The Anthropology of Business Ethics: Worth Thinking about!

Abstract

This article deals with epistemological thoughts about business ethics. My intention is to consider business ethics as a research subject in anthropology and not to judge the relevance of the morality or ethics: in other words, the integration of activities in a “common good” category. The article examines the philosophical ground of this notion and explores whether business ethics is related to this philosophical background. While, from an anthropological point of view, it is better to draw a value judgment from the notion of “business ethics” (applicability, truthfulness, intentionality, and so on), the argument presented here is that it is better to consider “business ethics” as a category of work management at the meeting point between theory and practice, and to observe in situ how this notion is used, articulated and circulated in the daily life of a workplace.