Reconciling Profit and Performance with Integrity: The Case of Companies Operating in Cross Cultural Contexts

The paper is primarily directed towards, but not confined to, the activities of larger commercial enterprises and questions the authority by which knowledge and integrity are legitimated in such enterprises and to do this we revisit Lyotard's (1984: 9) pertinent questions: Who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? We draw on both performativity theory and Levinas's (1985) notion of acting responsibly and having responsibility to others' to examine ways organizational performance can be constructed to by-pass ethical considerations, miss critical observations and thus opportunities. In some industries this nexus can be calamitous on a global as well as local scale. Knowledge in the Western tradition has had conceptual connections with truth and understanding since at least the seventeenth century (Popper, 1975). Yet the arenas of its definition and contestation have shifted. Once they were the preserve of exemplary spaces such as the laboratory while now, for many (business) organizations, the truth of knowledge has shifted to the market where its value is gauged and leveraged. A central question for this paper is the ways in which truth comes into play where organizational knowledge is concerned as leveraging may give it a particular complexion, in turn influencing integrity and virtue. Indeed, the construction and transmission of organizational knowledge has a powerful cultural context truths embedded in organization practices are extremely vulnerable. This vulnerability is revealed in the earlier leitmotiv of corporate crashes such as Enron and WorldCom , major collapses during the GFC including Lehman Bros Bank in 2008, and through the on-going experience of managing serious toxic debt such as in US mortgage giants Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae, the Royal Bank of Scotland (amongst others) and on-going Eurozone financial crises. The leitmotiv becomes more evident as these events highlight fundamental difficulties for those charged with managing and retaining intellectual capital and knowledge in the responsible organizations. Knowing what ought to be done and then actually doing it has been deeply flawed (see Leopold, 2009 Barth et al. 2009). It follows that organizational practices such as knowledge management (KM) must be more than mere techniques geared in a singular fashion towards enhancing the bottom line. Knowledge in organizations cannot simply mimic fashionable discourse or slavishly follow pre-set performance indicators. Such narrow approaches have been revealed as seriously deficient.