ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 explores the central themes of the book as it relates to the practice of management and leadership in organizations. This begins with a critical review and re-evaluation of dominant approaches to leadership justice, arguing that they appropriate justice as a rational means to achieve organizational effectiveness. It is shown that in contemporary management thinking justice is a formal rationality that renders it as a means to a different end, rather than a substantive one that values justice in and of itself. This rationalization of justice belies its masculinization and as a result human values such as love and care are sidelined. Levinas’s work is drawn on in particular to consider how pre-rational affective relations between people form the basis of ethically informed justice. It is proposed that justice is not a particular variety of leadership behaviour but rather that leadership is the practice of justice. Justice is not here regarded as something to be achieved through pre-designated leadership practices, but is an ongoing condition: an unanswerable question whose response defines the ethical quality of leadership. Moreover, this ethical quality puts people in leadership positions in a permanent state of quandary as they grapple with the multiple and contradictory ethical and political demands that are placed upon them.
