A Levinasian ethics critique of the role of management and control systems by large global corporations: The General Electric/Nuovo Pignone example
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay extends [Shearer, 2002] Levinasian critique of the role of financial accounting with its neo-classical underpinnings in today’s global market capitalism. It expands on Levinas’s ethics-of-being-for-the-other by emphasizing how he developed his radical ethics by drawing on the ancient Jewish texts, an ethics that gives place of privilege to ontology rather than epistemology in contrast to much conventionalWestern philosophy. The essay illustrates the potential of his ethics for mounting a critique of the use of management and control systems by global corporations. It provides General Electric’s takeover of the Italian company Nouvo Pignone as an instance. The systems are an essential element in the expansionary strategies of these massive enterprises that have come to dominate the world. The essay concludes that GE’s instantiation of its generic management and control systems into the firms it acquires runs afoul of a Levinasian ethics. That many large global corporations employ similar systems and tactics highlights the urgent need for a broader accountability on the part of such organizations than economic efficiency and producing profits to report to capital markets. Levinas’s ethics, thusly, presents a space of entry to expose and confront the economic commodification of employees scattered across the world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".