Blackwell Reference Online

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A caring organization is one whose values and practices are consistent with, and supportive of, an ethic of care. An ethic of care focuses on the self as connected to others, with an emphasis on the care‐giver's responsibility to the “other” to maintain that connection ( Gilligan, 1982 ). It is often compared with the stereotypically masculine ethic of justice, with its focus on defining the self as separate and its use of rights to protect boundaries between the self and other. Gilligan's metaphor of the web to represent feminine thinking has been juxtaposed against the use of hierarchy to represent masculine thinking ( White, 1992 ). A decade of writing in feminist morality has focused on the concept of an ethic of care. In examining the relevance of an ethic of care for business practice, the question has been raised, can organizations care? In other words, is it possible to take this essentially individual‐level theory and extend it to the level of an organization, without subverting it in the process? Central to the question of whether organizations can care is Noddings's (1984) distinction between “caring for” and “caring about.” Ethical caring, she argues, only applies to those persons that we care for . She uses the term “aesthetical caring” for objects and things that we care about . She is concerned about the extent to which our caring for things subverts our caring ... log in or subscribe to read full text