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Business Ethics, Accounting and the Fear of MelancholySchouten & Nelissen/ Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands In the article, I address the strained relationship between business, the ethics of business and working life, on the one hand, and what is sometimes referred to as melancholy, on the other. I take issue with the age-old claim that one should keep to the books if one is to prevent melancholy. I argue that this claim, half-forgotten as it may be, is still implicit in many texts on business ethics. Much of what I have to say is grounded in a different, explicitly `anti-bourgeois' understanding of melancholy. To pave the way for such a different understanding, I will bring in ideas stemming from a wide and rather unusual range of sources (for example, Aristotle, Ficino, Defoe, Lepenies, Tarkowskij and, perhaps most importantly, Benjamin). The point is that these sources allow us to understand that one objective of business ethics is to help management and organizations to block off certain experiences that are, for various reasons, deemed to be unwelcome.
Key Words: bookkeeping • business ethics • experience • gothic • melancholy • ruins
Organization, Vol. 10, No. 2,
267-285 (2003) This article has been cited by other articles:
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