Goals of this chapter

After studying this chapter you will be able to:

• articulate the ways in which management and business ethics researchers have approached and developed the idea of organizational justice;

• distinguish between the three most commonly defined dimensions of organizational justice: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice;

• explain how management and business ethics researchers have understood the relationship between justice and ethics;

• explain how the concept of justice is understood in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and contrast this with the concept of justice used in the literature on organizational justice;

• consider the radical implications of Levinas's understanding of justice for organizational justice;

• understand the meaning of the term pleonexia and its relationship with justice in organizations.

Introduction

The idea of justice is philosophically sophisticated, culturally embedded, and practically enacted. Justice has had massive uptake in Western society and culture over some thousands of years. With this longevity ‘justice’ is part of our normal lexicon and is an idea that forms the basis of some of the main national and international institutions that serve to govern our everyday lives. The breadth of juridico-political structures that regulates interactions between people in both national and global settings rests in one way or the other on the idea of justice. Business organizations are also sites where the idea of justice is meaningful, and it has therefore not escaped the attention of those who study, theorize, and practice management and ethics – especially in terms of the just treatment of employees.