Organizational Democracy as ‘Facing the Other’ - Corporeal Ethics in a Knowledge Sector Cooperative

Corporeal ethics has researched embodied and affective resistance to managerial and organizational dominations mostly in hierarchical organizations. Democratic organizing, especially in small alternative enterprises, brings people closer together, confronts them with varying interests and desires but also makes their bodies meet entangling them with affect. This paper investigates how relational moves unravel in a small scale cooperative in the knowledge sector, while seeking to understand their corporeal ethical dimension. An ethnographic field study reveals five relational moves: sensing (1), corporeal care (2), listening (3), dialoging (4) and joy (5). The study similarly observes relational precarities displaying the limits of a pre-reflexive ‘ethics of ethics’ which understands ethical acts as an 'ontological compulsion' rather than a 'moral obligation'. We thereby explore how feminist corporeal ethical theorizing can integrate relational precarities in a novel research agenda for ethical democratic organizing.