Communicative Practices of Business Ethics - A Case Study of Self-Writing in Strategic Context

This study develops practice-based understanding of ethics by examining how communicative activities can contribute to ethics in organizing. To conceptualize ethical significance of language use, I draw on Foucault’s concept of self-writing that captures the potential of writing in developing the self of an individual, and by extension, that of a collective of individuals. I conduct a single case study of a strategy process between an owner organization and a business conglomerate they own. The writing provides the owner a practice through which it not only steers the conglomerate, but also develops itself as an owner-stakeholder and its relation to business activities. The study extends the notion of self-writing to strategic context and shows how writers can subject themselves to a particular position through 1) normative, 2) temporal, and 3) textual-structural discursive resources. These resources enable the writers to establish a reflexive relation with themselves and develop this relation as an organized collective. These findings contribute to the business ethics as practice literature by extending communicative practices to its scope and articulating a model of self-writing practices in an organizational context.