Bringing the ugly back: A dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno-narrative re-reading of the Enron case
采用对话方法，通过重读安然案例的叙事，探讨领导力伦理中的美学偏见，揭示“压抑丑陋”和“追求好看”两种社会张力如何美化有毒的男性化人格。
In this article, we adopt a dialogic approach to examining narratives on ethics in leadership. We do this through an ethno-narrative re-reading of writing on the Enron case informed by Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue. Employing concepts such as beautyism, aesthetic craving and recent writing around disgust and abjection in organizations helps us to develop a deeper relational interpretation of written accounts of leadership and ethics in organizations. We identify two underlying and interrelated social tensions exemplified in existing narratives on this popular example of ‘unethical’ leadership practice. Both tensions, we conclude, are linked to denigrating the ugly in favour of the beautiful, and we have labelled them ‘suppressing the ugly’ and a fetish for ‘looking good’. We go on to suggest that these two tensions then combine in the stories about this case to ultimately beautify a toxic masculinized persona. We suggest therefore that our dialogic perspective on ethical leadership narratives helps to uncover how accounts about Enron are developed through an intricate interplay between seeking to ‘look good’ and the suppression of moral judgment by leaders of the organization.