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'Organisational soul' has been used in popular management texts to celebrate corporations that are governed through the values and beliefs of their leaders. Apart from Bell, Taylor and Driscoll in this journal, organisational soul has received little critical scrutiny or conceptual exploration. This article examines the concept through significant texts and traditions in the West's long religio-philosophical engagement with soul – including poststructuralist and Nietzschean thought, Classical Greek philosophy, Aurelius Augustine's first hermeneutics of the subject and key constitutive moral practices of Late Antiquity and Early Christianity. Through such sources, I argue that we can understand neoliberal corporations to have souls, that this soul can be regarded as imperialist, that it is constituted through ethical-moral discourse and that it is subject to being disciplined – as we have come to understand human souls to be – through processes of governmentality. As such, this article posits that it may yet be possible to redeem organisational soul.

I use this paper to reflect upon the ethics and politics of Critical Management Studies (CMS) research. I highlight a potential for problematic power relations in CMS and, drawing upon Foucault's (1976) `five methodological precautions' for analysing power, I explore these power relations as an effect of the micro-constitution of `subordinate' and `superior' subject positions within the research process. Through detailed analysis of a research interview transcript I illustrate how the researched's `subordinate' and researcher's `superior' subject positions may be constructed as an outcome of normal and well-intentioned CMS research.

In this paper, I draw jointly upon a Foucauldian ethical discourse and the example of the so-called `Manchester school' of Foucauldian labour process theory (LPT) to question the political/ethical aspirations and effects of critical management studies. Specifically, I question the ethics and effects of LPT researchers' relationships with those they/we research. I organize the discussion around four Foucauldian ethical themes or feelings. I thread these ethical themes throughout the paper to argue that, though Foucauldian LPT may be understood to abstractly resonate with these themes, its contribution is seriously undermined through the authors' lack of attention to ways of embodying this ethics in relations with the researched. By not embodying these commitments, the marriage between Foucault and LPT risks being read more as a marriage of convenience than commitment. And, further, a marriage that reproduces a politically problematic `modernist/positivist' self-other separation or divorce between researcher and researched.

Noting that from its very inception Organization laid claim to having a central interest in the ethics and politics of organization, in this article we review contributions to the Journal over the past 20 years in order to consider the ethical thinking that has developed. We suggest that there is a common thread of ethical interest that characterizes much of this work—one that clearly differentiates it from more conventional approaches to business ethics. While business ethics has as its locus of interest the ethicality of organizations themselves, central issues that have emerged in Organization concern how individuals might (or might not) maintain a valued experience of themselves as ethical subjects despite the behaviour of organizations, and how organizational arrangements might be politically contested in the name of ethics. We explore this in relation to a question that unites much of the study of ethics in Organization: how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference? We consider this question in terms of the issue of ethical subjectivity and the relation between an ethics of consensus and an ethics of difference. The article concludes much as the Journal started—with the proposal that ethics remains a pressing challenge for critical scholarship and practice.

This article examines ethics in work organization and in academic, particularly Critical Management Studies, research. It is centred on empirical data exploring the actions of three employees of a higher education institution who variously failed to resist and/or colluded in the sex discrimination of a colleague. We bring ethics to bear in our analysis of these data in three ways. First, reflecting upon our own methodology, we highlight the difficulties of balancing competing ethical responsibilities when engaging in critical research in contexts defined by adversarial relationships. Second, we highlight how research subjects, who we interpret as exercising problematic agency, draw upon discourses of care, friendship and responsibility to discursively construct their behaviour as moral. Third, drawing upon feminist theory, we reflect upon the ethical warrant of academic critiques of research subjects' agency. Our analysis raises unsettling implications both for the ethics of Critical Management Studies research and for the function of ethics in organizations. We end by being as concerned by the capacity of ethical discourse to enable and legitimize discrimination as we are reassured by its utility to enable us to discriminate right from wrong behaviour in organizations.