Ethical Praxis and the Business Case for LGBT Diversity: Political Insights from Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas

Carl Rhodes

doi:10.1111/gwao.12168

Abstract

This paper critically reconsiders debates about the business case for workplace diversity as exemplified in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism. These debates have long suggested that there is an oppositional distinction between justifying diversity on self‐interested business grounds and justifying it on the grounds of ethics, equality and social justice. This has led to an impasse between ethically driven diversity theory and activism, and the dominant business case approach commonly deferred to in managerial practice. As a way of mediating this impasse the contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how ‘ethical praxis’ can be deployed both despite and because of non‐ethically motivated approaches to ethics in business. Drawing on Judith Butler's and Emmanuel Levinas's considerations of the relationship between ethics and the practice of justice, it is argued that critiques of the business case for diversity rely on a pure ethics that does not adequately recognize its connection to lived politics. Conversely, support for the business case evinces a politics that has failed to remember its origin in ethics. The paper positions ethical praxis as a political intervention undertaken in the name of ethics and uses this to suggest that the business case, despite its ethical poverty, holds potential to create real opportunities for justice in organizations.

Highlights

Justice and social equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people has become an issue of major contestation on the global political agenda
The resulting situation is that “tension between an approach based on utilitarian arguments and an approach based on social justice and human rights forms a crucial point of debate in the diversity and equality field” (Tomlinson and Schwabenand, 2010: 102)
The same is true for the actual and possible political responses to those issues. Despite these differences LGBT, and its various correlates, has emerged as a political category that is central to workplace equality and diversity. Within this politics it is demonstrably the case that the distinction between the business case and the social justice case have formed a central distinction in how the motives for the pursuit of LGBT diversity have been formulated, as is the case with diversity more generally

Summary

Introduction

Justice and social equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people has become an issue of major contestation on the global political agenda. The resulting situation is that “tension between an approach based on utilitarian arguments (the business case) and an approach based on social justice and human rights forms a crucial point of debate in the diversity and equality field” (Tomlinson and Schwabenand, 2010: 102) This tension arises because support for the business case relies on the presumption that “being morally good is materially good for business” (Michalos, 2013: 599), while critics see it as being ‘fatally flawed’ because it rests on a set of motives that are not ethically driven (Cragg, 2002). While this is an important consideration it fails to account for how the business case logic can be used for purposes that are different from, and possibly in contradiction with, those motives This calls for a way of theorizing diversity politics that, instead of standing on the moral high ground, adds to its ethical position a concern with the practicalities and possibilities of praxis. The paper concludes by outlining how ethical praxis is a way that both uses and resists instrumental approaches to diversity so as to break impasse between the business case and the social justice case

The Business Case for LGBT Diversity

Conclusion