The Phenomenological Tradition: Experience, Body and Ethics

Abstract

This chapter presents the French tradition of phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas) in relation to business ethics and philosophy of management. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas provide us also with some existentialist concepts, but they go beyond that and help us to understand fundamental aspects of meaning creation in organizations and institutions. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body can be considered as a social theory of sense-making in organizations and institutions. This can be said to be further developed by Lévinas who proposed a phenomenological concept of ethics that contrasts with dominating positions of ethics in business. Lévinas contributed with an ethics of the close encounter that opens for infinite responsibility. With regard to organizations, this is another approach to ethics that challenges dominant utilitarian or deontological conceptions of ethics in business. With the phenomenological description of reality or cases in organizations the researcher can capture the normative aspects of situations and thereby combine ethics with ontological phenomenology through phenomenological case-studies. Phenomenological description provides us with a thick description of the human life-world, which includes its ethical dimension. Phenomenology can, therefore, be very important for analyzing cases in business ethics.