Understanding the dynamics of difference: how ethics and selfawareness can illuminate choices in organizations

Abstract

This article is an attempt to look at ethics, ourselves, organisations, and psychoanalysis from the viewpoint of meaning making and how centrally our inner reality and beliefs create our organisations. In exploring the topic, I rely on insights, experiences, news, articles, and existing literature along with my experiences in teaching ethics or related subjects for MBA students. Many ethics discussions have excessively relied on outer aspects, not inner. Our internal space has been left alone: we occupy outer spaces as human mass, but not the inner ones. The mere reference to "character" is meaningless and an empty container without understanding what character means and how inner landscapes are presently cultivated-consciously or unconsciously. Since many therapy and therapeutical approaches have focused more on pathologies and diseases, the vast traditional knowing that exists throughout history, until now, has not been used to create and cultivate everyday understandings, experiences, and capacities to withstand ups and downs life inevitably provides. The main argument in this article is that ethics, psychoanalysis, and process oriented working need to be linked together to create more humanly organisations. The article concludes that learning to juggle multiple realities is the only way one can live with global mindsets, work with dialogue processes which address questions of meaning, and increase our capacity to hold and examine ethics.