Refusal as method: Reading business ethics backwards from conquest to compliance

Abstract

This article offers a radical rereading of business ethics in South Africa by proposing refusal as an ethical method and an epistemic stance. Taking a recent editorial’s worry about a shortage of publishable manuscripts as a signal, it argues that the apparent quiet from African scholars is not disengagement but a choice: a refusal to perform legibility on pre-scripted terms. Reading the field backwards – from missionary schools to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dashboards – the article traces how publishing standards, classroom habits, and review rubrics have come to reward clarity, composure, and tidy endings while sidelining grief, opacity, and interruption.Refusal is offered not as retreat, but as practice: honouring memory, withholding translation when translation distorts, and insisting on ethical sovereignty. Here, African thought is not context or case; it arrives as concept, setting questions and methods on its own terms. The article asks whether business ethics can learn to hear differently, and what changes in editorial criteria, teaching, and citation would be needed to make thatpossible. Refusal, in this framing, declines domestication, refuses to make pain palatable, and resists trading voice for recognition. It invites a field capacious enough for dissonance, opacity, and ancestral obligation – where cadence, pause, and address can carry argument. Refusal is not nihilism; it is the architecture for another kind of listening and a different future for the discipline. The wager is simple: if we change how we hear, we widen what can be thought, taught, and published.