Six intersecting facets of ethics for the use of managers, managers and managed[Six facettes croisées de l’éthique à l’usage des gestionnaires, gérants et gérés]

Like management, ethics resides in action. Like management, ethics as a concept is absorbed in projective or prescriptive speeches or representations. But, in essence, ethics offers a precious ground for questioning the foundations, the dynamics and the practices of management. It directly questions the position and the role of ethics in a dialectic game played between the worlds of idealities and dogmas and the world of life. Hasn't management partially fallen in a dynamics of voluntary speeches, dictating to the world of life what it ought to be, without any consideration for what it actually is? Based on an inductive approach and inspired by phenomenology, on direct observations and on the collection of individual experiences, analysed in accordance with the grounded theory, our works put to light the need for, and the practical scope of, an ethics centered on the individual and rooted in philosophy. Hence, ethics offers, in various ways which are examined individually, the possibility to deconstruct a number of vain illusions, and to re-instil an efficient and innovative room for action in the world of life. Deconstruction by questioning our methodological blindnesses (whereas it would be possible for us to see before we speak), the awareness of certain founding illusions linked to the ignorance (of the absence of an insurmountable identity between concept and object or subject, between theoretical reasonings and living reality allowing the understanding of certain of the theoretical blindnesses we have established). New room for action, because ethics freed from projective speeches recovers its relevance in action, an action which is by definition individual and disinterested, but in connivance with life, an ethics which offers a path for individual social emancipation but an ethics which can be favoured by our organisational choices. Breaking with a social approach of projection of speeches and representations on others, in order to prescribe or demonstrate, ethics thus appears as a free individual path bringing efficiency and rooms for innovation. At a society level, ethical collective works, in essence humanly useful, can gradually aggregate emancipated individuals who are free to participate. Thus, ethics revives the very roots of management and offers new perspectives for the organisation of work.