ABSTRACT
Ethical leadership, given scandals from Enron to the current epidemic of ‘toxic assets’ bailouts, would appear to be in decline. Instead of increased ethical practices, many corporations engage in apparently more apologist versus positive ethical rhetoric. The storytelling of organizations has become nonsensical (and by virtue, obfuscating) because it contradicts empirical conditions. An international sports brand is given an ethics award, while facts of its sweatshop contractor material conditions are well researched! Clearly the material conditions of sweatshop capitalism were not considered valid criteria in that ethics award. Perhaps the plight of ethical leadership and change lies in the limitations of social constructionism philosophy. This chapter explores an alternative philosophy, ‘social materiality’ as a different approach to ethics, change and leadership. Social materiality contributes an ethics of storytelling, answerability for constructing one’s life as an ethical living storytelling, in intra-activity with material conditions. Social materiality is about how virtuality and materiality are intra-penetrating one another, whereas social constructionism dualizes them. Answerability is a Bakhtinian ethical concept, to be that person, standing in the once-occurrent, non-recurrent moment of Being-ness, who intervenes in the Now, who does the right thing, out of an awareness of one’s complicity in the material-virtual situation that is riddled with storytelling, inseparable from storytelling. A contribution this chapter makes is sorting out the intra-play of materiality and storytelling which social construction would render just virtuality. Social materiality storytelling has its consequences for answerability ethics in leadership and change. Some autoethnographic examples are presented to explore these relationships.
