Individual Contribution to a Themed Symposium by Chiara Corvino¹, Matthijs P. Bal², Francesco Tommasi³
¹ Faculty of Economics, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Milano, Italy ² Lincoln University, Italy ³ Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 4
Session: 8
Abstract
This paper analyses violence in the workplace by considering both a macro, meso and micro-level perspective. In social sciences and in political philosophy, there is a longstanding debate on how to account for violence. Drawing on insights from Žižek’s perspective on systemic violence and Agamben’s philosophy of the Homo Sacer, we theorize violence in the workplace by combining both the macro, meso and the micro-level. In doing so, we assert that violence obscures our ethical understanding of the human, and while a systemic approach offers us an understanding of violence in capitalism (Žižek, 2008), the camp of the lived experience of humans in organization can also be accounted (Agamben, 1995, 1998) by considering the psychological self-inflicted violence and violence at the relational, group and organizational level. To conclude, we elaborate on the potential of our intellectual work for business ethics. We advocate for an ethics of violence, that is, an ethics to resist violence in work and organizations based on two specific ethical components: the ethics of the testimonio and the ethics of grievability.