Journal of Business Ethics

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-018-4029-5

ORIGINAL PAPER

Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics

Dima Younes1 · David Courpasson2 · Marie‑Rachel Jacob1

Received: 27 June 2017 / Accepted: 26 September 2018

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
Secrecy and ethics are often seen as opposing forces within organizations. Secret work is viewed as unethical, as it excludes
others from knowing and is associated with self-interested behavior. We contend that this view does not account for the
dynamic inherent to secrecy and to the fact that ethics is embedded in social relations. This paper suggests an alternative
view. We  consider secrecy as a social process which allows employees to maintain their ethics when faced with managerial
policies that affect the quality of their work. Building on an in-depth case study of a team of journalists who worked in secret
after their managers decided to prioritize the interests of shareholders and advertising firms, we show how these journalists
managed to maintain collective ethics through secrecy and to do their work according to their own moral principles. This
paper offers two primary contributions. First, we show a mutually beneficial relationship between ethics and secrecy in
organizations, wherein secrecy  helps maintaining ethics in everyday work. Second, the paper shows how secrecy can lead
to ethical resistance, via a transformation of the  power relationship with managers.

Keywords  Secrecy · Ethics · Power · Resistance · Conflict

Introduction own moral principles in organizations where managers give

More than a century ago, Georg Simmel stated that
Secrecy is a universal sociological form, which, as
such, has nothing to do with the moral valuations of
its contents. On the one hand, secrecy may embrace
the highest values […] On the other hand, secrecy is
not in immediate interdependence with evil, but evil
with secrecy. (Simmel 1906, p. 463).
Yet, few studies have paid attention to how secrecy can
be mobilized in a morally sound way. The purpose of this
paper is to address this question, by focusing on how secrecy
can help employees accomplish their work according to their
* Dima Younes
younes@em‑lyon.com
David Courpasson
courpasson@em‑lyon.com
Marie‑Rachel Jacob
jacob@em‑lyon.com
1
Emlyon Business School, 23 Avenue Guy de Collongue,
69130 Écully, France
2
Emlyon Business School and Cardiff University, 23 Avenue
Guy de Collongue, 69130 Écully, France
little room to employees to intervene in the moral domain
(Pullen and Rhodes 2015; Hanlon and Mandarini 2015). It
is important to look closely at the morality of secrecy, and
more generally at the ties between secrecy and ethics, espe-
cially at a time when organizations are doing their best to
avoid secrecy and instead to promote transparency (Birchall
2011; Flyverbom et al. 2015; Ringel 2018).
Indeed, studies on secrecy have considered this phenome-
non as intrinsically unethical. Most research equates secrecy
with a lack of transparency (Birchall 2011) or attempts at
dissent, viewed in a negative way (Nemeth 1997). In their
efforts to explain why employees in organizations develop
secret activities, authors generally describe “self-interested”
actors who hide information from their managers or play
with numbers to avoid punishment (Birchall 2011; Grey and
Costas 2016; Parker 2015). Thus, hidden activities in firms
are shown to belong to a moral “gray zone” (Anteby 2008)
and to the “underlife of politics” (Mumby et al. 2017). This
leaves Simmel’s view of secrecy partially unexplored, if not
entirely at odds with such results.
We contend that these studies fail to capture the poten-
tially positive relationship between secrecy and ethics for
two reasons. The first is inherent to the definition of ethics.
It seems that scholars have considered that what is morally

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acceptable is what dominant actors consider as such (Pullen
and Rhodes 2015). This calls for a study of the relation-
ship between ethics and secrecy, which would recognize
that moral principles are not neutral: they rather reflect the
beliefs of dominant social groups (Becker 1997; Gordon
et al. 2009). The second reason is related to the definition
of secrecy in these studies. They mostly see secrecy as a
static phenomenon whereby individuals or a group conceal
information. By doing so, they fail to account for secrecy
as a social process which requires organizing (Davies et al.
2010; Grey and Sturdy 2008), affects power relations (Sim-
mel 1906), and involves risk and sacrifice (Courpasson and
Younes 2018). From this perspective, secrecy and ethics
can be considered in a mutual dynamic, making secrecy an
“everyday fact of life” (Bloom and White 2016, p. 11). The
question we ask becomes: how does secrecy affect employee
ability to maintain ethical practices despite antagonistic
managerial policies?
To examine this question, this paper relies on an in-depth
case study of a team of journalists. One of the authors dis-
covered that this team was using secrecy to defend their
moral principles against managerial policies they judged to
be problematic, since they directly affected the content of
articles intended for a readership of pharmacists. We analyze
the team as a secret group in the Simmelian sense, that is
to say, as “an interactional unit characterized in its totality
by the fact that reciprocal relations among its members are
governed by the protective function of secrecy” (Hazelrigg
1969, p. 324). In the publishing corporation we study here,
managers had introduced a series of measures intended to
modify the editorial line of a professional journal, due to
pressure from powerful companies. This triggered profound
moral tensions. We investigate how secrecy helped journal-
ists to defend their moral principles in their day-to-day work,
principles which were made manifest in the content of the
journal. As such, we are able to study possible positive links
between secrecy and ethics.
We will show that secrecy makes it possible to maintain
ethics that can effectively oppose managerial policies and
principles, all the while benefitting the organization. For
these journalists, keeping a secret required organizing (Grey
2014; Grey and Costas 2016) and sharing risk (Courpasson
and Younes 2018; Simmel 1906), in addition to transforming
the relationship between the journalists and their managers.
This led to increased interactions amongst the journalists,
during which they took time to share and discuss what really
mattered for them, especially their shared moral principles.
Secrecy also transformed the social configuration that tied
these journalists to their managers and made it possible for
them to enact their moral principles and ultimately main-
tain their ethics over a relatively long period of time. We
understand maintenance as a process by which actors acti-
vate their moral principles and attempt to enforce them in
13
D. Younes et al.
practice, recognizing thereby that moral principles do not
automatically transform into practices (Clegg et al. 2007;
Jackall 2010; Weiskopf and Willmott 2013). To do so, social
configurations must be transformed so that life can be given
to these practices (Contu 2014; Gordon et al. 2009; Munro
2017).
The paper makes two contributions to research on secrecy
and ethics. First, using Simmel’s views on secrecy as a social
process, we shed light on the positive relationship between
ethics and secrecy. In particular, by highlighting the way in
which secrecy provides more autonomy and interactions, our
data show how the intensification of interactions amongst
the bearers of the secret, as well as the risk of revelation, cre-
ate a bond that in turn encourages these individuals to spend
more time sharing what really matters to them and to find
tactics to maintain their ethics. Thus, the paper shows how
this mutual dynamic redraws the boundary between secrecy
and what is considered ethical in organizations. Second, we
highlight the political nature of the maintenance of ethics
through secrecy. We thereby contribute to research on the
links between ethics and politics, by analyzing secrecy as a
dynamic social phenomenon that allows employees to influ-
ence the political relationship they have with management
through resistance that can be qualified as ethical (Schaffer
2004; Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017). Overall, at a more
general level, our results show why secrecy is neither inher-
ently good nor bad, but rather a pacific tool of collective
action that can serve the interests of corporations, despite
its illegal nature.
Secrecy and Ethics: A Critical Review
of the Existing Literature
Studies on secrecy and ethics have mainly focused on the
negative effects of concealment for others, that is, those
excluded from knowing (Bouilloud et al. 2017; Hebb 2006).
This is because secrecy—usually defined as the activity of
withholding and concealing information (Hebb 2006; Pompa
1992; Wexler 1987)—is viewed in a static way. It has been
shown to be used to develop illegal activities that facili-
tate employees’ own careers (Anteby 2008) or to help them
obtain space to maneuver under authority, even if this is at
the expense of business efficiency (Crozier 2009). Those
holding secrets in the literature of business ethics are pic-
tured as interested individuals or groups who deploy tactics
to obtain a better position, creating betrayal and deception
along the way (Wexler 1987; Bouilloud et al. 2017). It is
associated with managerial attempts to repress alternative
ethical behaviors (Maria 2006), to undermine the interests of
some stakeholders (Hebb 2006), and in all cases, it is asso-
ciated with an individualistic and short-term career ethos
(Jackall 2010). We contend that these studies fail to capture
Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
the positive link between ethics and secrecy mainly because
of the way they define these two concepts.
Many studies assume that secrecy is a static tactic that
entails concealing information. Only its consequences in
terms of deception and feelings of betrayal (Bail 2015; Horn
2011) or inefficiency and organizational disorder (Crozier
2009; Hebb 2006) are considered. If we consider secrecy to
be a social process (Grey and Costas 2016; Simmel 1906),
we can then shed light on elements such as the sacrifices
and risk (Courpasson and Younes 2018) that individuals
must accept to maintain secrecy. Above all, this perspective
reveals the moral motives behind their actions, as acting
secretly does not mean acting without norms (Simmel 1906).
Moreover, these studies have an essentialist view of eth-
ics which does not account for the fact that moral principles
are disputed in the social arena (Becker 1997) and that what
we usually accept as appropriate behavior reflects the view
of dominant actors (Rhodes et al. 2010). Indeed, resistance
to dominant morality can also be considered morally sound
when collective concerns are taken into account (Alaka-
vuklar and Alamgir 2017; Bloom and White 2016; Pullen
and Rhodes 2014). From this perspective, ethics are viewed
as a socially embedded practice, developed contextually in
response to moral dilemmas (Gordon et al. 2009; Jackall
2010; Weiskopf and Willmott 2013).
In short, our argument is that secrecy should be seen as
a social practice, one that can be linked to ethics, rather
than as an informational tactic (Costas and Grey 2014). Put
differently, if we want to understand the mutual dynamic
between secrecy and ethics, we cannot reduce secrecy to
concealment of information. We rather need to approach it
as a practice woven into the everyday fabric of life at work
(Costas and Grey 2014). Similarly, ethics can be understood
as a practice embedded in social relations (Gordon et al.
2009) and they can also become “the driver of political
action” or “ethico-politics” (Pullen and Rhodes 2014).
Secrecy as a Facilitator of Ethics
Maintenance
In this paper, we understand ethics as practices which indi-
viduals adopt when faced with moral dilemmas at work
(Gordon et al. 2009; Jackall 2010; Labeff et al. 1990). In
this definition, it is understood that individuals may also
act against their moral principles, because they can find a
rationale for what they did in the situation in which they had
to act (Gordon et al. 2009; Rhodes et al. 2010). This defini-
tion is sensitive to power relations that more or less constrain
individuals in their acts (Rhodes et al. 2010). It can also cap-
ture the degree to which individuals confronted with moral
tensions are willing to make sacrifices in order to implement
practices that better fit their moral principles (Pérezts and
Picard 2015). However, cases where employees succeed in
introducing ethics that are in tension with managerial ones
are rare indeed, except in cases of whistleblowing or exter-
nal interventions (Contu 2014; Munro 2015; Weiskopf and
Willmott 2013). This left the authors skeptical about the
possibility of doing precisely this in today’s organizations,
especially given the role of managers who have introduced
moral principles that better fit with their economic rationale
(Pullen and Rhodes 2015). We contend that secrecy is a way
of maintaining alternative ethics in today’s organizations, via
three main mechanisms explained below.
First, secrecy can help shake up the power relations
between employees and managers (Blakely 2011; Simmel
1906; Smith et al. 2015). In today’s organizations, it has
been argued that resistance has not succeeded in altering the
moral principles carried by management (Contu 2008, 2014;
Pullen and Rhodes 2015). Nevertheless, critical authors
recall the need to acknowledge and uncover power relations
in order to study ethics in organizations (Alvesson 2008;
Fournier and Grey 2000; Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017) so
as to understand how employees can sometimes successfully
influence power relations without overtly confronting man-
agers (Courpasson 2017). For instance, impactful resistance
can imply meaning negotiations (Thomas et al. 2011), the
creation of intermediary objects that affect policies (Cour-
passon et al. 2012), or other forms of insubordination and
insurrection (Mumby et al. 2017). Secrecy appears to be a
pacific tool to introduce practices that are to some extent not
visible, but that change the relationship (Simmel 1906) to
managers. Generally, the literature on secrecy shows that it
is a mechanism which affects what firms do, even if it does
not always change what dominant actors officially push for
(Courpasson and Younes 2018; Grey and Costas 2016).
Second, collective action which alters organizations has
been shown to be risky and requires personal sacrifices
(Munro 2015; Vallas 2016; Willer 2009; Willmott 2013).
This is worsened by the increasing isolation of individuals at
work (Vallas 2011). Secrecy can partially solve these issues,
as it can lead to cohesion amongst the group of people bear-
ing a secret (Blakely 2011; Courpasson and Younes 2018),
taking individuals out of their isolation. Indeed, in the con-
text of organizations, Dalton (1959) has shown that secrecy
leads to the construction of strong informal collectives with
their own rules and leaders. The secret group’s dynamic
makes sacrifice more acceptable to individuals (Courpas-
son and Younes 2018). Secrecy can therefore facilitate the
emergence of collective action, which can be directed at
defending principles shared by the group (Simmel 1906).
We contend here that secret keeping can also facilitate acts
of “ethical resistance” (Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017),
where groups consolidate their common moral principles
and act according to them (Blakely 2011; Simmel 1906).
This also explains the link between secrecy and ethics, as it
13

means that secrecy influences the capacity of groups to push
their members to act in conformity with their self-created
normative principles: acting in secret implies de facto acting
according to moral principles (Simmel 1906) that are both
protective and productive.
Third, due to the fact that secrecy requires organizing for
its own sake (Grey and Sturdy 2008), it helps preserve the
capacity of individuals to maintain their preferred practices
over time. Given that ethics must be transformed into prac-
tice order to have lasting power, individuals must work to
change social configurations, strive for their stabilization,
and thereby make it possible to give life to these practices
(Contu 2014; Gordon et al. 2009; Munro 2017). To maintain
a secret also means that individuals have to continuously
ensure that the new social configuration they have created
is defended on a day-to-day basis (Blakely 2011; Grey 2014;
Grey and Sturdy 2008). The will to maintain these prac-
tices is driven by continuous interactions (Courpasson and
Younes 2018) in secret groups that help activate the moral
principles (Blakely 2011) the group is defending. This con-
tinuous work on social configurations, the activation of prin-
ciples, and the energy to fight for them and act upon them
despite risk, explains how secrecy helps maintain ethics that
are at odds with managerial policies.
Methods
In order to give a full account of how secrecy helps main-
tain alternative ethics, this paper relies on one in-depth case
study of a publishing company. Studying secret activities is
challenging since the acts under investigation are not vis-
ible (Grey and Costas 2016). Indeed, this case was acci-
dentally uncovered during a field study about work changes
in organizations. We chose this case because it shows the
link between secrecy and ethics at the micro-level in a firm
that appears typical: managers were in a dominant position
and could largely decide what directions work should take
and the moral principles it should carry. They also had the
means to rebuke employees who contested their policies.
In this instance, when they discovered that collective secret
work had been changing the content of a pharmaceutical
journal for almost 2 years, they directly incriminated the
team leader who then decided to resign. Their thinking was
that this secrecy was an isolated initiative on his part. Under
severe pressure and increasingly disconnected from manage-
rial demands, most of the rest of the team left the company
in a matter of months. Our focus here is on what happened
between the moment the team developed secret activities
and the moment their secret went public, to see how secrecy
influenced the team’s capacity to maintain their preferred
ethics.
13
D. Younes et al.
Table 1  Data sources
Source Content
In-depth interviews T. team leader, 4 interviews
8 team members (10 interviews in total)
referred in the text as C., F., G., H., J., J-L.,
N., Y
Marketing VP
Head of Publishing (T.’s manager)
Production supervisor
Observations Two meetings with the team
Informal conversations Team leader
All the journalists of the team
Additional source 34 email exchanges with the team leader
Letters from journal’s readers
Our case involves a journal for pharmacists published in
France. It examines the secret work of a team of 12 journal-
ists. The conflict derived from a shift to better serve share-
holders’ as well as advertising companies’ interests, which
led to decisions that watered down the content of the journal.
The journalist team leader in our study dated the decision to
modify and influence the editorial content of the journal to a
meeting in October 2002. In an interview with him in 2008,
after he had left the company, he said: “It was official that we
were one of the journals which, despite our success, should
toe the line of big companies. Critique was not the point
anymore. […] It was forbidden to touch board members.”
Moral tensions also arose due to increased management
intervention when articles threatened the reputation of cer-
tain companies represented on the Board of Directors. One
journalist stated:
As journalists we are responsible for the truth. I cannot
accept being part of a journal when we lie to our read-
ers, but in a sense, that is what the managers had asked
us to do; they chose big companies over honesty. (F.)
Clearly, what was at stake were the moral principles guid-
ing the content of the journal.
Data Collection
The study relies on qualitative data. We place great impor-
tance on personal narratives in our methods. They provide
a valuable approach to the study of secret events and to the
parallel individual interpretations of the personal risks that
people may take to protect their principles (Becker 1997;
Cotton et al. 2011). In-depth interviews were conducted with
the team leader, team members, and senior managers. Given
the sensitive nature of this investigation, senior managers
agreed to be interviewed only after they left the company.
Furthermore, we bolstered the coherence of interviews by
Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
collecting additional records (Denzin 1989). Table 1 sum-
marizes the various sources of our data:
The interview protocol was designed to elicit data on
individual, situational, and organizational elements (events,
interactions, discussion…) affecting individuals’ pursuit of
their work when they were confronted with growing tensions
regarding antagonistic visions of what the journal should be.
We therefore also addressed the informants’ subjective sense
of moral principles to understand their perception of work.
We paid particular attention to the narratives our inform-
ants shared when asked to think about secrecy as something
that would permit the maintenance of certain practices. We
asked them to provide examples of when and how their
secret actions became more central to their job and how they
helped them to cope with ethical tensions, and whether this
could be linked to work in a group and the frequent interac-
tions that were stimulated by this secret work.
We conducted a second round of interviews at a later
stage, to better understand the process which unfolded
between the moment they decided to go secret and the
moment their secret activity was discovered. We also took
part in two of their secret editorial meetings. We interviewed
almost all the actors involved in the production of the jour-
nal during these 2 years. During this second round of inter-
views, informants were asked to narrate the salient events
and turning points of their secret work and to narrate specific
circumstances surrounding key moments of the process, cru-
cial actions and decisions, and further developments and
consequences of their activities. Overall, by focusing the
interviews on concrete events and acts and by cross-check-
ing them, we tried to limit the subjective aspect of studies
relying on narratives (Langley 1999) and to reduce the bias
inherent to the study of secret processes (i.e., the impossibil-
ity of direct observation which requires us to cross-verify
interviews not only with journalists, but also with managers
when possible).
Data Analysis
Our data analysis was conducted inductively (Strauss and
Corbin 1998) and according to a process view (Langley
1999). Accordingly, we first made a timeline of the events
that occurred between the initial change in editorial policy
at the October 2002 meeting and the discovery of the secret
activity of the journalistic team at the end of 2007. Our ini-
tial goal was to understand how journalists succeeded in
producing a journal that was in harmony with their moral
principles despite managerial constraints.
We first attempted to understand the context in which
they were acting. We coded our interviews for themes
such as “lack of communication with managers,” “share-
holder interests,” and “dishonesty.” This echoed with the
organizational literature on ethics which describe today’s
organizations as dominated by a managerial morality that
is “self-interested” and distant from the social (Jackall
2010), and where managers do not leave room for employ-
ees to intervene in this realm (Contu 2013; Pullen and
Rhodes 2015; Weiskopf and Willmott 2013). At this point,
we looked closer at the tactics they developed to bring
about change in such a context. These tactics seemed simi-
lar to what has been identified in the literature as “ethics
as a critical practice” (Weiskopf and Willmott 2013), “a
moral work of subversion” (Bloom and White 2016), or
an “ethics of resistance” (Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017),
without being identical in all their aspects.
We therefore coded the tactics employed in everyday
interactions both between the journalists and “others”
(these include top managers and also the marketing depart-
ment), among the journalists themselves, and between the
journalists and actors that they saw as occasional accom-
plices (the publishing department, scientists in large phar-
maceutical firms…). Here we noticed the importance of
the hidden activities deployed by journalists over more
than 2 years. Many interviews highlighted that without
these activities, it would not have been possible to publish
a journal they found worthy of respect. This is when we
decided to focus on the aspect that we labeled secrecy,
according to Simmel’s (1906) view and recent work on the
phenomenon (Blakely 2011; Grey 2014; Puyou 2018). In
particular, first-order themes emerged, such as: “activities
that aim to protect the secret,” in line with the organiza-
tional view of secrecy (Grey and Costas 2016; Grey and
Sturdy 2008), “others’ dishonesty” marks a boundary with
others, and “concealment and revelation” (Blakely 2011;
Courpasson and Younes 2018; Simmel 1906) shows the
need to maintain a relationship with “others.” We there-
fore decided to focus on secrecy and iterated between data
and theory to understand how secrecy affected the journal-
ists’ ability to influence the journal. The transformation
of power relationships, cohesion and the acceptance of
sacrifice, as well as the intensification of interactions with
their consequences on the agreement on common princi-
ples and practices appeared as important themes. These
themes were related to how journalists perceived ethics.
Here power relations with managers, the acceptance of
sacrifice, and the capacity to preserve a configuration that
allow for maintaining the preferred practices appeared as
important. We therefore attempted to draw the relationship
among these codes.
Three social mechanisms progressively emerged, which
show us how secrecy can have a positive relationship
with ethics and how it can even become a form of “ethi-
cal resistance” (Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017). These
social mechanisms are further developed and illustrated
in the following section.
13

Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
Our data show that secrecy triggers three social mecha-
nisms which explain how it facilitates the maintenance of
ethical practices. First, secrecy alters the power relationship
between those who hold the secret and those excluded from
it (Simmel 1906). In our case, it liberated journalists’ time
and energy, and reconfigured their relationship to managers.
However, secrecy also puts actors in an illegal and uncom-
fortable situation (Simmel 1906). In the case studied here,
it created surprises for managers every time a new issue was
published, increasing thereby the risk of revelation and gen-
erating fear for the secret keepers. Second, secrecy facilitates
the emergence of collective action. Fear in the context of
moral adversity creates strong bonds and a greater readi-
ness to accept sacrifice in order to defend collective prin-
ciples (Simmel 1906). Third, secrecy induces interactions
through which common principles are constantly discussed,
recalled, and upheld in a way that encourages individuals
to act according to them despite the sacrifices necessary
to do so. Continuous day-to-day interactions also facilitate
coordination and the micromanagement of surprises, which
keeps the social configuration favorable for the introduction
of alternative ethical practices. We will now look at each of
these three social mechanisms in turn.
Secrecy Transforms Relationships with Managers
In this section, we show how secrecy influences the social
configurations in which power is niched (Simmel 1906).
Specifically, secrecy helped transform the role of the
monthly editorial meetings with publishing and marketing
representatives. It also helped to focus journalists’ working
time and energy on what really mattered to them. This helps
clarify how managerial power was progressively diminished
without direct confrontation. At the same time, secrecy
increased vulnerability, because each published issue gen-
erated potential surprises for the managers.
Editorial Meetings: from Negotiations to a “Façade
of Compliance”
By going secret, journalists broke the tacit agreement
according to which they would negotiate the way they allo-
cated their time for the next issue in monthly meetings with
publishing and marketing representatives. This is because
journalists saw the orientation of the monthly discussions
as morally undesirable:
Usually, we have monthly meetings where the manager
says it would be interesting to make an article about
this topic. The marketing department can suggest top-
13
D. Younes et al.
ics. We can also put some topics on the table, and then
we negotiate to see what topics should appear in the
next issue, what is interesting but can be left for a later
issue, and what is not really interesting. Usually, the
manager likes to follow the marketing department’s
proposals… It is not always easy for us, but here it
was getting even tougher because they decided to
follow the interests of shareholders… which is even
more problematic than just pleasing a company paying
for advertisement in my opinion… all that sounded
slightly immoral (T.)
As a result, journalists decided to use these meetings dif-
ferently when they noticed that most editorial decisions were
taken on grounds they did not accept. Therefore, discussion
became increasingly useless: “We started to be more silent
and were more listening to what they said, their ideas and
arguments, we looked like we were accepting their views”
(G). How journalists would use their time afterwards was
not discussed: “These meetings were good because we knew
everything the head of publishing and the marketing depart-
ment wanted to do without really revealing what we would
do” (T.). These meetings were thereby transformed into set-
tings where journalists could be informed about their man-
agers’ intentions and forthcoming actions without making
their own actions known.
In addition, the monthly editorial meetings with publish-
ing and marketing representatives became occasions for T.,
the team manager, and his colleagues to check whether man-
agement was “looking for trouble, trying to find out what
we were doing and how we were working, or whether all
was quiet” (T.). In addition, the journalists stopped mak-
ing suggestions. “So we had these meetings, but for quite a
long time we just used them to show some compliance and
stopped attempting to put things on the agenda that really
mattered to us”(G.). They showed a façade of compliance
[“We ended up saying mostly yes, yes, yes sir” says G.], and
from time to time, made proposals that they did not mind
seeing eventually rejected in order to pretend that they were
taking part in the discussion:
We suggested an article on sunscreens once. There
was a debate on a molecule in one of the sunscreens…
But that was something most pharmacists knew about
already. It was just to make sure they didn’t feel there
was something weird about us not suggesting articles.
They debated the matter, and then forgot to decide…
So it was an occasion for me to put it on the agenda
again at the next meeting to keep them busy (laughter).
(T.)
Official meetings also became opportunities to justify
what actually happened between them, mostly in secret.
“We had to make up stories about why this article was
Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
not written, and why this advertisement did not appear as
decided in the previous meeting.” (T.). All efforts were
made to avoid conflict and to divert the attention of the
manager from what was going on in secret, as will be
shown later. By doing this, managerial control was less-
ened, and journalists succeeded in gaining back a say over
the use of their working time.
Working on “What Really Matters”
Avoiding negotiations with managers in turn liberated
time and energy for journalists. T noticed that the dura-
tion of the meetings went down “from at least 3 h to max
an hour, listening to what they had already prepared with
marketers before the meeting.” T explains:
I felt that it would be useless to confront managers
and discuss their new way of doing things. They
were so convinced of their philosophy that any dif-
ferent point of view would have been seen as resist-
ance to change… I mean in a bad way, because they
believed that we didn’t like change in general, not
because we believed the journal can do a better job
in a different way. (T.)
This negative attitude of managers was coupled with an
impossibility of discussing matters with them. T. quali-
fied discussions as “useless” in one of his emails to the
researcher: “They did not listen, whatever they might say,
also because they were surely constrained by the higher-
ups in headquarters.” (T.) Managerial dominance over the
moral principles of the firm (Rhodes et al. 2010) encour-
aged the journalists to take autonomous decisions regard-
ing the everyday use of their time.
Thus, the journalists preferred to spend more time
doing their journalistic job in secret, in a basement office
that was unofficially made available by the computer team
in April 2003. C. underlines, “I just want to do my job as
a journalist. I don’t want to teach managers any lessons,
so I spent time working on my papers and research, that’s
it.” Going secret had the advantage of saving time and
energy. T. says “imagine the energy you have to spend to
convince them you are right! It would have been a politi-
cal game, which is honestly of no interest to me.” Using a
secret place allowed journalists to work overtime without
being noticed: “we basically worked when we wanted,
and rather more than before! This was the place where
we could work and chill, share ideas and so on, instead of
wasting time discussing with marketers” says J. Secrecy
allowed the journalists to appropriate their working time
(Ackroyd and Thompson 1999).
Vulnerability and the Everyday Work of Maintaining
Secrecy
By developing secret activities that increased their auton-
omy, as in any relationship of the kind (Simmel 1906), these
journalists also added challenges to their relationship with
managers. Indeed, every month, the latter discovered that
the content of the journal was not fully in conformity to
what had been, from their point of view, agreed on in the
editorial meeting.
It requires a lot of organizing to keep the collective
action secret. You always have to find a plausible story
that is convincing, or at least not offensive to the man-
agers. I don’t know if you can imagine the situation,
but it is a lot of pressure, and creativity. Of course, we
do our best to find convincing arguments, but in reality,
you never know if they will buy it. (T.)
Another challenge was that developing secret activities
that went against managerial policies was perceived as an
illegal act that could be punished, as the following comment
made by a manager illustrates:
Journalists have their autonomy, but this does not mean
that they can write against the editorial line set in the
meetings. It means that they can choose how to satisfy
it. What this group of journalists did was totally crazy.
They were running the journal as if it was a sort of
independent entity. You want an independent entity,
fine. Go create one. This is not acceptable in an organi-
zation. (Head of publishing).
Working in secret thus puts individuals in an illegal situ-
ation. Therefore, as each published issue could reveal its fair
lot of surprises, the risk that managers could conduct a more
serious investigation to understand why some content had
been modified was constant and increasing. This meant that
journalists had to find reasons for the editorial changes, both
for managers and for themselves. For instance, C. explains
that “of course we were lying to them, so we worked more
to find explanations, and there were explanations that could
be acceptable, and we needed also to explain to ourselves,
man, why am I actually lying to my boss, what am I doing,
if yes, there are reasons, I defend some values here!.” This
transformation in the relationship with managers therefore
raised challenges as it pushed journalists into an illegal situ-
ation in the organization, which required them to spend time
finding justifications for surprising content.
Overall, the switch in the allocation of time toward activi-
ties that were not controlled by, or even unknown to man-
agers, modified the power relations, as it gave less weight
to the claims of managers over the content of the journal.
This made the journalists switch from a position of obedient
employees to a position of more autonomous individuals
13
 D. Younes et al.

attempting to control the characteristics of the journal. We had many different ways of managing our careers
This changed the previous social configuration where they in this group. Defection was a permanent threat. So
accepted to negotiate “around a table” how they allocated you are tempted to engage further with colleagues, but
their time and what the journal should look like. This you keep in mind that a colleague can defect if he or
impactful change (Courpasson 2017) did not entail efforts she is unhappy with our collective decisions… This is
for changing the policies themselves (Contu 2014), but a good and bad thing, because it pushed us to find an
rather kept the journal at a level of quality deemed appro- inclusive way to make decisions so that no one felt that
priate by the journalists. we were as stubborn as managers in our decisions. (C.)
Consequently, actors felt the need to listen to each other,
to be inclusive in the decision-making process, and to be
Secrecy as a Facilitator of Collective Action
more attentive to the fundamental reasons for secret keeping.
As a junior journalist argued, on a positive note,
The ability of employees to influence organizational policies
suffers from the increasing isolation of individuals at work It was a great opportunity for me to understand what
(Vallas 2011) and the dilution of the capacity for collective the journalistic expectations of my colleagues were,
action (Fleming 2013). However, secrecy can help over- and to develop my own opinion about matters. In a
come this. Secret activities intensify interactions, as they normal setting, you wouldn’t ask colleagues ‘why are
are developed along with the fear of being discovered by you doing this?,’ but here we really questioned each
managers (Simmel 1906) and with the risk of defection. This other’s principles to see if everyone was on the same
reinforces bonding and cohesiveness in the group. Bonding wavelength. (H.)
can be observed in groups where we observe certain acts that
Discussing the ethical relevance of their acts was there-
would be qualified as irrational if members were acting indi-
fore important for them to overcome fear and to accept the
vidually (Blakely 2011; Courpasson and Younes 2018). Our
illegality of their acts from an organizational point of view.
findings show that secret keeping makes individuals more
willing to make sacrifices and act according to group norms. I discussed with H. over lunch. I realize that that day,
I was feeling discouraged and I was wondering if we
would be able to get rid of a demand to orient an issue
Keeping the Momentum about cosmetics. She reminded me of the reasons why
we started all this and suggested ideas that I could
Many of our interviewees expressed their unease and fear develop to get away with what I was asked to do. I
when they were part of the secret group. For instance, H. didn’t do exactly what she said, but I was excited again
reports “not sleeping well at night,” while G. questioned about the idea of controlling the editorial line of the
whether “it [was] worth taking all this risk” in one of the journal. I found a solution to do things smoothly and
secret meetings. Fear and the consequent interactions occur- certainly with impact! (laughter) (J.)
ring in the group helped keep a momentum going, whereby
In addition to these comforting interactions, the team also
actors were no longer isolated and continually reiterated the
had joyful interactions that refueled their energy and pushed
importance of their principles.
their attention away from fear. These were moments of cel-
Actors admitted that fear was always present, since hid-
ebration that reassured them of the relevance of their acts.
ing activities and strategies that affected the editorial line
could have been considered illegal and steps could have been Sometimes, we had to read the “Letters to the Editor”
taken against them. In turn, this reinforced the necessity to section to comfort each other. I remember one reader
be “absolutely together,” as T argued. saying something like ‘Thank you for this good article,
this is a beautiful job.’ Of course we were proud, but
What we were doing is totally crazy, so it is normal
we also then discussed if the article the reader was
that half of our discussions were due to the fact that
talking about really incorporated all that we under-
we were afraid. We needed to comfort each other. We
stand as beauty in an article, and how it could be
could all get fired if the manager for any unknown rea-
improved. This made all of us learn about our com-
son decided to pass by the basement and saw all of us
mon goals.(M.)
discussing what to put in the next issue. This was total
rebellion… Sort of a coup d’etat! (F.) At one point, even sales numbers made them feel that
the point was not just about being ethical toward their read-
Some actors underlined the fear of the secret being
ership. It was also about making the journal perform bet-
revealed from within the group, which in turn reinforced
ter economically, even if some shareholders could have
interpersonal trust.

13
Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
expressed concern about the critical tone of certain articles.
At the time of our interviews, many journalists showed
us figures showing that the readership of the journal had
increased by 8% per year for the previous 3 years; the rates
of satisfaction expressed in market surveys were consist-
ently above 90%; the journal also reported profit margins
of 23% in 2006, the highest in the publishing sector of the
company. These numbers were used in their discussions to
comfort each other.
Numbers are on our side. Of course, managers would
say that it is their shift in policy that caused this
change. If you look closely at the journal website, the
articles that receive the most comments and are the
most read are definitely not those that fit with their
policies. (T.)
These interactions were therefore useful to remind indi-
viduals of the relevance of their acts, even if they were ille-
gal. They removed individuals from their previous isolation,
and helped build a collective way of thinking and acting,;
what Grey and Sturdy (2008) refer to as organizing.
Sacrifice as Part of a Moral Struggle
Beyond overcoming fear, these interactions also energized
the group and pushed for the acceptance of sacrifice, another
crucial component for collective action (Schaffer 2004). This
energy not only helped to keep up the momentum, it also
pushed actors toward what might appear as irrational acts.
Many reported sacrifices they had made to make the journal
look as they wanted it to.
We sacrificed our personal lives in a way. I had to tell
my family that we had to work underground to save
the journal, because we did a lot of overtime during
this period. My family was also worried: what if I got
fired? I had to discuss my choices with my partner
who, thank God, ended up supporting me. But of
course, all this was totally irrational from a career
point of view. We knew it couldn’t last forever. But we
did our best as long as possible to make the journal in
a different way. (C.)
This idea of sacrifice was acceptable as long as people felt
that the group was carrying their moral principles.
I get fired, fine, at least I will have done my job accord-
ing to the rules “I respect. […] And feeling supported
in a team of happy people is comforting” (N.). Or:
“they have the power to fire us, for sure, but it was as
if I really didn’t care, and there were more of us than
they thought, and we were together. This journal was
our strength, this journal as it used to be.” (F.)
Some actors even pushed their sacrifice further by pro-
voking personal clashes with managers. For instance, a jour-
nalist explicitly told the head of publishing that she did not
write what she was asked to because it was irrelevant. She
stated that “this couldn’t last forever. I wanted them to hear
that what they were doing was nonsense, even if I knew that
they could fire me.” The fired journalist wrote in an email to
one of the authors (November 17, 2008):
They sacrifice some, like sheep in a ritual, thinking it
is going to scare the others. But I told my colleagues,
don’t be scared, don’t be sad, I despise their shit, I will
find another place. I am happy to be sacrificed. You
can only say these things to people with whom you
share a true vision of work and life (…) when you do
the right thing with the right people.
Overall, the risks involved in secret-keeping acts made
these individuals feel empowered by virtue of their feeling
of belonging to a cohesive group for which they could sac-
rifice certain aspects of their life and career, since this was
part of a moral struggle. Simmel (1906) argues that this is
an important aspect of secret groups: they do not act with-
out rules, but rather according to rules of their own. In this
sense, secret activities allow for the development of ethical
resistance, one which confronts dominant actors in order to
introduce moral principles that are perceived as more appro-
priate for the organization (Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017;
Schaffer 2004).
Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
Bonding allowed journalists to maintain their capacity to
influence the journal’s content in line with their group’s
moral principles. This was possible thanks to continuous
interactions about appropriate practices and the microman-
agement of surprises—an element which is crucial to the
continuous exercise of power in secret (Simmel 1906).
Agreement on Ethical Practices
The agreement on common practices was made possible
through increased interactions amongst the journalists.
Despite their agreement on the “dishonesty” of managerial
policies, the journalists had to agree on what practices would
be adopted to maintain a morally sound journal.
They gave themselves over to long debates, which
allowed the group to make its shared expectations explicit
and to make sure they were solid grounds for continuing to
take risks.
G. asked in one of the meetings why we were resisting
the decision to publish this ad. ‘Let them do it,’ she
said. This pushed us to discuss what we really meant
13

by an honest journal. Does it mean that we do not pub-
lish ads at all? Does it mean that we publish the ad and
an investigation on the same topic that questions the
information in the ad? The debate was heated, but at
least we ended up agreeing on what it meant. (J.)
At one point, for instance, there was an agreement on
what was meant by an “honest” article. There was an agree-
ment over the importance of verifying information firsthand,
in contrast with writing an article based on the information
received from a pharmaceutical firm.
At any rate, in all circumstances, I have always refused
to write or to say something that cannot be verified
firsthand. […] This is probably incompatible with how
our managers see the content of the journal, but this
is honesty, this is my way of being true to myself. (T.)
Another criterion was also put forward, pertaining to the
time needed to write a serious article. Y. strongly expressed
the need to “take time and even work slowly to reflect on
facts and figures before writing an article.” This contrasted
with the need to write quickly to create “buzz.”
“Good writing” appeared to be an important element as
well. Indeed, journalists would often decide to reject the
pages written by marketers because they found them “badly
written, or you know, just publicity with no added value”
(C.). Writing properly was key for all team members (“Writ-
ing is our job, choosing words properly, avoiding grammati-
cal mistakes, crafting something pleasurable,” says N.).
According to G., this was a way to increase the journalists’
own standards of quality and rigor: “When you reject others’
papers, you need to make sure that what you put in instead
is really good.”
All these criteria for shaping a “good paper” were also a
basis from which to select what was going to be published
or not, and therefore to put their principles into practice.
Each month, we received a number of ads written by
marketers, which they often imposed at the editorial
meeting. What we did is that we decided it was our job
to decide what was published in the journal. It was as
simple as that. So we held a monthly secret advertising
meeting, as we called it, where we screened market-
ing ads and collectively decided which ones we could
include and which we would not. It was always based
on the quality of the text, but mostly about coherence
with the rest of the journal (T.)
J. added in an email that “being ethical is not a theory, it
is the means for being motivated and inspired to do a good
job.” That is not to say that the journalists did whatever they
wanted in the journal; of course, they had to compromise at
times. “We had to accept or tolerate in a way some manage-
rial demands in order to avoid big clashes and suspicion”
13
D. Younes et al.
(T.). But compromise was always the result of collective
discussion.
Each month, we took the list of demands and discussed
it collectively in our meetings. We decided on what
to keep and what to remove from the next issue. Of
course, we had to agree on what we would tolerate or
not, which was not always an easy task (H.)
Criticizing the quality of the job done by the marketing
department was a way to debate “what really mattered” to
them. Making explicit what is an ethical way of producing
a journal helped them coordinate their activities and make
collective decisions, which helped maintain the cohesiveness
of the group and also their moral principles. Therefore, the
collective was experienced not only as a bulwark against
the managerial gaze, or as an emotional bubble, but also as
a space where ethical issues could be freely discussed every
day. These discussions helped to clarify shared expectations
and made the collective action possible.
Micromanaging Editorial Surprises
Developing practices that were at odds with managerial
expectations, forming a tight collective, and developing
secret activities, does not imply that the journalists consist-
ently succeeded in introducing their preferred practices,
since this was a dissident effort that required continuous
action to shift the balance of power with management (Gor-
don et al. 2009). As a result, journalists developed tactics
that allowed them to actually influence the content of the
journal by micromanaging editorial surprises, that is to say,
unexpected content. Indeed, these surprises are what gives
a group a leadership role in the end. It is the “permanent
in- and out-flow of content, in which what is originally
concealed throws off its mystery” (Simmel 1906, p. 467)
which progressively modifies the balance of power. How
these journalists could continue surprising managers each
month was a fundamental aspect of their collective ethical
resistance (Schaffer 2004).
Indeed, every time a new issue was out, T., the team
leader, had to explain to managers and marketers in edito-
rial meetings that there were reasons why the journal did not
appear as expected. There was a sort of regular unofficial
discussion about these surprises:
Well, I recognize that I sometimes felt a little anx-
ious when I saw the face of the top manager holding
the journal and discovering things. We exchanged
in the hallway, or in each other’s offices, the man-
ager showed up with the journal in his hands with
a look like “wtf?.” But the team did a great job to
help me find good excuses. Working on convincing
Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
excuses was very important for us to be able to keep
our capacity to maneuver. (T.)
The team therefore dedicated part of its time to pro-
tecting the secret sphere by continuously explaining the
reasons for unexpected content. They looked for reasons
that could be credible to managers.
When we decided to not publish an ad that was sup-
posedly paid, we needed to find good reasons. Such
as, I remember, once we evoked a problem of picture
coloration, which was confirmed by the production
staff, I have to admit that was a bit of sabotage, but
hey that is what you need to fix the mistake (F.)
At times, the team had to find alliances with other
departments in the firm to explain editorial surprises:
Sometimes we would ask one of the supervisors of
the production line… to not print what marketing
wanted the journal to publish. […] So the production
guy promised not to print a four-page advertisement
in the next month’s issue because he thought we were
right. That would leave more space for another of our
pieces. […] In the meeting, I talked about a problem
related to production that we solved at the last minute
by writing an article. (T.)
Some demands were just delayed in a way that allowed
journalists to counterbalance them with articles that pro-
vided contrasting views. For instance, T. told the mar-
keting correspondent at a given editorial meeting that
commercial information on cosmetic products “would be
published later because we planned to have a paper on the
proper use of cosmetics in a forthcoming issue, […] a way
to gain time.”(T.).
Even when marketers could have been offended by the
team’s decisions, the argument was made very difficult to
challenge.
The trick was obvious, but I was sort of trapped
because if I said ‘I don’t believe what you’re say-
ing,’ I would need to explain why, while sometimes
the reasons that T. brought forward were convincing
because they always related to a kind of editorial
coherence. […] In short, everyone guessed he was
cheating us, but nobody dared ask directly, ‘Why are
you lying?’ (VP of Marketing).
This difficulty of challenging the journalists’ work was
enhanced as they were also hiding the collective action
very well, so that they could not be blamed for collective
disobedience. Autonomy and the uncertainty over the out-
put inherent in journalistic work were used to make some
acts of collective disobedience appear to be isolated acts,
even coincidences that happened for good reasons.
I told them that H. was sick and she asked G. if she
couldn’t suggest something to replace the original arti-
cle. And I added that I was not sure it was still mean-
ingful to write an article about that in the next issue.
They agreed, so we got away with it like that. As long
as it was individual initiatives, that was fine. When
they discovered there was a whole process behind the
changes, they went crazy! (T.)
Indeed, when the secret collective action was discovered,
many journalists had to leave the company, following the
resignation of T.
The main problem was that they decided to work on
their own, while, I guess, this type of problem could
have been discussed in a fair and professional meeting.
But no, they turned their back and said, ‘it’s our busi-
ness, not theirs, they don’t understand us, blah, blah,
blah,’ in a kind of immature and egotistical way. (Head
of publishing – T.’s manager).
It was as if small “variations” were acceptable and
labeled as autonomy, while a collective action of appropria-
tion of the journal was forbidden. Certain things could be
said, and others needed to remain concealed so as to avoid
direct confrontation.
Micromanaging surprises by systematically finding cred-
ible justifications that relied on isolated personal initiatives
was what allowed journalists to work according to their
moral principles for an unexpectedly long time and con-
served their ability to surprise and therefore to influence
(Simmel 1906) the content of the journal, despite its pub-
lic character. Secrecy, by creating an “ideal sphere” (Sim-
mel 1950) of dense interactions, increased the journalists’
capacity to protect and enhance their ethical expectations,
before having “to give up the fight in front of managerial
stubbornness,” as T. said, a bit sadly, in an email in 2011.
The head of publishing claims that “you can always bring
changes or do things differently as long as the job is well
done, but hey, when you see that people have been a bit,
say, disloyal, then you need to take steps. […] and that was
a shame, because they were all doing well, really well, but
did I have a choice?” Therefore, beyond acknowledged per-
formance, loyalty to managers was perceived as crucial, con-
firming the existence of managerial expectations according
to which individuals are supposed to abide “body and soul”
to managerial requests (Fleming 2015).
Before being finally revealed, secrecy helped journalists
to maintain high ethical standards and to produce a journal
appreciated by its readership. Their resistance to manage-
rial decisions through the development of secret activi-
ties strengthened, for a time, the moral values carried by
the journal, and had a positive impact on the organization
(Bloom and White 2016). This suggests that secrecy is a way
13

of resisting managerial policies by introducing alternative
ethical practices, although the ultimate goal of these secret
keepers was not to challenge policies, but to defend the ethi-
cal expectations conveyed in the product of their work.
Discussion
We have shown that secrecy can be a social mechanism
through which employees can influence “things that mat-
ter” to them in a context of moral adversity in an organiza-
tion. We have suggested that this is the case because secrecy
affects the balance of power in the social configuration that
binds those who hold the secret to those excluded from it
(Blakely 2011; Simmel 1906). As such, these journalists
gained more autonomy by showing compliance in meetings
instead of negotiating what to do in the next issue, and by
reallocating their time and energy to do what they really
wanted to do, discuss what mattered to them, and find ways
to protect their secret activities. These interactions facili-
tated bonding (Courpasson and Younes 2018; Simmel 1906)
within the group. It allowed them to find inclusive ways
of making collective decisions, and discuss their common
principles and the practices that fit with them. Ultimately,
their ability to protect their secret over time created a social
configuration that was favorable to the introduction of alter-
native practices. This was the case as long as they could
micromanage surprises each time a journal issue that they
modified appeared. Their ability to continuously rekindle
the importance of moral principles and the necessity to act
according to them was what allowed journalists to maintain
ethical practices that did not fit with managerial policies, but
which affected the content of the journal as well as its eco-
nomic results. These findings therefore illuminate, we con-
tend, the important role of secrecy for preserving how things
normatively ought to be and the “moral world” (Bloom and
White 2016) that employees inhabit and strive to defend.
These results have implications for theory.
“Secrecy May Embrace the Highest Values”
A major insight derived from the literature on secrecy and
ethics is that secret work, being by nature illegal and devi-
ant (Mainemelis 2010), is rarely acknowledged as a posi-
tive force for organizations (see, however, Courpasson and
Younes 2018). Most academic work praises rather its oppo-
site, transparency, when considering moral consequences
(Flyverbom et al. 2015). In contrast, this paper has shown
that secrecy can be a facilitator for the maintenance of ethi-
cal practices that fit with employee principles, despite ten-
sion with management. We have shown that results in terms
of quality, readership satisfaction, and even margins were
13
D. Younes et al.
enhanced, despite the existence of secret activities within
the organization.
This paper therefore allows for greater sensitivity to the
social maintenance of ethics in light of three elements: the
interplay between moral principles informally practiced in
everyday work, an increase in secret interactions due to the
risk of revelation (Simmel 1906), and the absolute necessity
to find ways to avoid direct confrontation with management.
These three elements coexist because secrecy makes it pos-
sible not only to maintain ethics while avoiding conflict with
managers, but also reinforces the beliefs about what is a
good product and forces actors to constantly focus on what
really matters. At stake is the enforcement of a mutual rela-
tion between secrecy and ethics whereby employees attempt
to both accomplish their task according to their ethical
expectations and preserve a relationship with management
through which they avoid open conflict that could damage
the secret process. This allows us to contribute to theory on
secrecy, by showing a new configuration of concealment
and revelation. In most studies on secrecy, the content of the
collective action is concealed while its existence is revealed.
This is done in order to give the secret greater mystique and
to make others aware of the fact that they are excluded from
something they should value (Blakely 2011; Simmel 1906).
In the case of these journalists, it was rather the opposite:
they had to reveal the content of the secret group’s work
without making managers feel excluded from the process—
despite the fact that they were. In that sense, secrecy was not
at all used to engage in an open struggle, but rather to pacify
and dilute an informally existing one. This is what Maine-
melis (2010) qualifies as “stealing the fire” in his work on
scientists’ secret activities, except that scientists do not have
to manage surprises, as they only reveal their secret activities
if they get the results desired. In that sense, using secrecy to
defend moral principles is challenging. Not diverting from
the primary goal, which is moral, becomes more difficult as
energy is spent to manage the power relationship. Succeed-
ing in this task shows the degree to which secrecy can be
used in an authentically engaged manner. This is where we
contribute to a better understanding about how “secrecy can
embrace the highest values” (Simmel 1906, p. 463).
Crucial to our contention is a critical deconstruction
of the conventional binary and oppositional analysis of
ethics and secrecy by focusing on their mutually consti-
tutive relationship, showing ethics as a practical accom-
plishment facilitated by secrecy. Secrecy is thus analyzed
in this paper as a potentially positive social process for
achieving ethical ends, because employees use it as a way
to circumvent managerial demands in the name of uphold-
ing a crucial set of moral principles. This type of process
has also been captured in previous research on “construc-
tive deviance” in which employees violate norms of con-
duct, but “in doing so contribute to the well-being of an
Ethics from Below: Secrecy and the Maintenance of Ethics
organization, its members or both” (Galperin and Burke
2006: 333 in Bloom and White 2016, p. 8). Research on
“constructive resistance” (Greenbaum et al. 2013), “pro-
ductive resistance” (Courpasson et al. 2012), or the notion
of the “ethics of rule-bending” whereby acts of disobedi-
ence are seen as a “critical practice” for challenging domi-
nant power structures (Weiskopf and Willmott 2013) sug-
gests that some allegedly unethical conduct can actually be
a strong means to critically examine what can be taken as
ethical or not (Solomon 1992). Our findings add to these
insights, forcing us to reconsider the role of secrecy, as it
may indeed exist at times in a productive dynamic with
ethics rather than in opposition to it.
According to this view, we contend that secrecy is intrin-
sic and useful to everyday life at work, not because workers
have something to conceal per se against company inter-
ests, but because their choices of concealment can directly
influence the outcomes of the firm. In other words, what
is unique in the relationship between ethics and secrecy is
that secrecy allows employees to negotiate amongst them-
selves away from managerial control, and thereby to focus
time and energy on a collective project to accomplish “bet-
ter work.” Most of our informants felt the journal produced
underground was better. They had established a special rela-
tionship with it, regarding it as a trophy they can be proud
of. They were ready to make sacrifices for it and live with
fear on a daily basis. The separate sphere of life constituted
by secrecy (Simmel 1950; Grey and Costas 2016) is there-
fore a lively space where employees exercise power over the
content of their work, dedicate energy and skills to fix mana-
gerial wrongdoings, and make crucial choices about what
they accept to be associated with. This last idea is important
because it supports the view of ethics as “the conscious prac-
tice of freedom” (Foucault 2001), that is, “the considered
form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection”
(Foucault 2001, p. 284). The journalists made deliberate and
informed choices and exercised this freedom. That is, “what
allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting
[…] to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its
goals” (Foucault 2001, p. 117). The freedom of the ethical
subject consists of the possibility to choose what kind of self
one wishes to be. We contend that secret work, in this case,
helped employees exercise this self-constituting freedom
(Laidlaw 2002, p. 324). Indeed, this practice of freedom led
most of them to leave the company when their secret work
became impossible.
Overall, our data show that rather than seeing secrecy as
a dissenting illegal force against clear and indisputable rules
of conduct, studying the relationship between secrecy and
ethics as mutually constitutive gives us a way to analyze how
disobedience and morality play a fundamental role together
in framing employee practices and accomplishments as
“morally sound.” Secrecy is a means for triggering and
sustaining the ad hoc everyday actions of employees deal-
ing with competing dominant morality.
Secrecy, Ethics, and Power
Another contribution is to show that secrecy can be a politi-
cal act aimed at influencing the relationship with manage-
ment, so as to keep control over the object of work (in our
case, a journal), and to influence its content in line with
employee moral principles. As such, the paper offers a par-
ticular understanding of an ethics of resistance (Schaffer
2004; Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017) produced by secrecy.
These journalists challenged the structures and relations
of control through their secret actions, while agreeing on
a collective morality. They managed, through secrecy, to
keep control over what they deemed worthy of publishing,
and to reconstruct a sense of ethics that de facto challenged
managerial domination over what and how things should be
produced in the corporation (Bardon and Josserand 2010).
Moreover, our findings allow us to go one step further, by
highlighting secrecy as a means for these journalists to
engage in collective political action (Rendtroff 2014), in
which the progressive intensification of interactions with
others encouraged the secret holders to tighten their interre-
lations and clarify the reasons why they would take the col-
lective risk of being discovered. Secrecy encouraged these
employees to emphasize the collective dimension (even the
militant dimension, see Schaffer 2004) of their actions: in
Schaffer’s terms, secrecy triggers activities that encour-
age people to resist ethics of compliance (Alakavuklar and
Alamgir 2017) and official codes of conduct that sustain
managerial control, despite the risks associated with this
resistance. Hence, ethics sustained by secrecy derive from a
political action of resistance, because it instigates a process
of interactions amongst the secret holders which challenges
the existing power relations.
Secrecy entails accepting sacrifice while pushing for dif-
ferent moral principles. Pullen and Rhodes (2014) argue
that the ethico-political nature of resistance resides in the
idea of corporeal generosity: ethics are to be observed in
the “embodied experience of open relations with others in
organizations in response to a rational-managerial enclosure
of difference” (Alakavuklar and Alamgir 2017). In our study,
we take this argument further and reveal how secrecy is a
process entailing acts of generosity and self-sacrifice which
makes it possible to continuously challenge the status quo of
managerial demands. In this case, secrecy allowed journal-
ists to adopt an ethics of resistance because of the intensity
of their interactions and the compulsory cohesion required to
alleviate fears of being discovered (Courpasson and Younes
2018). But what makes this resistance ethical is also a con-
cern for others (in particular colleagues and readership) that
led the journalists to sacrifice their time and their personal
13

life to sustain the secret process. We therefore argue that
secrecy can help create an ethical resistance that is likely to
challenge managerial appropriation of organizational eth-
ics, because it is founded on the contextual appropriateness
of secrecy, rather than on what is good or right in general,
that is to say, secrecy makes it possible to enhance “what
is viewed as fitting, given the circumstances” (Labeff et al.
1990, p. 191). Special circumstances, largely defined by the
actors themselves, do exist, and they cause them to violate
certain rules of conduct in a particular instance where “what
really matters” is endangered. Our study highlights how the
decision to go secret, in these special circumstances, implied
a strong concern for morality amongst this group of journal-
ists, rather than a political orientation against management
per se. In that sense, secrecy allowed for a different type of
ethical resistance. It was not just about protecting identities
(Fleming 2013), doing something that better fits one’s career
(Fleming and Sewell 2002), or other actions that have very
little impact on the corporation (Contu 2008). It was about
influencing what the corporation carried as moral princi-
ples in its day-to-day activities, beyond its formal mana-
gerial policies. In other words, managerial domination—
which is a systemic form of power (Clegg 1989; Fleming
and Spicer 2014)—can coexist with less visible forms of
power that are neither coercive nor manipulative. It was
not at all what journalists intended to challenge. Such acts
rather target the characteristics of an organization’s output
(Chan 2009; Turco 2012). Our case shows that this form
of power is impactful but requires continuous day-to-day
micromanagement of events that could reveal that a power
struggle is at play—in our case, surprises. This is precisely
because secrecy cannot permanently change the power rela-
tion among actors.
Conclusion
This paper has shown that it is possible to study secrecy
without a moral judgment of this practice. Instead, we sug-
gest that it can be a social means for ethical ends. Accord-
ingly, secrecy appears to be an appropriate focus for the
study of ethics, as it emerges in interactions devoted to
accomplishing work that is recognized by different actors
(employees, customers/readers) as honest and valuable. The
paper showed the micromechanisms through which secrecy
positively affects ethics in organizations. It shows how
secrecy affects power relations in which ethics are embedded
(Gordon et al. 2009), and also how it helps employees build
a collective action that facilitates the maintenance of ethics.
We have shown that secrecy does not allow for a transforma-
tion of the domination system in firms, but that it is a form of
“ethical resistance” that enables employees to influence the
output of their firm and its moral characteristics.
13
D. Younes et al.
This has implications for businesses willing to facilitate
employees’ intervention in the moral domain. The paper
has shown that the capacity of journalists to meet and dis-
cuss freely their expectations was important for organizing
a hidden collective action that does not affect the domina-
tion structure but influences the moral characteristics of
the journal. This means that allowing employees to meet
during their working time to discuss what matters to them
without managerial control can facilitate the attempts of
employees to counterbalance managerial careerist behav-
ior that can harm the corporation on the long run. This
is also interesting because our data show that ethics and
business are not necessarily incompatible (see Hanlon and
Mandarini 2015). It is only when particular interests (here
managers’ and stakeholders’ interests) are added to the
equation that situations become more complicated.
However, this element can be further explored in future
research. Indeed, we remind that secrecy works partly
because fear facilitates bonding and the development of
cohesion. These are important to understand why jour-
nalists start accepting illegal acts. This point leads us to
believe that the link between secrecy and ethics sheds light
on a “moral tragedy” (Larmer 1992) whereby individuals
do not necessarily see that by disobeying they do benefit
their organizations. However, facilitating their collective
action can take away an important element inherent to
secrecy: risk, and the consequent interactions that lead
to cohesion and the willingness to sacrifice. Therefore,
further research should be conducted to further explore
this tragedy and its consequences for business.
Compliance with Ethical Standards 
Conflict of interest  The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest.
Ethical Approval  All procedures performed in studies involving human
participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the insti-
tutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki
Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by
any of the authors.
Informed Consent  Informed consent was obtained from all individual
participants included in the study.
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