodied and tacit knowledge for men. The system of Kaizen which enables Toyota to develop significantly is based on its workers' tacit knowledge. In this dimension, Toyotism is a management system which recognizes better than Fordism the importance of living experiences and as such is better suited to human nature. The paper then discusses Toyotism, Fordism and post‐Fordism in the light of the concept of community. Toyotism appears as a constraining “total community,” whereas attempts to reintroduce a sense of community into the post‐Fordist model reveal its limits due to the fact that such a sense of community does not exist at a company level.

The originality of this paper lies in its comparison of the phenomenology of life with Zen in order to understand the importance of life and also in the introduction of the consideration of living workers in managerial performance.

This question of community has always been a preoccupation for the human sciences and, indeed, is a practical concern for us everyday humans in our variety ways of being. As such a preoccupation with community traverses vast territories of intellectual discourse in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth. Recent developments in continental philosophy, innovations in information and communication technology and the emergence of “virtual” communities afford an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of community in what is believed to be a rather fundamental way. Virtual communities are often critiqued for being “thin” and “shallow” lacking the depth that local proximity in face‐to‐face communities brings. It is suggested that such a critique privileges a certain view of community premised upon shared values, or shared concerns, embedded in local situated face‐to‐face interaction and practices. The paper agues that such a view of community, based on categorical and physical proximity or sameness, can be problematised by a notion of community that is based on the ethical proximity of the stranger, the otherness of the Other.

The paper draws upon Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

The paper demonstrates that community premised upon a categorical and physical proximity can be problematised by a conception of community based upon the ethical proximity of the stranger – the otherness of the Other. In developing this notion of community, the paper argues that communities always face an insider/outsider problematic that mirrors Levinas' tension between ethics and justice. Furthermore, the paper suggests that the continual working out of this problem, our ethical concern, is differently constituted in virtual communities and face‐to‐face communities. In particular, the paper draws attention to the importance of the encounter with the stranger in virtual environments.

Contributes to debates on community by developing an ethical and political philosophy through which a shared sense of community can be rethought through the primacy of the Other.

I. The Gendarmerie: Historical Background The Gendarmerie is the senior unit of the French Armed Forces. It is, however, difficult to give a precise date to its creation. What can be asserted is that as early as the Eleventh Century special units existed under the sénéchal (seneschal), an official of the King's household who was entrusted with the administration of military justice and the command of the army. The seneschal's assistants were armed men known as sergents d'armes (sergeants at arms). In time, the office of the seneschal was replaced by that of the connétable (constable) who was originally the head groom of the King's stables, but who became the principal officer of the early French kings before rising to become commander‐in‐chief of the army in 1218. The connétable's second in command was the maréchal (marshal). Eventually, the number of marshals grew and they were empowered to administer justice among the soldiery and the camp followers in wartime, a task which fully absorbed them throughout the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). The corps of marshals was then known as the maréchaussée (marshalcy) and its members as sergeants and provosts. One of the provosts, Le Gallois de Fougières, was killed at Agincourt in 1415; his ashes were transferred to the national memorial to the Gendarmerie, which was erected at Versailles in 1946.

The aim of this paper is to find the relationship between the purely representational aspects of the statements of account and the everyday lived experiences of those who were directly affected by the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in India in 1984. The paper seeks to consider the rhetorical force of photography in capturing the tragic and to compare this with the position adopted by Union Carbide in accounting for the catastrophe.

The paper reviews the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and draws on the works of Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe and Julia Kristeva to examine the relationship between photographic representation and statements of account.

The rhetorical character of the ways in which the tragedy has been represented and the impact of the photographic image when set against the statement of account is considered. The photographic image is an attempt to restore the body to the text, to bear in mind that, in the face of inevitable abstract, it is important to remember the body, albeit with the caveat that the image too succumbs to the force of rhetoric. Nonetheless, the image reminds one that one is dealing not only with figures and statements but also with life and death.

The paper contributes to discussions about the need for a dialogic approach to accounting. Frequently, in disaster analysis, the co‐existence of multiple perspectives and fragmented stories i.e. a dialogic approach, is paramount to gaining an insight into the complexity of the system which has failed. The paper demonstrates how images can complement cosy, coherent, monologic statements of accounts and help to retain the human character of disaster.

The purpose of this paper is to capture legitimising principles of recent successions to the throne through narrative time. Further, this study considers leaders’ sense-giving to succession.

This research applies a “temporal narrative analysis” to explicate legitimising principles of narrative time in three recent case studies of royal succession: the kingdoms of Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The findings show that royal successions in three modern European constitutional monarchies are legitimised through giving sense to narrative time. The legitimacy of timing succession is embedded in multiple temporal narratives, in which heirs apparent are brought forward as the new generation who will modernise the monarchy.

The paper presents an innovative conceptual framework of sense-giving to succession through narrative time. This framework will be helpful to scholars who aim to grasp legitimising principles of temporal narration in leadership succession.

The paper aims to query the value of strategies implemented, notably in France, and to demonstrate the largely ignored link between demographics and economics.

The paper achieves its objective by comparing statistics of European Union (EU) members and competitors to reveal that traditional views on economics and social policy may no longer apply.

The paper finds that the Old Europe stagnated due to political lack of will, but a renewed Europe has begun. The Euro as scapegoat for poor performance is dismissed. Productivity figures show how foreign trade and debt can be efficiently managed. Overall, trade must be encouraged worldwide. Low‐wage countries will inevitably compete and cannot ethically be ignored. The subsidy debate heats up as the EU agricultural policy ends and the USA extends Farm Aid. Regardless, EU members must focus on sustainable development. The low birthrate in the Old Europe means social policy should be reformed to encourage families to have children and allow selective immigration to meet labour needs. The implication is that France – Europe in general – must review the EU mission and structure. The French president seems to be headed in this direction. In future research, demographics must be monitored to make social and economic plans for the working lives of our youth and retirement of our seniors.

This paper will interest economists, politicians and policy‐makers, especially those unaware of the role of demographics in productivity and planning.