Research on the ethics of life and death in organizations has overlooked the growing role of social media in shaping the ethical implications of organizational regulations on death. More specifically, while recent research suggests that memes are increasingly used to influence the reputation and perception of organizational actions, research on their roles in legitimating the organization of death is scant. This paper analyzes Internet memes legitimizing police slaughter in Brazilian favelas. Three primary discourses were identified: denying life worthiness, establishing actors deserving death, and upholding the police organization as executioners of death. This paper contributes to research on the ethics of organizational death in three different ways in a context of political polarization and growing authoritarism. First, it discusses how social media creates a legitimate discourse that makes death visible and gloats over its victims. Second, this discourse is enabled by social media memes, which divert the ethical debate on life and death, replacing it with superficial and transient engagement. Third, we discuss how memes can reinforce the role of the state police enforcement apparatus as an expression of racialized inequalities.

This essay reconsiders the possibility and prospects for the relationship between business ethics scholarship and the world of business practice. More specifically, to a field that often considers the question, “What should be the role of business in society?” it poses the question, “What should be the role of the Society for Business Ethics in business?” My intent is not to solve the related epistemological question of whether we have to “be one to know one.” It is, however, to encourage scholars to leave our laboratories more often to engage with the work and world of those we study. To that end, the essay poses a series of questions for us – individual scholars, members of the Society, and the Society itself – to consider about our relationship with business. It concludes with a postscript response to one of those questions: When, if ever, should the Society make public statements?

In this article, we consider how zones of slow death can emerge from epistemic marginalization—specifically, the kind that occurs when a social group lacks shared interpretive models due to processes of “social descent.” Drawing on an ethnographic study of waste collectors who moved from skilled to low-skilled or unskilled labor, we explore how this epistemic marginalization is reinforced by the temporal framing of certain lives in the “past tense.” In this way, epistemic marginalization and temporal disqualification are intertwined: denying a group’s interpretive authority simultaneously enables the erasure of their claims to justice as outdated and obsolete.

Death elicits needs such as an adequate farewell. Attending and responding to such needs is central to the organization of death, that is, the management of end-of-life situations before, during, and after a person’s passing. However, prior research points to insensitivity and marginalization of such needs in the organization of death. I refer to this phenomenon as “organized carelessness,” and I draw on the ethics of care to examine how it is produced. Based on a case study in the field of funeral services, I show how organized carelessness emerges through four processes: sequestration, deauthorization, reskilling, and moralization. Together, these processes contribute to stripping away ethical choices in relationships with the bereaved, and moving forward with little, if any, sensitivity and responses to their specific needs for an adequate farewell. These findings have implications for understanding carelessness in the organization of death in particular, and in organizational life more generally.