Abstract
This article draws attention to the importance of enchantment in business ethics research. Starting from a Weberian understanding of disenchantment, as a force that arises through modernity and scientific rationality, we show how rationalist business ethics research has become disenchanted as a consequence of the normalization of positivist, quantitative methods of inquiry. Such methods absent the relational and lively nature of business ethics research and detract from the ethical meaning that can be generated through research encounters. To address this issue, we draw on the work of political theorist and philosopher, Jane Bennett, using this to show how interpretive qualitative research creates possibilities for enchantment. We identify three opportunities for reenchanting business ethics research related to: (i) moments of novelty or disruption; (ii) deep, meaningful attachments to things studied; and (iii) possibilities for embodied, affective encounters. In conclusion, we suggest that business ethics research needs to recognize and reorient scholarship towards an appreciation of the ethical value of interpretive, qualitative research as a source of potential enchantment.
Highlights
In recent years there have been calls for a ‘deepening’ of business ethics research (Freeman and Greenwood 2020)
Enchantment, understood as an ethical engagement charac‐ terized by lively relations, inserts a challenge into discus‐ sions about methods in business ethics research
This article has proposed that the study of business ethics would benefit from taking account of, and being more strongly oriented towards, possibilities for enchantment in research
Summary
In recent years there have been calls for a ‘deepening’ of business ethics research (Freeman and Greenwood 2020). Qualitative research, when approached as affect-laden, lively, relational practice (Bennett 2001), offers greater possibilities for meaningful, ethical encounters and a more enchanted, ethical approach to studying busi‐ ness ethics. In the section that follows we explore how interpretive qualitative research supports such a relational practice of ethical encounters and enables greater consistency between the methods used in business ethics and the axiological values on which this field of study is based. Interpretive, qualitative research provides genuine possibilities of enchantment in studying business ethics— the chance to experience Bennett’s (2001) “meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully pre‐ pared to engage” which gives rise to the “feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychicintellectual disposition” While power differentials even in interpre‐ tive, qualitative research contexts cannot be completely over‐ come (Wray-Bliss 2003c), enchanted research is oriented towards cultivating more collaborative, less exploitative, research relationships
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