Ethics and research methodology in the studying of corporate governance

Research methodology can be seen as a manifestation of applied ethics, grounded in assumptions about the appropriateness, fairness, and integrity of relatedness, particularly between the researcher and the researched. Likewise, corporate governance poses ethical questions: how can one account for the fairness and integrity of the governance of corporates and their behavior? Who or what determines what is “fair” and/or “good” (in) governance? In our contribution we examine how these two levels of ethics interact, asking how mixed methods research can help to evaluate the ensuing interactions. If we follow Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics, the researcher’s encounter with the researched (which may be called the “Other”) forms the basis of just and fair relatedness: both in research and in governance. But Levinas did not extrapolate his ethics to corporate institutions or research methodology, which we are setting out to do here. To extend Levinas’ ethics of “Otherness,” we follow the logic of “flat ontology,” derived from Bruno Latour and Graham Harman. To explore the robustness of our position, we present a (mini)case of FairPrice, examining when and how research methodology is ethically grounded and assessments of the fairness of corporate governance can viably be made. We conclude that mixing research methods can do very little to bring ethically grounded research based on a flat ontology into reach. However, there is a way to appropriate such ethically grounded research, which we will set out in this contribution. Both types of consideration need to be taken into account when conducting corporate governance research.