Reflexive ethics of caring leadership and other-responsibility with Bourdieu and Levinas in response to neoliberal self-responsibilisation

Caring leadership has been proposed as a precondition for sound and caring relations in organisations. This article engages with how neoliberal capitalism promotes a caring ethics that materialises as self-responsibilisation in leadership. We explore how leaders can cultivate ‘a reflexive ethics of caring leadership’, informed by Bourdieu’s notion of the reflexive habitus and Levinas’s ethics of responsibility, as we suggest that a combined Bourdieusian and Levinasian perspective holds the potential to challenge neoliberal caring ethics. The unique contribution of this article is a conceptualisation of caring leadership based on a complementary approach that draws on Bourdieu’s relational sociology and Levinas’s ethical phenomenology. This approach offers leaders the potential to break with self-responsibilisation in favour of other-responsibility through reflexive practice. The concepts of habitus and field from Bourdieu provide the conceptual groundwork for management learning by establishing a potentially transformative connection between the broader structuring forces of neoliberalism and everyday leadership, while Levinas’s fundamental concern for the other makes it possible to ground caring leadership in an ethical demand of responsibility to the other. We discuss the role of the field’s key institutions, such as business schools, in enabling a development where leaders acquire a reflexive ethics of caring leadership.