Reputation: Ethics, Trust, and Relationships at Oxford
Dear All,
Please join us online on Thursday 16 October for the first R:ETRO seminar of this term, hosted by the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.
Roya Derkakshan (University College London) will be presenting 'The corporate use of legal violence to exploit refugee labour'.
I examine the lived experiences of refugee workers in Italy by analyzing immigration and labour law, associated legal frameworks, and their application by business organizations. I find that, despite their apparent social legitimacy, these legal structures frequently inflict legal violence on refugee workers within broader societal contexts and enable business organizations to undermine fundamental human and labor rights. I argue that legal violence legitimizes the exploitation of refugee workers and protects the interests of the organizations that benefit from such exploitation. Through legal mechanisms, organizations acquire the authority to impose precarious working conditions, restrict mobility, and suppress resistance, all while operating within the boundaries of formal legality. This structural configuration renders violence lawful, necessary, and often invisible. The experiences of refugee workers with legally enabled organizational violence are also closely tied to the failure of moral frameworks to provide adequate ethical guidance in relation to the specific and situated complexities they face in both workplaces and society. These moral frameworks are often too generalized to confront the ambiguity produced by the intersection of legal and organizational forces. My findings suggest that, because moral questions are embedded within these overlapping and complex forms of violence, addressing them requires significant structural transformation, including the reform of legal institutions. This necessitates the development of an integrative moral and legal system. Every law and policy, along with its implementation by powerful actors and institutions, must be rooted in context-specific moral principles. These micro-level principles should, in turn, be aligned with broader macro-level boundaries grounded in core human values, which provide the ethical foundation for justice within society.
-------------------------------------------