Wendelin Kuepers

This introductory piece to the special issue presents in a broad sense, issues, and concepts related to temporality and ethics in business and society. In particular, this article rethinking time and temporality while developing a more critical understanding of the same, especially in organizing and managing, helps processing specific ethical questions and issues as well as more sustainable ways by reconstructing the past and relating differently to the presence and future in organisation studies and practice (Wenzel et al. in Organ Stud 45:1–15, 2020). We present an extended understanding of what “timely” means and why is it well timed to connect temporality with ethics and vice versa in our present-day time and for a future to come. We discuss reasons why it is ethically timely to rethink and reconsider not only conceptions of time, but also its implications and consequences related to our contemporary world. This article elaborates on the connection between temporality and ethics. Moreover, we briefly discuss some specific ethically relevant phenomena, the nexus of time, and crisis and then conclude by offering some perspectives on alternative temporal interpretations linked to ethics and an overview of the articles in this special issue.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology highlights the bodily, embodied dimensions and forms of non- or post-representational knowing for understanding organizational phenomena and realties as processes. In addition, it focuses on a re-embodied organization and a corresponding sense-based organizational practice. This chapter first considers Merleau-Ponty’s biography and intellectual life before discussing the significance of his ideas for process philosophy as well as organizational theory and practice. In particular, it examines some key concepts such as the living body and dynamic embodiment beyond empiricism and idealism, reversible flesh as elemental carnality and formative medium and chiasm, as well as wild being and being. It also looks at Merleau-Ponty’s connections with two other process thinkers, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze. Finally, it assesses the significance of his process-philosophical phenomenology and ontology for organization studies.