%0 Journal Article
%T Bringing the ugly back: A dialogic exploration of ethics in leadership through an ethno
%A Beverley Hawkins
%A Doris Schedlitzki
%A Gareth Edwards
%J Human Relations
%@ 1741-282X
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0018726718773859
%X 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
%K Bakhtin
%K beauty
%K dialogism
%K ethics
%K leadership
%K ugliness
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0018726718773859