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Abstract
Discussions of the ethics of organization are often based on crucial but mostly abstract categories. The role of these categories is not contested here but, in line with a sociomaterial view of organizations, we suggest that objects also participate in ethical processes and that they fulfil a number of important roles in the social construction of ethics. We study this possibility via the extreme case of young Khmer Rouge combatants participating in two operational units (elite Division 703 and the S-21 death camp), and discuss how objects played critical roles in connecting macro-ideological and micro-individual dimensions with ethical relevance. We suggest that objects conveyed ethical meaning and that they initially offered opportunities to validate, materially, the Khmer Rouge ideology amongst this group and to justify their genocidal action. At a later stage, they evidenced the impossibility of escape from the totalitarian gaze of the Ângkar. Ethics, we conclude, partly speak through objects.
Notes
1. The suicidal wave at Foxconn (Eccles et al. Citation2012) and the outbreak of unrest in the autumn of 2012 in the same company (Hille Citation2012) suggest that the recruitment of large numbers of young workers, especially young men, and their inclusion in what can be interpreted as a total institutional space (Lucas et al. Citation2012), is something still happening in the contemporary corporate world where proletarians are being made.