Routine Exploitation or Dramatic Portrayals? How Violence Against Nonhuman Animals Gains Institutional Recognition
The treatment of nonhuman animals in organisational contexts has emerged as a pressing ethical and political issue, yet their status as legitimate stakeholders in business ethics remains weak at best. This paper investigates how violence towards working nonhuman animals gains salience and becomes in...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2026
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| In: |
Journal of business ethics
Year: 2026, Volume: 204, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-15 |
| Further subjects: | B
Moral Status
B Violence B Nonhuman animals |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The treatment of nonhuman animals in organisational contexts has emerged as a pressing ethical and political issue, yet their status as legitimate stakeholders in business ethics remains weak at best. This paper investigates how violence towards working nonhuman animals gains salience and becomes institutionally recognised as illegitimate. Building on earlier institutional and stakeholder-grounded literature, I develop a process model that captures how weak stakeholder recognition unfolds when a violent event becomes salient in the context of sport. The model offers an explanation of why the stigmatisation of rule-breaking human-animal actors is a commonplace reaction, minimising attention to more routine forms of violence towards nonhuman animals. As a result, I suggest that the stigmatisation of human actors serves as a means to maintain institutions by suppressing widespread discomfort, thus obscuring the possibility of engaging in meaningful change or ethical reform. I argue that reimagining business ethics beyond human-centric frameworks—and engaging with discomfort as an epistemic and ethical tool—can open new pathways for recognising nonhuman animals and violence in general. |
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| ISSN: | 1573-0697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1007/s10551-025-06021-w |
