The issue of damaged relationships and of repairing them is very important, especially in recent years with reports of organizations which damage relationships with various stakeholders. Many studies have investigated how individuals react to damaged relationships after perceiving injustice or receiving offense in organizations. A part of this research has been focused on revenge or other types of negative responses. However, individuals can choose to react in other ways than revenge, willing to repair relationships through reconciliation. Recently, the effectiveness of (...) reconciliation to repair damaged relationship in organizations has been linked to restorative justice. For the purpose of this article we are interested in understanding how restorative justice can be effective in repairing damaged or broken relationships in organizations, as inspired by principles of compassion or mercy. In this sense, we look for a convincing philosophical foundation for restorative justice, proposing Levinas’ ethics as a way to justify it. (shrink)

Forgiveness has been a central issue for humankind since ancient times; it emerged in theology, but in recent decades it has received significant attention from different disciplines, such as philosophy and psychology. More recently, forgiveness has received attention also from organizational and managerial studies, particularly, in studying how individuals respond to interpersonal offenses, or perceived harm and wrongdoing in the workplace. Forgiveness is a complex concept, as it can be understood as a family of related constructs and can be analyzed (...) at different levels. Even if social sciences have widely recognized that the nature of forgiveness can be both conditional and unconditional, the notions of conditionality and unconditionality have not yet received sufficient study, especially in organizational and managerial fields. In these fields, forgiveness has been predominantly studied under a psychological approach, looking for the conditions under which it may occur in the workplace. Unconditional forgiveness has received less attention: with a few exceptions, managerial and organizational literature has limited the conceptualization of forgiveness, weakening its scope and probably not catching a relevant part of forgiving experiences in the workplace. This article proposes to follow a more comprehensive approach to forgiveness in the workplace, according to the social sciences field, which can take into account both conditionality and unconditionality. It focuses on unconditional forgiveness according to Continental philosophy, in particular, to the thought of Jacque Derrida and Paul Ricoeur. Through their contributions, the unconditionality of forgiveness is deepened, and the implications of considering both conditional and unconditional forgiveness are discussed. (shrink)

The logic of gift and gratuitousness in business activity raised by the encyclical Caritas in Veritate stresses a deeper critical evaluation of the category of relation. The logic of gift in business includes two aspects. The first is considering the logic of gift as a new conceptual lens in order to view business relationship beyond contractual logic. In this view, it is crucial to see the circulation of goods as instrumental for the development of relationships. The second aspect is to (...) qualify the relationships established through the gift, and to think about the motivation in gift-giving, which has an ethical content. We give because we have received, and through gift-giving we develop relationships that have a high ‘bonding value’. Analysing the logic of gift in business management may permit us to gain an understanding of the ambiguity of gift-giving in organizations. Looking at the relationships between organizations and employees, and organizations and customers, we can discover why the logic of gift is often misunderstood or abused in its application, and how it should be applied to be more consistent with the message of Caritas in Veritate. (shrink)

This study aims at developing a theoretical model for workplace bullying using René Girard’s scapegoating framework. Despite the wide range of labels and related constructs present in workplace bullying literature, the explanation of the phenomenon is often studied under theoretical frameworks that do not always capture the nature of the concept. Indeed, the need to find instruments and tools to reduce or solve workplace bullying overshadowed conceptual and theoretical matters, leaving the concept undertheorized. By broadening the spectrum of social sciences (...) beyond managerial and organizational studies, we propose to use René Girard’s scapegoating framework to shed new light on workplace bullying. The scapegoating framework allows us to understand better some collective and social dimensions of workplace bullying, catching relevant elements that characterize this phenomenon, also those that are less evident from organizational studies. In a Girardian sense, scapegoating is like a trap that every human society falls into, and many aspects of workplace bullying recall its mechanism. For Girard, a human group or society can fall into a spiral of reciprocal violence because of the mimetic desire mechanism, risking a conflict escalation: violence begets more violence, putting at risk the stability or even the existence of this group or society. Scapegoating is a way to overcome reciprocal violence by uniting against a single victim who cannot reciprocate this violence. This study also proposes a tentative way to escape this trap: positive mimesis and gift-giving. (shrink)

Today we are facing the rising of new needs for the firms, especially for the small ones; they find themselves acting in a context characterized by the great content of information technology. This paper wants to analyse some aspects tied to the use of some particular kinds of resources, such as knowledge and organizational culture. It's necessary, especially in the new economy, to add another attribute to the four set by Barney as elements able to make the resources sustainable competitive (...) advantage sources in 1991: this attribute is freedom, essentially as freedom of reaching and using resources. This attribute, more than coming along with the four already set, can be considered in many cases as a pre-condition to the other ones in existence.The theoretical part will be completed by the reference to a particular organizational model that is based on freedom, that is the open source model; we'll try to show how freedom is not an abstract concept in business. (shrink)