“The border between “all right” and “all wrong”, like the border betweenlife and death, is not solid.”
Yiyun Li, “The Deaths—and Lives—of two sons” (Li, Reference Li2025)To those who (struggle to) live within organizations, on the fringes of organizations, or in spite of organizations.
In the beginning, there were two verbs. To live. To die. These two verbs are immanently entangled; all that lives dies, and the experience of living takes meaning in its relation to dying. In formulating an ethics around the organization of life and death, we considered their mutual relationship, which we conceptualize as a compound term. Life-and-death constitutes both an existential condition, relevant to all living beings, and a foundational ethical and political question: ways of organizing lead some to live, and others to die. Although organizational policies that subsume human and nonhuman lives are often expressed in an ostensibly “neutral” language of efficiency and productivity, they contain ethical choices with material effects on experiences of existence and lived realities of both workers (Hughes, Reference Hughes2019) and other life forms affected by organizations. Disturbing examples abound in which the livability of our shared world is sacrificed at the altar of technological expansion and extractivism. Big tech. Arms manufacturing. Overfishing. The stunning speed with which fossil fuel companies have made peace with mass death and rolled back net-zero pledges, aligning with Trump-era revisionist politics, among others. Understanding business and organization solely through frameworks of exchange, contract, or the illusion of “neutral” management obscures the life-and-death stakes of organizing. Perhaps as a result, current business ethics scholarship pays little attention to how matters of life-and-death are organized, distributed, contested, or promoted.
Our call for papers (Pérezts, Fotaki, Shymko, & Islam, Reference Pérezts, Fotaki and Shymko2022) aimed to address this significant omission. We formulated the need to “examine how our ideas operate within complex social and natural worlds, for what ends, and which support they render to different forms of being and of living.” Our key premise was that business organizations engage in actions and decisions that—inadvertently or willfully—shape who lives and who is left to die (Candrian, Reference Candrian2014; Mechanic, Reference Mechanic1989), if not overtly “sacrificed” in the name of profit and economic “necessity” (Banerjee, Reference Banerjee2008; Valencia, Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018). Business organizations thus contribute to indulging “the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others” by “not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them” (Klein & Taylor, Reference Klein and Taylor2025). Beyond the more spectacular and catastrophic instances, in more banal, everyday ways, organizations exploit and extract labour from their workers to the verge of exhaustion and breathlessness (Han, Reference Han and Butler2015; Pérezts, Fotaki, Shymko, & Islam, Reference Pérezts, Fotaki, Shymko and Islam2024). These considerations raise the question of what constitutes livable and care-worthy life and how organizations might bring about or perpetuate various forms of unlivable existence or even social death.
This Special Issue (SI) recognizes the existential, embodied, material, and metaphysical dimensions of being: I live, I die. However, it also stresses how these existential dimensions bear collective, political, and ethical meaning: We live, we die. And sometimes, we survive. As collective processes, living and dying are organizational phenomena: they are the object and outcome of organization practices, as life and death are collectively organized (Agamben, Reference Agamben1998; Elias, Reference Elias1985) and mutually implicated. The organization of life impacts the organization of death, encompassing the ever-diversified means of struggling on the border of survival. Crucially, because we share the world we live and die in with others, in ways that are organized, as well as disorganized, addressing the outcomes of (dis)organization and their (business) ethics implications raises important and disturbing ethical questions: who/what is left to die? Who/what is left exposed on the fringes of bare survival? Who/what remains forgotten (including otherized human populations and nonhuman entities)?
Asking such questions is disquieting because they raise fears of an existential nature. Hence, they are largely marginalized in both business ethics scholarship and organizational studies. Yet, bringing these interrogations from the edges of thought and practice to the center of organizational ethics is essential because organizations and organizing can shape such outcomes by engaging in the ethics of care and politics of inclusivity, redefining “essential” or “front line” work, managing relationships between bodily health and work, or ethically relating to nonhuman forms of life. Considering the roles of organizations in terms of life-and-death, therefore, it seems crucial for scholars to redefine organizations and/in/for/with the world, and not only with society, shareholders, or even stakeholders.
Reflecting on the organizational ethics of life-and-death puts a spotlight on what often remains obscured and ignored in the frenzy of social existence: the intricate ways, places, occasions and reasons that drive processes of living and dying, and the central role organizations play in such processes. By considering life-and-death together, our SI has three specific aims: 1) to foreground the vital and deadly outcomes of organization, 2) to elucidate how their various ethical outcomes are manifested in organizations, and 3) to focus on how they play out in the context of growing inequalities and multiple and intersecting crises. Together, these three aims crucially help us bring the ethical implications of interrogating organizational life-and-death stakes into sharp relief, supplementing question of ethics in business with broader questions of the ethics of business in our current world (Islam & Greenwood, Reference Islam and Greenwood2021). They also help stress the ethical dimensions of organizing for life by shaping human and other-than-human relatedness and redefining organizational ethics along vital (rather than deadly) lines of inquiry and practice.
At the crossroads of these concerns, and following the disciplinary and thematic scope of Business Ethics Quarterly, the guest editorial team sought to invite scholars representing diverse perspectives to consider the roles of organizations and organizing in the ethics of life-and-death, thereby envisioning modes and forms of organizing that cherish human and other-than-human relatedness and entanglements in the web of life-and-death.
In the following section, we first share the theoretical and empirical justifications for the foregrounding of an organizational ethics of life-and-death. Next, we outline the existential, collective and posthuman dimensions that together shape our approach. These allow us in the following section of the essay to discuss what an organizational ethics of life-and-death can concretely imply to become an operational reality. The papers selected for this special issue are introduced thereafter, followed by some concluding comments on moving forward.
ORGANIZATIONAL ETHICS OF LIFE-AND-DEATH: BEGINNING THE CONVERSATION
We began nurturing the idea for this special issue in 2020, amidst unprecedented environmental catastrophes, rampant authoritarianism, economic recessions and hunger across the globe, exacerbation of migration and refugee hardships, ongoing armed conflict, social upheavals and profound inequalities across the lines of race, gender, and class, and, to top it off, a global pandemic. As we write today, the backdrop has shifted to a scenario in many ways gloomier: no longer confined to their homes or behind masks, for many workers, there appears to be a relentless return to “business as usual”—a “normality” undeserving of the term, if we follow descriptions by the informants of Slutskaya, Newton, Horne, Mahalingam, and Luca in this volume. As if COVID-19 had never happened, nor its devastation of over 7 million deaths globally and excess mortality from indirect effects estimated at between 19 and 36 million (World Health Organization, 2025; Chakraborty et al., Reference Chakraborty, Bhattacharya, Chatterjee, Lee, Bhattacharya, Ohimain, Wen, Das, Rai, Abdelhameed, Agoramoorthy, Zayed and Byrareddy2025). At the same time, in other “distant” and not so distant places, new horrors have been added to the continuation and aggravation of the above-mentioned life-threatening issues: a brutal war in Ukraine and ongoing genocide in Gaza—“one of the cruelest genocides in modern history” (Albanese, Reference Albanese2025) mostly amidst a large wave of organizational inaction and indifference.
These, along with unfolding climate-related disasters and geopolitical and humanitarian catastrophes affecting every corner of the globe, signal the breakdown of an international order that, while often ineffectual, provided rhetorical legitimacy for humanitarian goals and a framework for protecting lives and livelihoods. The latter are equally threatened by forms of slower and less visible death in highly dysfunctional, but normalized, work settings. Considering these developments, it is simply unacceptable for business ethicists to ignore the life-and-death stakes of organizing in the face of such profound challenges. And while our SI is not specifically about genocide, burnout, or pandemics, nor about organizational responses to them, the sum of these constitutes more than just a series of contextual factors or background elements that could inform organizational ethics. In this era of genuine existential danger, matters of living and dying—both empirically and conceptually—become thought imperatives and unavoidable calls to action. Life-and-death issues should be at the forefront of our responsibility as business ethics scholars to offer a credible vision for a hopeful and ethical future.
In this context, from a normative perspective, we know little about the justifications used to defend ethical questions surrounding life-and-death issues and the validity of such justifications, particularly as they inform and build into organizational settings and processes. Organizational decisions may not make such normative questions explicit, and managerial rhetoric often tends to sanitize their life-and-death consequences (Gergen, Gergen, & Barrett, Reference Gergen, Gergen, Barrett, Grant, Hardy, Oswick and Putman2004) under a veil of “civilized indifference” (Courpasson, Reference Courpasson2016). In adopting impersonal, disembodied technical vocabularies of efficiency or feasibility and the instrumentalization of “wellness” practices and discourses (e.g., Karjalainen, Islam, & Holm, Reference Karjalainen, Islam and Holm2019), lies the derision (Faÿ, Reference Faÿ2008) through which matters of living and dying are denied or concealed. A recent report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine, entitled “From the economy of occupation to the economy of genocide” (Albanese, Reference Albanese2025) highlights how for-profit corporations financially benefit from the continuation of human suffering and extermination. Such examples dispel the illusion that life-and-death processes are outside the scope of organizational and business ethics. Classical visions of business responsibility to shareholders alone exclude such considerations but even broadening them to include conceptions of (some) stakeholders’ perspectives does not go far enough. This is because, in such conceptions, the wider systemic effects of business activities remain outside the discipline’s field of vision, while acting to shape these through collective action appears unrealistic, or worse—“woke” (Rhodes, Reference Rhodes2022).
By contrast, understanding the organization of life-and-death requires making explicit the ethical foundations of organizing and the ethics of business, referring to considerations of purpose, contribution, the role of each business organization in its wider social context, and the institutions that support them. This ultimately leads us to redefine the boundaries of what should (and not only could) fall under the scope of business ethics, as suggested by Islam and Greenwood in their Journal of Business Ethics editorial (Islam & Greenwood, Reference Islam and Greenwood2021). Specifically, they juxtaposed two definitions of business ethics: the narrow one, which concerns business misconduct/ethical conduct, and the more substantive one, referring to the values that businesses espouse and promote as crucial societal actors. Our editorial response to their plea aims to broaden the scope of business ethics as we develop it and to create a more radical version of business ethics through the lens of life-and-death. A business ethics driven by life affirmation in all its manifestations and informed by care, relationality, and collective solidarity. In times when apocalyptic premonitions prevail, it is essential to affirm an ethics based on vulnerable interdependence and belonging, not on escaping or succumbing to visions of “inevitable” destruction beyond repair (Carollo, Sferrazzo, & Shymko, Reference Carollo, Sferrazzo and Shymko2025; Levine, Reference Levine2001). It is vital to stay committed to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound to put it back together on a radically new basis.
To reach our stated objective of highlighting the life-and-death stakes of organizing, we suggested developing research on organizational ethics along three possible lines of inquiry: its relations with principles of care and concern (Gherardi & Rodeschini, Reference Gherardi and Rodeschini2015; Fotaki, Islam, & Antoni Reference Fotaki, Islam and Antoni2020; Antoni, Reinecke, & Fotaki, Reference Antoni, Reinecke and Fotaki2020; Arnold & Ross, Reference Arnold and Ross2023), collective solidarity (Vachhani & Pullen, Reference Vachhani and Pullen2019; Shymko, Quental, & Navarro Mena, Reference Shymko, Quental and Navarro Mena2022), and accountability and relationality (Painter-Morland, Reference Painter-Morland2006, Reference Painter-Morland2007; Fotaki, Reference Fotaki, Neesham, Reihlen and Schoeneborn2019a). Such approaches consider organizations not only as tightly bounded actors responsible for their local spheres of action but as nodes within larger organized networks of living and nonliving entities (Puig de la Bellacasa, Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017), where agency is diffused, and boundaries between one’s life and the lives of others are blurred. They compel us to reconsider what responsibility entails when actors are so closely bound to each other at an existential level, pushing us beyond anthropocentrism (Gherardi & Laasch, Reference Gherardi and Laasch2022).
More specifically, such approaches also help us challenge deterministic claims that the vital and deadly outcomes of organization are necessary and unavoidable, inevitable consequences of market processes, demographic trends, iron laws, or other discourses that drain and dissipate ethical agency. For example, organizational processes and tools, including methods for measuring and quantifying life processes, threats, and activities (cf. Islam, Reference Islam2022; Pérezts, Andersson, & Lindebaum, Reference Pérezts, Andersson and Lindebaum2021; Perray-Redslob, Clavijo, Ben Khaled, & Anesa, Reference Perray-Redslob, Clavijo, Ben Khaled and Anesa2023), are infused with underlying ethical stakes that ultimately shape understandings of life-and-death. Making explicit these ethical stakes reconnects organizational ethics with the need for a livable life within and around organizations. In contrast, an overreliance on and credence in measurement and control technologies threatens to reduce lives to data points, obscuring the sources of moral agency and value, and replacing them with a datafied simulacrum (Schwartzkopf, Reference Schwarzkopf2020). As we argue below, we need to counterbalance abstract and disembodied notions of morality, thereby expanding the boundaries of the organizational ethics through the lens of life-and-death.
A THIN VITAL LINE: LIFE-AND-DEATH BETWEEN EXISTENTIAL CONDITION AND ORGANIZED OTHER-THAN-HUMAN PRECARITY
As noted above, both life and death are integral to our existential condition, yet they are also organized socially and politically. Acknowledging the existential aspect of life-and-death creates a shared concern among all living beings, both human and other-than-human, while acknowledging its social and political contingency recognizes our responsibility for organizing in the various contexts that make life more or less livable. Considering the ethics of life-and-death in both their existential and organized dimensions creates theoretical tensions that require careful balancing (Noys, Reference Noys2025). Treating life-and-death as a given, immutable aspect of existence can overlook the agency and responsibility that inheres in organizing lives. Conversely, treating it in an overly contingent manner can lead to the fetishization of human agency and the powers of organization. An ethics of life-and-death requires scholars to hold these two poles in tension and discover an ethics in their interstices, between the acceptance of the inevitability of death and the commitment to promoting lives that flourish. A word about each of these dimensions is in order before presenting some ideas on how to formulate such an ethics.
Life-and-Death as an Existential Condition
Philosophical perspectives on the condition and ethics of life and death are as old as philosophy itself, relevant to but reaching beyond the scope of this SI. Discussions of how to live the “good life” and how to face death are central to classical Western thought (Korsgaard, Reference Korsgaard1998) as well as to Eastern philosophies. For instance, in Buddhism, approaching death with awareness reveals the impermanence of pleasure and pain, freeing ethical agents from the fear of dying and enabling compassionate, sustainable, ethical living (Abeydeera, Kearins, & Tregidga, Reference Abeydeera, Kearins and Tregidga2016). The Stoics also emphasized the importance of remembering the inevitability of death and saw the memento mori (the remembrance of death) as a fundamental ethical prerequisite for living well (Dhiman, Reference Dhiman and Dhiman2020). Marcus Aurelius, in the Meditations, considered death to be a reintegration into the universal order, a return to the elements out of which life emerges (Gill, Reference Gill2013). Ethics, in such perspectives, requires a contemplation of life in the face of death, often with an attitude of acceptance, courage, humility, and awareness of the brevity and ephemeral character of existence.
More recent existential conceptions of death in Western philosophy, likewise, emphasize its foundational character, although with varying consequences. Heidegger’s Being and Time (Reference Heidegger and Stambaugh2010) places death at the center of human life, a life that is “thrown” into being and is always a “being-towards death” (cf. Reedy & Learmonth, Reference Reedy and Learmonth2011). Death provides the ultimate horizon against which life takes meaning, both as the boundaries of living and as an ever-present possibility at every moment of life. However, the radical individuality of death—no one can die for another, and one cannot share or transfer one’s death to another—is undermined by social disavowal and organized distraction from death. Society, or “das Man,” attempts to render death superficial and thus remove its radical character, but reaffirming this existential “ownness” of death is characterized as a prerequisite to living authentically, and therefore takes on a foundational ethical character. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (Reference Sartre and Barnes1993: 699), in contrast to Heidegger, takes issue with the idea of being-for-death as a fundamental constituent of life and notes the radicality of Otherness that is contained in the notion of death:
Death is in no way an ontological structure of my being, at least not in so far as my being is for itself; it is the Other who is mortal in his being. There is no place for death in being-for-itself; it can neither wait for death nor realize it nor project itself toward it; death is in no way the foundation of the finitude of the for-itself.
The phenomenal character of living makes death conceivable only as a limit or horizon as it pertains to the lived present. The boundaries of the lived experience of being are themselves only present as the absurdness of the given: “It is absurd that we are born; it is absurd that we die” (Sartre, Reference Sartre and Barnes1993: 699). This facticity, nevertheless, is unavoidable, even as it cannot be integrated into the lifeworld of everyday experience.
The question of the radical intimacy versus the radical alterity of death in relation to life takes on poignancy in the philosophies of vitalism that extend from Nietzsche to Bataille, from Bergson to Ortega y Gasset among others (see Noys, Reference Noys2025) as well as in phenomenological and postphenomenological thinking (see De Vaujany, Aroles, & Pérezts, Reference De Vaujany, Aroles and Pérezts2023, particularly the introduction and chapter 12). Perhaps best exemplified in the psychoanalytic concepts of libido and death drive, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920/Reference Freud1956) considered death (Thanatos) as intertwined with life (Eros), co-existing impulses that enable survival. He argued that Thanatos, or the death drive, when projected outward from the self, was necessary for progress and development; yet, it could also become destructive when turned against the self and not counterbalanced by Eros.
While each of these elaborations offers important insights, we reject the tendencies potentially inherent in these philosophical interrogations of individualizing death or focusing on its absurdity. We argue that such tendencies risk rendering the phenomenon of death socially invisible and the issues surrounding it redundant or neglected. This results in the depoliticization of death, synonymous with the capitalist obsession with growth and productivity, which obscures the fact that destruction, and therefore death, and resulting inequality of opportunities to live a meaningful life or even have a livable one, are immanent aspects of capitalist “development.”
By contrast, perspectives such as those of Judith Butler consider both the existential and grounded political aspects of precarity that characterize life and bind us together relationally. Such a vision creates ethical obligations to care for all forms of life, in their irreducible otherness, while stressing how the unequal and sustained distribution of precarity is a political issue.
Life-and-Death as the Organization of Contingency and Precarity
The notion of life-and-death as both an existential condition and an organizational question revolves around the precarity of life, which is both personal and political. As Butler (Reference Butler2012) argues, all life is precarious; precarity is the condition of being alive and being a subject, revealing the deep entanglement of the subject’s development within social and political contexts due to the unequal distribution of precarity that is socially produced and reinforced. Therefore, precarity is also a political condition, which means that not all lives experience it to the same degree (Fotaki, Reference Fotaki2017, Reference Fotaki2023). Being particularly exposed to death because of how life is organized, having the inherent precarity of life experienced in a daily fashion, even weaponized to establish political domination, is a condition of precarious life. In this process, some lives are offered protection and nurturing, and their deaths are considered more “grieveable” (Butler, Reference Butler2016). Butler argues that for life to be grieved, it must first be recognized as worth living, and that recognition depends on how that life is framed. The politics of grieveability involve the organization of the value of life, not as an existential but as an organized condition of precarity—something that extends into the organization of bodily remains, as discussed in the article by Pianezzi and Tyler in this special issue. Differences among human populations and between human and other-than-human populations, in terms of the value assigned to their lives, are organized through social structures that confer or deny such value. Butler gives the example of Israeli soldiers, for whom Palestinian children in occupied Gaza are seen as “human shields” and “not children at all, but rather bits of armament, military instruments and material, aiding and abetting an assault on Israel” (Butler, Reference Butler2016: xxvi). Such dehumanization enables, through moral disengagement, the paradoxical treatment by the Israeli army of Palestinians as human shields during the war in Gaza (Mednick & Magdy, Reference Mednick and Magdy2025).
The organization of life through social structures recognizes that life-and-death are interconnected and articulated through relationships that shape vital outcomes. Foucault’s notion of biopolitics (Reference Foucault2002, Reference Foucault2003, Reference Foucault2008) involves a modern form of power that governs both individual practices and population-level biological dimensions, such as public health and sanitation, to administer the lives of populations. Distinct from older forms of power that relied on specific threats of death and punishment to govern coercively, modern biopolitical structures seek to control populations by constructing technical systems to maintain certain forms of life to the detriment of others. This occurs through regimes of food production and consumption, medical treatment and insurance, the organization of surveillance, education and physical activity. Furthermore, demographic classifications across the life span, as well as racialized and gendered classifications, served to organize how populations conducted and reproduced their lives, as well as how long they lived and with what degree of security.
While Foucault’s notion of biopolitics primarily focused on the control of life forms and processes through governing techniques, his theorizing already noted how biopolitics can move beyond the “calculated management of life” to encompass the organization of death (Foucault Reference Foucault and Hurley1978: 137). Specifically, focusing on racial classifications, totalitarian regimes, and nuclear politics, Foucault noted how biopolitics can result in the “power to expose a whole population to death” (Reference Foucault and Hurley1978: 140). As stated above, such forms of organization bind life and death together. In this way, the organization of life, in terms of who may live and in what form, is related to the organization of death, in terms of who is allowed to die and how. Thus, biopolitics—the governance of life is related to necropolitics—the governance of death.
Extending and radicalizing the Foucauldian position, Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (Mbembe, Reference Mbembe2019, Reference Mbembe2020) builds on this corollary of death to life. Necropolitics involves the creation of political subjects and spaces in which life and death are kept in an ambiguous liminal relation, creating an in-between organized zone between life and death. The creation of such spaces, or death-worlds, is related to processes of racialization, most starkly manifested in colonial governance. It is an organized process that results in activating and proliferating “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead” (Mbembe, Reference Mbembe2019: 40). Mbembe’s insight is to connect this state with racialized and colonial politics, reminiscent of other works such as Patterson’s (Reference Patterson2018) Slavery and Social Death, in which the very enactment of a kind of social “dying,” is a condition of possibility of the institution of slavery, or Valencia’s (Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018) analysis of the gore dynamics of capitalism particularly along border zones. The social institution of radically different classifications by their closeness to or association with death is necropolitics par excellence. Similar links between biopolitics and the management of death appear in Agamben’s (Reference Agamben1998) notion of homo sacer, the state in which a person may be killed without sanction or mourning, in the idea of thanatopolitics, the negative expression of Foucauldian biopolitics (see also Esposito, Reference Esposito2008), and the politics of disposability (see Bauman, Reference Bauman2014; Biehl, Reference Biehl2005; Pérezts, Reference Pérezts and Estévez2021).
But despite some rare exceptions (Banerjee, Reference Banerjee2006, Reference Banerjee2008; Cooke, Reference Cooke2003; Stokes & Gabriel, Reference Stokes and Gabriel2010), such issues remain on the margins of management or business ethics, although their population control logics and bio- or necropolitical outcomes depend on organized action.
Life-and-Death as an Other-Than-Human Stake
Notably, the above perspectives extend concerns with life-and-death beyond an individual existential position to establish it as the organization of the possibility of and modes of living as they remain bound to human society. Furthermore, bio- and necropolitics raise the very question of what counts as “human” in the moral sense. The biopolitical overflow into the Mbembian “death zone” is a question of the boundaries of what is considered socially “alive,” as is Patterson’s concept of social death. Relatedly, the conflation of “life” with that of the “human” creates ethical dilemmas around those forms of life that cannot be defined as human, yet require care, nurturance, and the conditions for survival. The organization of other-than-human life is thus another layer in the ethical organization of life-and-death.
Some work extends biopolitical and necropolitical thinking to such spheres, for example, in Klasky and Butt’s (Reference Klasky and Butt2024) analysis of cattle farming as the construction of “bovis sacer,” an echo of Agamben’s “homo sacer.” As we currently use other-than-human animals as means to our ends, we treat them in ways that would be profoundly immoral were they human beings (Cavalieri, Reference Cavalieri2001). Kaoutar Harchi (Reference Harchi2024) also argues that the animalization of humans instead of humanizing nonhuman animals renders both killable: calling a living being an animal gives permission to inflict harm and normalizes their killing. Working across these related theoretical traditions, a multispecies ethics of life-and-death poses complex questions about predation and the ethics of killing or exploiting, given the requirement of living beings to feed on other living beings. Such an ethics thus requires nuanced analysis of inter-species ways of relating (Haraway, Reference Haraway2008), as well as theorizing about the forms and processes of exclusion involved in multispecies entanglements (Giraud, Reference Giraud2019).
Various strands of emergent ethical thinking on the organization and politics of life beyond the human proliferate in environmental thought as well (e.g., Johnson, Reference Johnson2023; Leff, Reference Leff2021). For instance, Dahlmann (Reference Dahlmann2025) conceptualizes ethics as the “pursuit of life,” which involves recognizing the entanglement of human and other-than-human lives in complex ecosystems marked by mutual interdependence and multispecies relationships. Ethical thinking in a multispecies register cannot thus fall back on Enlightenment ideas about universal inclusion, which is mostly reserved for humans, but must instead find ethical ground in a differentiated ecosystem with diverse life processes, and metabolic and ecological cycles. We argue that human and ecological organizations are mutually imbricated, adding complexity to the organization of life-and-death and the ethical stakes behind it by including this other-than-human dimension at its core.
Next, we discuss these dimensions to formulate core propositions and avenues to advance organizational and business ethics scholarship through the lens of life-and-death.
OPERATIONALIZING AN ORGANIZATIONAL ETHICS OF LIFE-AND-DEATH
Positioned between an existential condition and an organized bio-/necropolitics, the organizational ethics of life-and-death should create space for both the lived experiences of the organized, and the structures and processes by which their lives and deaths are managed, as well as the values that underpin such structures and processes. While the business ethics literature does not yet explicitly acknowledge the organizational ethics of life-and-death, we attempt to bring together the many elements dispersed throughout the literature to elaborate on this intellectual and practical project. We briefly note below some of the possible avenues, which are distinct but overlapping in our attempt to operationalize what an organizational ethics of life-and-death may imply concretely for theory and practice.
Existential Condition as Freedom Ethics
An organizational ethics of life-and-death should draw out the ethical implications of organizing lives that are radically “thrown” into the world in a foundational, constitutive relation to death. Some business ethics scholars have explored these aspects of existentialist thought in terms of radical freedom and the difficulties of confronting one’s existential situation (Botha & Freeman, Reference Botha and Freeman2023). Moreover, existentialist perspectives in business ethics have emphasized the importance of authenticity to one’s being, an awareness of life “without absolute bearings, solid foundations, or universal meaning” (Villesèche, Klitmøller, & Michaelsen, Reference Villesèche, Klitmøller and Michaelsen2024: 668). While these works focus more on existential freedom than the facticity of death, del Rio and Suddaby (Reference Del Rio and Suddaby2025) do recognize the link between existential freedom and the acknowledgement of death. Specifically, they describe attempts to ethically organize death as an experiential and authentically lived phenomenon rather than obscure its radicality under a scientific-medical model. Such an approach illustrates how the “good death” (Reference Del Rio and Suddaby2025: 673) can become an object of organizational concern (see also Le Theule, Lambert, & Morales, Reference Le Theule, Lambert and Morales2020).
Such extensions of existentialist positions to organizational ethics of life-and-death can help us examine how standpoints on life-and-death shape visions of freedom, authenticity, and conformity. As Villesèche et al. (Reference Villesèche, Klitmøller and Michaelsen2024) suggest, and as noted above, the organization of people under the “das Man” distracts and diverts attention from the immediacy of life by enveloping it in a socially facilitated and conformist “they.” The resulting inauthentic position relieves organization members of the anxiety of being alive, which is also a powerful motivator for conformity, moral disengagement, and failure to acknowledge the effects of organizing on the world. Thus, focusing on the existential ethics of life-and-death recognizes social pressures of distraction and conformity, and insists on an acknowledgement of the irreducible condition of living beings as co-inhabiting the world and bound to each other through this mutual co-existence. This acknowledgment serves as the foundational basis for both ethical reasoning and freedom understood as an ethical and political commitment to existence and to life in the face of death.
Relationality and Interdependence
The existential dimension, as suggested above, is also relational because being with others provides a standpoint for understanding one’s own life position in a broader complex web of intricate lives. This understanding involves realizing that we can’t exist without others and without our life-sustaining habitat. According to Butler, relationality is the foundation of human subjectivity, defining our being in the social world through exchanges with others. In an interview with Thomas Dumm, she explains:
Whatever it means to have or pursue a moral mode of being in the world, it will not be something that is exclusively “mine” and so will have to be a mode of being that is bound up with others with all the difficulty and promise that it implies (Dumm, Reference Dumm2008: 102).
Relationality also implies an ethical obligation toward the irreducible other (Butler, Reference Butler2004, Reference Butler2016) whose mode of being we do not necessarily identify with yet recognize as equivalent (Fotaki, Reference Fotaki2023). Hence, Butler’s ethical obligation of care emerges from our co-implication and dependence on the relatable and unrelatable other, stressing the potential for both altruism and harm (Fotaki, Reference Fotaki2019b). Elley-Brown and Pringle (Reference Elley Brown and Pringle2021) continue this relational view from a Heideggerian perspective through the concept of Sorge, or care/concern, where an authentic investment in the other’s life gives one’s life meaning and grounding. This focus on alterity and relationality is also present in Rhodes and Badham’s (Reference Rhodes and Badham2018) Levinasian examination of relationality in leadership ethics, which locates ethics in the impossibility of fully responding to the regard of the other—in other words, ethics as situated in the impossibility of ethics as such. Such works reveal the relationality in existentialist perspectives themselves and foreground the ethical tensions they create.
Recent scholarship also draws on relational perspectives to offer alternative possibilities for ethical organizing, particularly those stemming from feminist and environmentalist perspectives (e.g., Good & Thorpe, Reference Good and Thorpe2020; Mandalaki & Fotaki, Reference Mandalaki and Fotaki2020). Although not in conflict with existentialist perspectives, such approaches generally begin with a consideration of relationality as constitutive of commons-oriented, sustainable communities, rather than with a consideration of human nature or meaning as a starting point. As such, they open possibilities for relational organizing that are not meaning-based and can provide a starting point for ecological and other-than-human forms of organizing that extend ethical organizing beyond a humanist paradigm. We discuss this in greater detail after considering the care and caring implications that the recognition of relationality imposes on us.
Care and Caring
An ethics of care perspective is based on a regard for the importance of others for ethical flourishing (Fotaki et al., Reference Fotaki, Islam and Antoni2020). Relevant to and discussed within both existential (Elley-Brown & Pringle, Reference Elley Brown and Pringle2021) and relational (Hawk, Reference Hawk, Hamington and Sander-Staudt2011) perspectives, an ethics of care acknowledges the relational bases of life and the need for caring relationships in a well-lived life, as well as care in the context of the vulnerability of all living beings. By shedding light on the ethics of life-and-death implicit within all human efforts at organizing, such scholarship can examine how ethics may be understood as “co-extensive with life in its full development” (Henry, Reference Henry and Davidson2012: 96; Pérezts, Faÿ, & Picard, Reference Pérezts, Faÿ and Picard2015).
For instance, Meschitti (Reference Meschitti, Fotaki, Islam and Antoni2019) critiques traditional normative perspectives for their disembodiment from the materiality of life, which is reflected in the routines of organizational life. Adopting a Deleuzian perspective, she theorizes care relationships through an immanent conception of becoming as a process that is embodied and encompasses different forms of life. Focusing on the flow of becoming, this perspective is concerned with enabling new ways of living for human and other-than-human forms of life, with a focus on the creativity of becoming that arises from relationships of care. Drawing on the feminist psychoanalytic idea of embodied vulnerability, which renders us dependent on others, Fotaki (Reference Fotaki2023) explains the ambivalence surrounding care in contemporary societies and organizations, as it is erroneously associated with weakness and ignores the life-sustaining power of interdependency. Neoliberal ideology—a dominant influence permeating public life—casts such interdependency as a moral failure and juxtaposes it with the fantasy of the rational individual, who is disembodied and free of any social obligations. Bringing back caring relationships to the fore in our collective infrastructures therefore appears as a vital tenet to push forward, as the articles in this volume by Perray-Redslob, Clavijo, and Morinière on the one hand and by Wenzel on the other exemplify in complementary ways.
Commons and Commoning as Ethical Alternatives
Recent discussions of the organizational ethics of the “commons” involve questions about alternative ways of organizing that move beyond private property and involve common-pool resources produced and distributed in diverse ways (Murillo, Guinart, & Arenas, Reference Murillo, Guinart and Arenas2025; Mandalaki & Fotaki, Reference Mandalaki and Fotaki2020; Peredo, Haugh, Hudon, & Meyer, Reference Peredo, Haugh, Hudon and Meyer2020). The notion of the commons refers to an eclectic variety of nonprivate resources, along with the complex social practices by which those resources are organized (e.g., Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, Reference Ostrom, Gardner and Walker1994). The nonprivate nature of commons acknowledges the interconnectedness of living beings and the more-than-human nature of organizational arrangements among different environmental factors (Bresnihan, Reference Bresnihan, Kirwan, Dawney and Bridgestoke2015). This more-than-human aspect is typically accepted, as common pool resources encompass environmentally complex systems such as fisheries and forests; however, the organization and distribution of commons resources are often considered a task for human agency (cf. Bresnihan, Reference Bresnihan, Kirwan, Dawney and Bridgestoke2015). By contrast, recent work extends this agentic web to include “more-than-human alliances, solidarities, and contradictory and conflictual relationships” (Smessaert & Feola, Reference Smessaert and Feola2025: 5942). This more expansive notion of the commons sees multispecies relationships as webs of lives in common, differentiated across species but entangled in complex ecosystems whose maintenance is a condition of life for all the species involved, as can be seen in the article by Ehrnström-Fuentes, Boehm, Hagolani-Albov, and Annala Tesfaye in this special issue.
Beyond the claim that commons are often effective ways of promoting sustainable ecological governance (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1990) is the crucial point that commons organizing produces the very communities that self-govern (Murillo et al., Reference Murillo, Guinart and Arenas2025). In this sense, commons are both products and actors of practices of commoning. An ethics of the commons is, therefore, not simply an ethics of the processes and outcomes of distribution but is an ethics of the production of shared life. Conversely, the governance of the commons regulates how and where death occurs—for example, in regulating over-fishing or deforestation—and thus involves an ethics of death. In this way, an ethic of the commons enables organizational ethics to move beyond overly economistic conceptions of ethics, considering the life-and-death consequences of organizing.
Ethics as Politics
A steady stream of scholarship has noted the relationship between business ethics and political philosophy (e.g., Heath, Moriarty, & Norman, Reference Heath, Moriarty and Norman2010; McMahon, Reference McMahon1995; Neesham & Macklin, Reference Neesham, Macklin, Poff and Michalos2023), yet these perspectives have often highlighted the tendency to sideline politics in the field (Heath et al., Reference Heath, Moriarty and Norman2010). Indeed, critical scholars have taken business ethics to task for the structural occlusion of politics in their ethical treatments (Parker, Reference Parker2003). An organizational ethics of life-and-death acknowledges the need for thinking organization politically. Moreover, in doing so, it also insists on a reconceptualization of politics as moving beyond a specific sphere of governance and social contracts, to an overarching politics of life-and-death. The previous section on bio- and necropolitics, as well as the discussion brought about the article by Vianna, Alcadipani, Barros, and Matarazzo in this volume, should make clear the expansion of politics implied in such a move. This position entails not only bringing politics into organizational ethics but also rethinking politics and organization themselves in terms of the (re)production and coordination of life-and-death.
Thinking ethics and politics together around life-and-death thus implies moving beyond a humanistic focus on discursive processes toward a “politics of nature” (Latour, Reference Latour2004) in which traditional notions of debate and negotiation through language are reconceived as a “parliament of nature” with the participation of diverse forms of life. Stenger’s (Reference Stengers2010) notion of “cosmopolitics” similarly involves a negotiation of taken-for-granted aspects of the world, in which nature and culture are integrated into an ecology of knowledge and practice that takes seriously the different forms of life that coexist and occupy the political sphere. Organizing life-and-death politically thus involves an embodied, affectively laden politics that acknowledges the diversity of political practices and seeks to find ways of living together among diverse forms of life.
Although the above are merely illustrations of how an organizational ethics of life-and-death can be further developed across different ethical traditions, they provide a starting point for this emerging discussion and an inspiration for the current special issue. In a more general sense, we argue that business ethics should shed light on infrastructural foundations of life-and-death organizing and interrogate ethical underpinnings of practices and experiences shaped by them. Consequently, hospitals, cemeteries, funeral homes, police, army, farms, and humanitarian missions, as organizations playing a primary role in infrastructuring individual and collective realities of life and death, are privileged sites of inquiry on such interrogations.
This discussion, with its tensions and unsuspected ramifications, is continued throughout this special issue, manifested in the papers selected for the volume, which we introduce in more detail below.
PAPERS IN THE SPECIAL ISSUE
With the above theoretical possibilities in mind, our call for papers outlined a series of questions regarding the ethics of organization and organizing life-and-death to initiate this multidimensional conversation. Not surprisingly, we received many submissions from life-and-death related industries, such as healthcare and funeral organizations. The editorial process involved deepening and elaborating the conceptual bases of a select few manuscripts to explore life-and-death issues, representing novel and complementary ways of thinking about organizational ethics, across diverse sectors and geographic locales.
Below, we summarize each of the contributions to the present volume and their relation to the core concerns of the Special Issue.
The article by Perray-Redslob, Clavijo, and Morinière, “Public Hospitals in Critical Condition: Death and Love as Embodied Care and Political Mobilization,” demonstrates the skillful application of life-and-death metaphors and their materiality to oppose the undermining of health as the public good with detrimental implications of such developments for society. The article draws on theoretical resources provided by Judith Butler’s work, which concerns the power of bodies to assemble as a potent political resource (Butler, Reference Butler2015). The article decries neoliberal philosophy as a dominant paradigm that ultimately promotes death at the expense of love and care in public life. This vital work contributes to the literature on the ethics of care by incorporating theories of social mobilization. It does so by bringing to the fore death and love as symbols that illuminate the radical political potential of care in social movements while advancing an “ethics of publicness” to counteract the wholesale privatization of the public sphere, evidenced in US public policy, for instance. Healthcare is a particularly relevant and stark example of the consequences of normalizing health as a consumerist service accessible only to those who can afford it. Literally, such access amounts to a right to live and be healthy—framed individually, rather than a collective responsibility that all contribute to according to their means. The negative consequences of such a system are evident in attempts to frame crowdfunding for health (the most common crowdfunding purpose), as “the democratic” source of funding health services, with predictable adverse consequences for equity of access (Moysidou & Fotaki, Reference Moysidou and Fotaki2025). However, the paper also highlights the potential for change and the role of social mobilization in shaping a more equitable future.
With the article “Organized Carelessness: Deethicizing the Organization of Death” by Wenzel, we move from life-sustaining organizational arrangements to the domain of death management and ritualization. Drawing on Tronto’s (Reference Tronto1993) dimensions of the ethics of care, the study examines how carelessness is produced in the organization of death. The paper offers a nuanced vision of how care and carelessness can co-exist within an organizational setting and identifies the processes through which the former morphs into the latter. By analyzing the practices and organizational habits of funeral homes in Berlin, the author uncovers the phenomenon of “organized carelessness” that enables us to move beyond a binarizing predilection of theorizing carelessness as a simple lack of care. The findings from this study offer novel implications for understanding carelessness as the quintessence of insensitivity and marginalization of others’ needs through processes that are integral to the fabric of organizing death.
In the article “Whose Grave’s This, Sir? An Ethico-Political Critique of Organized Resting Places” by Pianezzi and Tyler, the authors examine places of burial to consider how death is organized to confer recognition and a sense of the validity of life upon social actors. Also drawing upon a Butlerian psychoanalytic frame, the authors focus on the issue of “grievability” and its organization, considering cemeteries as “discursive-socio-material assemblages of inscriptions and marks” that can confer a sense of grievability and thus social recognition. As an empirical setting, they draw on a comparison of two island cemeteries: Venice’s San Michele cemetery, a beautiful and serene setting that conveys a sense of social value for the deceased, with New York’s Hart cemetery, a setting marked by despair and forgetfulness, and an endpoint of precarious lives. Their study shows that life-and-death are given social meaning through spatial and material practices, such as rituals and architectures, that render some lives grievable and other lives forgettable. What they learn about the comparative organization of the life-and-death ethics from what is clearly an extreme case—that is, an organization centered on death—can help us think more generally about how organizations confer recognition and value upon some lives over others, and the socio-material processes by which such conferral is achieved.
Slutskaya, Newton, Horne, Mahalingam, and Luca, in their paper “Zones of Slow Death? Social Descent, Epistemic Injustice and Temporality” continue the concern with the social and organizational coding of the value of lives, this time in the setting of waste collection workers who have been deskilled under a neoliberal privatization of their workplace over decades. The authors analyze how workers are discredited in their everyday experiences as a form of “epistemic injustice” theorized by Fricker (Reference Fricker2007). First, by being discounted in terms of their claims for restored dignity, particularly after the false hope brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the workers are victims of “testimonial injustice,” that is, an injustice occurring when a subject is not given their due epistemic credit. Moreover, by withholding the very resources needed to articulate their claims to dignity, they are victims of “hermeneutical injustice,” an injustice that occurs when the modes of expression of a given social experience are not socially available or accessible, leading to a deficit in expressing one’s own experience. By showing how regimes of work, linked to broader socioeconomic regimes of public and private control, can lead to different forms of everyday experience in which life is valued differently, the authors contribute to understanding the link between macro-political concepts and the lived phenomenology of a life of indignity, akin to a form of “slow death.”
The article by Vianna, Alcadipani, Barros, and Matarazzo, “Getting Away with Murder: Legitimizing the Organization of Life and Death via Memes,” switches sides radically, from those suffering workplace indignities and loss of valued life as workers to those whose work actively denigrates and devalues the lives of others. Through an analysis of internet memes among Brazilian police officers, the authors examine how the officers’ communications devalue life, justify their own roles as purveyors of death, and frame citizens as deserving of death. They focus on how the state claims authority over the lives and deaths of its population, requiring discursive legitimation techniques that sustain and maintain that authority. In a context of increasing social tension in Brazil and a turn towards authoritarian politics, the police’s internet communication becomes a way to build discursive tools, through language and images, that reinforce the myth of an authoritative state that can claim the lives of citizens at will. By analyzing the mediatized structures through which such legitimation is conferred, the authors also draw an explicit connection between life, death, and organization.
Finally, the article by Ehrnström-Fuentes, Boehm, Hagolani-Albov, and Annala Tesfaye, “Multispecies Organizing in the Web of Life: Ethico-Political Dynamics of Matters of Care in Ecologies-in-Place,” moves beyond a human register to interrogate the more-than-human organization involved in environmental ethics. Drawing on insights from multispecies ethnography and feminist new materialist thinkers, the authors develop a theorization of the fundamentally relational nature of life, its capacity to transcend species boundaries, and its intricate web of interdependencies among life forms. Illustrating their ideas with a case study of the Knepp estate in the UK, a formerly industrial farm site that underwent attempts at “rewilding,” which laid bare the multispecies webs that were involved in maintaining life. Ethics in this paper, as in the previous ones, is multiscale and relational, but goes beyond human organizations and governments in the degree of its relationality.
MOVING FORWARD
Overall, the small but diverse collection of articles that comprise this Special Issue reveals several key insights regarding the organizational ethics of life-and-death. They demonstrate how life-and-death can be taken literally and materially, as in a cemetery or a police shooting, or at a more profound and symbolic level, as in the dignity of a life well-lived. The articles also demonstrate how ethical agency is dispersed and reconfigured across complex relational networks that involve more than individual or organizational actors making decisions. They all involve, in some way or another, socio-material supports beyond cognitive and discursive ones, drawing on bodies, images, architectures, and technologies to manifest and materialize ethical imaginaries.
Taken together, the contributions in this Special Issue offer a glimpse into the research agenda that we hope to inspire with our theorizing, an agenda that is multifaceted and polyvocal in its focus on the key issues of life-and-death. By shedding light on the ethics of life-and-death implicit in all human efforts at organizing, we hope this SI will foster deeper inquiries into the modes of relationality that shape organizing, and how collective action manifests the shared predicament of life’s inherent fragility (Fotaki, Reference Fotaki2019b). The literature has yet to reach a deep understanding of how redefining organization through the lens of life-and-death brings new ethical stakes to light. Non-livability—whether in its most dramatic (e.g., genocide) or more banal expressions (e.g., business-as-usual)—is the result of organizational processes and infrastructures, and these therefore stand in the way of ethics. By questioning how organizational ethics can better integrate the fragility and interdependence of human and nonhuman lives and bodies into theory and practice we sought to inspire inquiries into how to develop forms of organizing that we can actually live by. This implies not shying away from visibilizing death as part of life, with the same existential and political dignity as life, instead of as a taboo, a failure, or a mere gore spectacle. Focusing on care, relationality, and collective solidarity, making space for a plurality of human, nonhuman, and even absent (no longer here or not yet here) others, becomes the normative claim that organizational practices and political choices should aim for. We hope this special issue will serve as a springboard for future inquiries in this direction, drawing upon some of the insights developed here but also broadening the discussion to include other authors, geographies, and scopes.
The ongoing tragedies that define our contemporary period—including the ways academia itself may be implicated, within and outside its walls, in processes of life-and-death—make such considerations universal (in the most basic sense), unavoidable and urgent but not devoid of hope. Yet, hope that a different world is possible must be a driver for action as we recognize the need for new organizational ethics with life-and-death concerns at its center to transform the infrastructures and the organizations we struggle to live in, without, or in spite of.
Mar Pérezts is full professor of philosophy and organization, and member of OCE Research Center (Organizations: Critical and Ethnographical perspectives) at Emlyon Business School in France. Her work is transversal, and delves into organizational questions with a critical and philosophical focus. She has previously served as book reviews editor for Organization Studies and as research integrity editor for the Journal of Business Ethics, and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Marianna Fotaki is a professor of business ethics at Warwick Business School. She has published over 100 articles on gender, inequalities, and the marketization of public services in leading international journals. Marianna was a Primary Investigator (2020–22) on a UKRI-funded COVID scheme project, “Understanding the financial impact of COVID-19 on the UK care home sector—implications for businesses and the workforce,” and on various research council-funded projects on whistleblowing in the last ten years. Her current research centers on the applications of feminist ethics of care in public policy and responses to refugee and migrant arrivals in Europe.
Yuliya Shymko (yshymko@audencia.com, corresponding author) is full professor and head of research at the Department of Organizational Studies and Ethics at Audencia Business School in France. She serves as an associate editor for Organization. Her work in critical sociology and ethics has been published in various international academic journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Gender, Work & Organization, Organization Science, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Applied Psychology among others.
Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, and member of the research laboratory IREGE (Research Institute for Management and Economics) at the University of Savoie Mont-Blanc. He is co-editor-in-chief of Journal of Business Ethics. His research interests revolve around business ethics and the contemporary meanings of work, including the relations between identity, power and the production of group and organizational cultures.
