Dealing with “the other matters”

Citation

Moriceau, J.-L. (2009), "Dealing with “the other matters”", Society and Business Review, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2009.29604aaa.001

Dealing with “the other matters”

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Society and Business Review, Volume 4, Issue 1

The other matters. Encountering, or being confronted to the other, is what research is all about. It is even the taste (and the test) of research. We are striving for something which is other from what we knew. And yet, on the one hand, Denzin and Lincoln (2008, p. 1) depict research as “provid[ing] the foundation for reports about and representations of ‘the other’”. From which they conclude, looking back to their early years, that from their early beginnings, qualitative researches were implicated in a racist project. On the other hand, we have to admit that much of our effort is about encapsulating all the differences into one concept, one theory or one narrative, thus ruling out otherness and singularity. In between these two extremes, research has been haunted, has been renewed by the question of the other: how to voice the other, how to speak for, how to write about him/her? With the inherent limit of Derrida’s (1986) law of the other: the other can approach, as the other, in its phenomenon of being otherness, only by moving away. And the other can appear, in its unlimited otherness, only by approaching …

But we also have to recognize that, in our theories, us and the other are usually made of the same matter. There is no other matters, the other is an alter ego. Legally it is often right; in fact it is often untrue. The other is an autonomous self with whom we contract (in standard economic theory), with whom we discuss (in a Habermasian approach), with whom we try to make sense or tell stories. The other is another me, or us; the other bears differences but is of the same kind.

All the contributions of this special issue of Society and Business Review depart from another standpoint. The other is not an equal, he/she is in an upper or lower position, sometimes shifting from one to the other, needing to be cared for, screaming for solicitude, being in a dominated or even alienated position. For more than 20 years, asking simple questions like who cares for whom, how?, an ethics of care has wrongfooted the almighty ethics of justice. Introducing dependance, it has also welcome vulnerability and sensitivity into our analyses with the feminist J. Tronto, C. Giligan, S. Laugier and P. Paperman. For all the situations between the equallity of friendship and the Levinas’ infinite subordination to the other’s face, Ricoeur(1990/1992) proposes an ethics of solicitude. The other calls for us to respond as we are aiming at the good life. And all the post-colonial studies, the marxist approaches and the Foucauldian perspectives, among others, have made us familiar with the idea that we are, unescapablely, from the very beginning of our conscience, in a dominating/dominated, or alienating/alienated stuf. The other matters. She/he/it is made of other matters.

For Hugo Letiche, the other is the intrinsic, non-detachable other face of what, at first glance, would seem the most personal. At the very moment when a familial quilt becomes art, it doubles itself and becomes a commodity. When the intimate, private self shows in public space, it becomes something else, akin to commodification. Taking Du Bois’ concept of doubling, and his application to the masculine “negro” signifyin(g), he applies it to the feminine practice of quilt-making. At first, the other of the other’s (the Black woman) resistance seems more effective than her male counterpart’s (who defines himself against, and thus according to, the dominant White). But when her traditional product becomes art (as quilt has become), it doubles itself into the art sphere and is swallowed by the dominant system. He ends up with a freaky but stimulating reflection about art and commodification.

For Peter Pelzer, the other is the risk you cannot predict, and specifically the international investors market. Long before the 2008 financial crisis, he wrote about the specific risks on the globalised financial markets, and above all about the reactions against the financial investors. In a German election, the investors were named locusts. This is the departure of the journey, in which the author takes us to The Bible, to the commercial vessels of emerging capitalism and to a very detailed picture of contemporary financial markets – with their enormous flows of liquidity threatening the “real” economy. The risk has been displaced and is managed on the screens of a postsocial, hyperreal world. At the end, we clearly understand the distinction between natural evil and nowadays risk management. The locust metaphor proves to be wrong. However, prophetically, P. Pelzer calls for an ethics of markets.

In a more analytic philosophical way, Frédérique Plot challenges some basic assumptions of business ethics and of corporate social responsibility. Contrasting the ethics of care and the ethics of justice, she contends that the other matters not for reason of economic advantage, nor because of a set of principles, but in regard to a concept of humanity. She then proposes and documents a concept of attention, which could ground our conceptions of ethics in business and society. To this aim, she uses specific examples to contrast her position to those of ethics thinkers with close but distinct rival grounds. The point, according to her, is not whether or not we take others into account but how we see them: do we pay attention to them, as human beings?

Bregham Dalgliesh counters the claim that Foucault would have nothing constructive to contribute to the relationship between the subject and the other, which would be only riddled by domination and subjection. For Foucault, otherness is the means through which the subject is constituted. But this other is less another subject than the power/technoscience. Thus, looking beyond the approaches in terms of autonomy and recognition, B. Dalgliesh explores the possibilities of creative resistance against the grasp of power/technoscience and organizational control. He ends up with a far more distributed division of power than many critical organization study pictures.

Steven D. Brown et al. are concerned with the fact the children ought to be cared for as others, and not as interchangeable no-ones. This, they contend, could not be obtained via a codification in categories and standards. From the case of the UK Government Every Child Matters program, they study how different agencies try to coordinate in order to achieve different targets of a child good life. Each agency categorizes a child with its own “epistemic devices”, while the coordination between agencies requires higher level abstraction of categorizations. However, and rather surprisingly, this process of categorization of categorizations reaches the category of “outcome of improved outcome”; that “might very well served as a synonym for unique, indivisible Otherness that founds Levinasian justice”.

At last, for Yannick Fronda and Marie-Astrid Le Theule, the other is the psychosocially handicapped worker (which comprises an important and growing number of persons). They are concerned with the way, in our “society of individuals”, management requires from them the same level of performance as from other workers. They show that both for the economy and the society, we are all better off if they find their place economically, socially and emotionally. They propose three main strategies for their integration, which they call: integration at any price, the construction of closed community and positive discrimination. They advocate for the existence of an intermediate sector, less prone to competition, where the most fragile workers (what we may all become at one moment of our life) could more easily develop themselves and even promote different social arrangements. However, they warn us about the decreasing number of such intermediate institutions.

Jean-Luc Moriceau