Bringing the ugly back

A dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron case

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9888359
AutoresGareth Edwards (0000-0002-9770-6864, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK,, autor de correspondencia), Beverley Hawkins (0000-0002-6573-9469, University of Exeter, autor de correspondencia), Doris Schedlitzki (0000-0002-8658-2659, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK,, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen72
Número4
Páginas733-754
Fecha de publicación2019-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHuman Relations (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-7267 • E-ISSN: 1741-282X
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0018726718773859
OpenAlexW2796654679
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas66

In this article, we adopt a dialogic approach to examining narratives on ethics in leadership. We do this through an ethno-narrative re-reading of writing on the Enron case informed by Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue. Employing concepts such as beautyism, aesthetic craving and recent writing around disgust and abjection in organizations helps us to develop a deeper relational interpretation of written accounts of leadership and ethics in organizations. We identify two underlying and interrelated social tensions exemplified in existing narratives on this popular example of ‘unethical’ leadership practice. Both tensions, we conclude, are linked to denigrating the ugly in favour of the beautiful, and we have labelled them ‘suppressing the ugly’ and a fetish for ‘looking good’. We go on to suggest that these two tensions then combine in the stories about this case to ultimately beautify a toxic masculinized persona. We suggest therefore that our dialogic perspective on ethical leadership narratives helps to uncover how accounts about Enron are developed through an intricate interplay between seeking to ‘look good’ and the suppression of moral judgment by leaders of the organization

Aesthetics · Business ethics · Dialogic · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Pedagogy · Persona · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Public relations · Reading (process · Sociology · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy · Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy