Western representation of countries from the Global South implies a dichotomist view of business ethics: on the one hand, universal ethics largely reproduces commonsensical views of the South as ‘less ethical’, and on the other hand, voices from the South are often conditioned to present themselves as substantially indigenous and unambiguous to be accepted as legitimate ethical subjects. We join the growing interest in bridging this gap by drawing on studies from human geography, and ask to what extent the materiality (...) of moral dilemmas bespeaks the disputed underpinning ethical values of a given space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of social space, we outline and apply the idea of ‘spatial ethics’ to organizations, in order to approach the entanglement between center and periphery. We analyze organizations in favelas, which are, for many authors, territories where experiences are extreme, and poverty and violence mix with vibrant culture and ingenuity. We critically approach the field of business ethics and suggest that one way of moving beyond the North–South debate is to consider that ethics cannot be transmitted or represented in empty milieus. (shrink)

The articles comprising this thematic symposium suggest options for exploring the nexus between freedom and unfreedom, as exemplified by the British abolitionists’ anti-slavery campaign and the paradox of freedom. Each article has implications for how these abolitionists achieved their goals, social activists’ efforts to secure reparations for slave ancestors, and modern slavery. We present the abolitionists’ undertaking as a marketing campaign, highlighting the role of instilling moral agency and indignation through re-humanizing the dehumanized. Despite this campaign’s eventual success, its post-emancipation (...) phase illustrates a paradox of freedom. After introducing mystification as an explanation for the obscuring rhetoric used to conceal post-emancipation violations of freedom during the West’s colonial phase, we briefly discuss the appropriateness of reparations. Finally, we discuss the contributions made by the articles in this thematic symposium. (shrink)

This article seeks to synthesise three fields of inquiry – management studies, linguistics and cognitive psychology – to explore an arguably emerging phenomenon of global management knowledge impoverishment. To this end, three literatures are reviewed and interrogated for the insights they may provide into the underlying factors affecting global MK: trends in knowledge production, Englishisation of management scholarship and the culturally determined differences in cognition. Arguments are developed through descriptive investigation, discussion and analysis. The central proposition of this article is (...) that the politics of knowledge production, the hegemony of English as the dominant language of management studies and the variations in thinking styles are synergistically interlinked in a way that facilitates Anglophone homogenisation of management research and potentially leads to global MK impoverishment. The ways of addressing the situation are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Corporate Social Responsibility denotes a movement away from shareholder theories of the corporation, and refers to a set of practices designed to have an economic, environmental, and social impact. Public companies report on their CSR practices annually in the form of multimodal reports which are made available on the companies’ websites, and are typically read by investors who seek standardisation across this genre. Thus, most companies across the globe follow the Global Reporting Initiative framework for reporting, a framework developed (...) within the Global North. The dominance of the Global North in CSR practices is also evident in the academic literature – while applied linguists have gone some way in highlighting the generic, interpersonal, and ideational features of reports, such studies have predominantly focused on multinational corporations. There is, comparatively, very little literature on the CSR practices and discourses circulating in the Global South or former colonial contexts and because of this we have limited insight into how companies operating in these contexts discursively represent themselves, their employees and their suppliers within the same context. To address this shortcoming, this study draws on analytical approaches developed within Critical Discourse Analysis coupled with postcolonial theory in order to comment on the ideational features of the four most recent CSR reports of one South African company. (shrink)