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Machiavelli's Kitchen

Schouten & Nelissen/Nijmegen School of Management, The Netherlands, renetenbos{at}hotmail.com

Berlin's ideas about value pluralism are used in order to criticize business ethics. These ideas can be traced back to Machiavelli, a philosopher who has been remarkably popular among managers and business leaders. The first part of the article, therefore, enters into why Berlin thought Machiavelli paved the way for value pluralism. It will be concluded that we need skills to handle pluralism rather than a strong emphasis on values. In the second part of the article, Berlin's ideas about value pluralism are related to Foucault's ideas about ethics. Both philosophers offer us ideas about how aforementioned skills are to be understood. In the third and final part, it will be argued that business ethics undermines the use of these skills. The ironical objective of the article is to show that business ethics has a very strained relationship with certain democratic and liberal intuitions.

Key Words: business ethics • irony • negative freedom • pluralism • professionalism

Organization, Vol. 9, No. 1, 51-70 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/135050840291003


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