Rogue logics: organization in the grey zone

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of the ‘rogue’ through an examination of how the figure appears in business ethics and as the rogue trader. Reading the rogue trader through institutional logics and Jacques Derrida’s book Rogues, we suggest that the rogue is not on the dark side of organization so much as in an indeterminate grey zone, where the boundary between acceptable behaviour and misconduct is unclear. We further argue that this boundary is necessarily unclear as it is in the nature of organization, at least within capitalist trading systems, to push the boundaries of what is possible and acceptable. The rogue thus helps produce the boundaries of ethically acceptable organizational behaviour in the very act of transgressing them. The location-bound specificity of the rogue, as well as the symbolic process of naming an individual or a state a rogue, finds a relevant correlate in the villain, as Derrida suggests. But what we call ‘rogue organization’ may be constitutive of organization per se. As such, there is a potential roguishness in organization that should be addressed when considering the dark side of ethics in organization studies.