This volume is an interdisciplinary exploration of the modalities, meanings, and practices of silence in contemporary social discourse. How is silence treated in different cultures? In a globalized world, how is silence managed between and across cultures? Co-authored by a philosopher and an economist, the text draws on interviews with scholars and practitioners in fields as diverse as marine biology and African American history. International case studies are presented in operational contexts from the Black Lives Matter movement to the creation of art installations to the struggles of transgender people in Southeast Asia. The authors examine the relationship between ethics and silence, and suggest strategies to transform social praxis through greater attention to silence.

Ethical Silence: Kierkegaard on Communication, Education, andHumility examines a new area of Kierkegaard scholarship: the ethical value of silence. Through exegesis of Kierkegaard’s later writings, works in what is known as his second authorship, Sergia Hay argues that silence is an essential element of his Christian ethics. Starting with an overview of Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning ethics and communication, Hay builds a case for a Kierkegaardian notion of ethical silence by showing how silence contributes to the fulfillment of ethical imperatives by halting chatter, setting the “fundamental tone” for ethical activity, curbing excessive self-love, and providing another mode for educating and expressing love. Most importantly, silence can be used to humble the self and elevate the neighbor, creating conditions of Christian equality. Ethical silence is not the silence of the ineffable or what cannot be said, this is the silence of what can be said but should not.

Corporate accountability is never far from the front page, and as one of the world’s most elite business schools, Harvard Business School trains many of the future leaders of Fortune 500 companies. But how does HBS formally and informally ensure faculty and students embrace proper business standards? Relying on his first-hand experience as a Harvard Business School faculty member, Michel Anteby takes readers inside HBS in order to draw vivid parallels between the socialization of faculty and of students. In an era when many organizations are focused on principles of responsibility, Harvard Business School has long tried to promote better business standards. Anteby’s rich account reveals the surprising role of silence and ambiguity in HBS’s process of codifying morals and business values. As Anteby describes, at HBS specifics are often left unspoken; for example, teaching notes given to faculty provide much guidance on how to teach but are largely silent on what to teach. Manufacturing Morals demonstrates how faculty and students are exposed to a system that operates on open-ended directives that require significant decision-making on the part of those involved, with little overt guidance from the hierarchy. Anteby suggests that this model—which tolerates moral complexity—is perhaps one of the few that can adapt and endure over time. Manufacturing Morals is a perceptive must-read for anyone looking for insight into the moral decision-making of today’s business leaders and those influenced by and working for them.

Because oral history interviews are personal interactions between human beings, they rarely conform to a methodological ideal. These reflections from oral historians provide honest and rigorous analyses of actual oral history practice that address the complexities of a human-centered methodology.

In viewing business people's lack of voice on moral convictions as a moral silence, deafness and blindness, this work argues that the practice of ethics is a form of communication. It focuses on the factors that stifle communication and contains numerous case studies from business life.

Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art demonstrates how silence as a form of indirect discourse provides us with access to hitherto inaccessible aspects of human experience.

Although listening is central to human interaction, its importance is often ignored. In the rush to speak and be heard, it is easy to neglect listening and disregard its significance as a way of being with others and the world. Drawing upon insights from phenomenology, linguistics, philosophy of communication, and ethics, Listening, Thinking, Being is both an invitation and an intervention meant to turn much of what readers know, or think they know, about language, communication, and listening inside out. It is not about how to be a good listener or the numerous pitfalls that stem from the failure to listen. Rather, the purpose of the book is, first, to make readers aware of the value and importance of listening as a fundamental human ability inextricably connected with language and thought; second, to alert readers to the complexity of listening from personal, cultural, and philosophical perspectives; and third, to offer readers a way to think of listening as a mode of communicative action by which humans create and abide in the world. Lisbeth Lipari brings together historical, literary, intercultural, scientific, musical, and philosophical perspectives, as well as a range of her own personal experiences, to produce this highly readable analysis of how “the human experience of being as an ethical relation with others . . . is enacted by means of listening.”