Business Ethics AC 351

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Business EthicsAC 351

• Week 10
• Ethics of Alternative Organisations

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Can capitalist business be ethical?

• If business ethics is an oxymoron then what
  sort of alternative organisations exist?
• The capitalist firm is often taken as the assumed
  starting point for management organisation
  studies.
• It can be said that this ignores huge portions of
  social interaction and history based on other
  organisational forms.

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1. Aims of this lecture

• Exploring the ethics of organisational forms
  other than capitalist firms. E.g. cooperatives
  and worker owned run enterprises.
• To what extent can these alternative
  organisations address the ethical concerns raised
  about the operations of capitalist firms (e.g.
  surveillance, exploitation, labour alienation,
  creation of false wants, etc).

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2. Horizontalism a form of popular
anti-capitalist power

• Principle breaking with power-over and
  embracing power-with. Breaks with vertical ways
  of organizing and aims at non-hierarchical
  anti-authoritarian creation (rather than
  reaction).
• Direct democracy consensus. Organising
  independently of state capitalist hierarchies.
• The aim is to change the world without taking
  power. Rejection of hierarchy, bosses, managers
  and anyone having power over anyone else.

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3. An example Worker self-management

• Cooperatives Joint ownership and democratic
  control. Ownership control rests with members
  rather than managers as agents.
• Based on values of self-help, democracy, equality
  and solidarity. Members receive little of the
  surplus on their investment decisions on how to
  distribute this surplus are taken democratically.
• Workers co-ops developed in response to
  industrial capitalism and its disempowering
  effect on workers.

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• Syndicalism working-class direct action to
  transform capitalist society (rather than through
  party political organisation).
• Instruments of syndicalism the Trade Union.
  Industrial action, control over the labour
  process, industrial sabotage, and the strike
  (including the general strike).
• Principle all participants in the workplace
  should share equal ownership of production and
  therefore deserve equal earnings, benefits and
  control.

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4. Outside the traditional workplace?

• Organisation of communes and ethical
  implications
• 1) Inefficient work. Much of traditional farming
  activity in the global south and Southern
  Europe is inefficient in market terms.
• 2) Degrowth explorations into non-consumption,
  non-buying behaviour, non-monetary market
  exchange, unwaged labour (domestic work, free
  family labour, etc.) Addresses the problem of
  false wants?
• 3) Cooperation economic activities driven by
  mutual aid, solidarity, cooperation, etc, rather
  than competition for scare resources, economic
  self-interest, etc. Addresses the ethical issues
  of the employment contract (exploitation,
  surveillance, etc)?