ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines justice-based activism within organizations as it relates to diversity and inclusion, with specific reference to activism that opposes discrimination against people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans(LGBT). The focus is on reconsidering debates that 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. To contribute to these debates, the chapter demonstrates how a Levinasian-inspired ‘ethical praxis’ can be deployed both despite and because of non-ethically motivated approaches to ethics in business. Drawing on Levinas’s considerations of the relationship between ethics and the practice of justice, and focusing on Judith Butler’s reading of Levinas’s, 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 chapter positions ethical praxis as a political intervention undertaken in the name of ethics and uses this to suggest that the business case, despite its intrinsic ethical poverty, holds practical potential to create real opportunities for justice in organizations.
