Post-humanist Practice Theory as a Contribution to the Study of Responsibility and Ethics in Philosophy of Management

Abstract A key problem in philosophy of management is the role of the manager and of the researcher in relation to practices and processes of organizations. Mainstream philosophy of management is striving to conceive practices of ethics and responsibility in organizations. Moreover, it is a problem of how to do ideographic analysis and capture the uniqueness of situations. However, such efforts to capture actions and events in practical life have not been sufficiently successful. With post-humanist practice philosophy, we find an innovative attempt to study organizations that help us to address these challenges. This approach is inspired by the new materialism, feminist analysis and sustainability theory in relation to organization studies. In particular, the Italian organizational theorist Silvia Gherardi develops a relevant perspective on ethics and an ideographic approach in organizational analysis, and this is further developed into a post humanist perspective on management responsibility. In this article we propose a hermeneutic analysis of Gherardi’s work with focus on clarification of the possibilities of the post-humanist contribution to approach analysis of ethics and responsible management. The article presents an analysis of the contribution of post-humanist practice theory to do research in ethics and responsible management with focus on methodology to capture unique real-life situations of doing ethics and responsible management in practice. The aim is to demonstrate how practice theory with the development of analytical strategies based on ethico-onto-epistemology and agential realism implies an important contribution to the study of ethics and responsible management, and idiographic methodology in philosophy of management. With this scrutiny of posthuman practice theory the innovative contribution of this article lies in the hermeneutic evaluation of Silvia Gherardi’s work as a key position in philosophy of management with focus on ethics and responsible management in practical organizational processes.