Abstract
This article examines how the textual rendering of the non-Western Other in Business Ethics in the West often remains a misrepresentation. Informed by the Derridean ethico-political project on writing/violence and ethics, the article analyzes the writing of this Other in Western academic production of Business Ethics, through a consideration of writing on the Buddhist doctrine of karma. It shows that this writing makes the Other’s presence in (writing) Business Ethics an absence–presence. The article argues that what is absent in such writing/text is not the Other, but the context in which the Other exists. Calling this absence–presence the “contextual violence of text”, the article shows how the Orientalist or arche-violence/writing amalgamates with Business Ethics where the latter appears to be an apparatus of founding mythic violence. Nevertheless, it does not claim that the present aporia of writing the non-Western Other in Western academic production of Business Ethics makes ethics impossible. Rather, it shows that this same writing/violence opens up a passage to ethics/the Other that is nevertheless a non-ethical opening of ethics. In conclusion, the article argues that writing the non-Western Other in writing Business Ethics in the West appears more ethico-political than epistemic and linguistic.
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16 February 2023
Distorted sentences on section “'Derrida, Writing and Violence" has been corrected.
Notes
It should be noted that no context is fixed, but is always in process. Accordingly, for example, Iranian middle-class women, who veiled in the early 1900s, chose to unveil from 1936 to 1979 and reveil during and after the Islamic Revolution. And they are now defying the imposed veiling by Islamic authorities (Mohanty 1991; Sedghi 2007; Swash 2022).
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Jayawardena, D. Writing, Violence and Writing the Non-Western Other in Business Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Alterity. Philosophy of Management 22, 521–538 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-022-00228-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-022-00228-x