Radical Humanism

Current “Reformist” Management Debates: A Truncated Pseudo-Humanism?

Mainstream management literature remains largely confined within traditional North American utilitarian functionalist frameworks and neoclassical, not to mention neoliberal, economic thinking. Some of the leitmotivs discernible within this literature include “humanism,” “ethics,” “corporate governance,” and “social responsibility for business,” as well as “environmental responsibility.” These are calls to (re)discover human, moral, and social dimensions that ought to be present in both upstream (employees) and downstream (consumers, society, and nature) business activities. However, such notions can already be found in the classic works of traditional management. What is new in the recent rediscovery of humanist principles, ethics and good governance?

The main problem that management confronts in a global context of unbridled capitalism is to find means to motivate and interest people in doing productive, innovative, quality work, when in fact work has (through specialization, division of labor, and relentless cost reductions) become ever more uninteresting and empty of all meaning, as well as an irreducible enemy of nature and the environment. The root cause of the problem is the negation of humanist thought by a technocratic order striving for maximization of profits at all costs. The person in the sight of much management theory has been truncated, with their humanity reduced to a functional dimension that is dehumanized, instrumentalized, and reified. Nowhere does one see a theory of humanity and production within the workplace.

The debate needs to be widened by bringing attention to the trend known as governance (an often vaguely defined notion) and to postmodern or constructivist analyses that have developed and departed from the works of authors such as Jean Piaget, Anthony Giddens, and Alain Eraly. The resulting analysis of organizations and management contains three levels of theoretical omissions.

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