5 Humanistic management1

Monika Kostera

Contemporary times, which Zygmunt Bauman (2012), adopting Gramsci’s meta-

phor, called the interregnum, or an era in-between working social, political and
economic systems, are characterized by adiaphorization: placing of certain events
and human beings outside of moral categories (Bauman and Donskis, 2013).
Management is one of such domains where ordinary ethics has ceased to have
spontaneous access, and has been replaced by a specialist entity called ‘business
ethics’, which many students have serious problems with relating to their ‘everyday’
sense of justice, decency or moral choices. While discussing case studies my practi-
tioner students often opt for decisions that they later admit they would never make
in their ‘normal life’, outside of the business realm. Small wonder – in today’s busi-
ness world, dealing with human issues has been assigned to specialists in human
resource management.

At the same time, management and its language have infiltrated every aspect of
human life, and the popularity of management education of various kinds seems
to be constantly beating its own records (Hatch et al., 2005). Millions of people
from all over the globe, from all walks of life and professions, from businessmen
and -women, through journalists, teachers and academics to artists, clergy and
many others go through some kind of management programme in their life.
Management has been, indeed, the driving force of the whole liquid modern era
and it has been providing the imagery and language for almost all social contexts
(Bauman et al., 2015). I believe that it, as a practice and academic discipline, now
has to face a choice: either vanish, slowly or suddenly, as the bubble bursts, or
take responsibility for the problems it has caused or legitimized. The first step to
achieve this is a reorientation towards people, an awareness of the presence of
the Other and the willingness to take responsibility for her or him, as Emmanuel
Lévinas ([1961] 1999) called for. Humanistic management, based on such an
awareness and on a consciously humanistic management creed, can become a
force that can work for making our world a place where human dignity and well-
being are promoted in the workings of the economic system (Pirson et al., 2009;
Batko et al., in press).

1 This text is based on a research project supported by the European Union Marie Curie Fellowship Programme: FP7,
627429 ECOPREN FP7 PEOPLE 2013 IEF.

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In the mid-1990s Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges (1994) was pondering the status of

our discipline. Are we, scholars of management and organization, engaged at the
service of business and administration practice, as the mainstream at that time was
emphatically upholding, or, were we, instead, busy constructing an independent
academic discipline, like the other ones: philosophy, sociology, political sciences?
She was inclined to see us as heading in the latter direction, and not in any particu-
larly original way. Management and organization studies were, in fact, a relatively
recent academic discipline, just about to reach its first centenary. Like all its older
siblings had once done, it was now going through a phase of adolescence, a period
of claiming its uniqueness and importance and, indeed, like all the others before,
making all kinds of promises to the world of practice and practitioners. Philosophy,
in the words of Plato, was supposed to help Athens to conquer Sparta and to advise
the Athenian how to educate their sons. Durkheim claimed that sociology had a
very practical programme, including prevention of suicide. Similar pledges were
made by others and so it is not surprising that our discipline also initially posited
itself as a practical problem-solver, and the kind of challenges it promised to help
overcome were related to business and administration, an area of both growing
interest and concern.

At the time when Czarniawska-Joerges was writing her article, there was a fierce
discussion in progress about the scientific status of management sciences, going
on at least since the publication of Gibson Burrell’s and Gareth Morgan’s (1979)
monumental Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, accompanied by
attempts at reflectivity and theoretical consolidation. This momentum has not been
broken; if anything, it may have intensified during the recent decades. We no longer
have raging paradigm wars (Jackson and Carter, 1993), but a more or less conscious
co-existence of several mature paradigms in the most active academic communi-
ties. They produce a plethora of theories pertaining to a vast array of manage-
rial and organizational problems, which are approached from a large number of
perspectives: from business oriented, through critical, to systemic, aiming to place
organizational phenomena within a larger social and ecological context.

There exists a huge range of outlets for the publication of these theories and models,
from books, to scientific journals both general and specialist and niche. It would
not be an overstatement to risk a proposition that we can, today, speak of a rich and
mature management science, embracing a multitude of theories and perspectives,
offering reflection and a more or less systematic view of quite a large number of
phenomena considered to fall within the scope of the discipline. In Czarniawska-
Joerges’s (1992) formulation, what organization scholars study are all social pro-
cesses taking place at the meso level of social life, or in-between the big picture or
macro-economics and sociology and the person level of psychology.

Yet this reservoir of knowledge seems to be vastly underutilized both in practice

(which should not surprise us, considering the fate of the older disciplines) and in
education (which, indeed, is rather amazing). Despite the mind-blowing popular-
ity of business studies all around the globe, with millions of graduates in the US

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alone, coming from all walks of life and professions, from business managers and
entrepreneurs, through nurses, teachers, journalists, to artists and clerics (Hatch
et  al., 2005), the scientific contribution of the discipline seems to have instead
become something of a forbidden knowledge (Czarniawska, 2003). We do not teach
what we learn from our research, and sometimes we teach what we know does not
follow from our research. Addressing the split between research and education,
Czarniawska observed:

The best-selling manuals in organization theory make one think of the Monument of the
Unknown Soldier: they celebrate authors whose fame is long dead and was not especially
large even during its peak. (Czarniawska, 2003: 353)

Furthermore, there is ‘a conflict between the knowledge that comes from our
research results, and that we naturally would like to promote and propagate, and the
“received knowledge” whose propagation is apparently demanded by our sponsors;
that is, future corporate and public employers of our students’ (Czarniawska,
2003: 354). Czarniawska went on to list 10 typical ideas which we teach, such as that
organizations are goal-directed, that knowledge of alternatives is necessary to make
a good decision, that change should be planned, etc., all of them based on what she
called the ‘rational myth’ of management which not only has not been confirmed by
research but has actually been disproved. Why would we insist on teaching these,
obviously false, propositions to our students, making them prone to frustration and
anger when they enter real organizational life, when modern education boasts of
debunking old myths, rather than celebrating and perpetuating them?

She went on to examine possible explanations for this discrepancy, taking into
consideration different kinds of knowledge and logic: of theory, practice and rep-
resentation, and proposed that indeed, the erroneous ideas, based on the myth of
rationality offer an illusion of control that research results do not. However, even if
there is nothing alarming or wrong about people preferring hope over cool despair,
the problematic thing is the contents of the myth, what our students are supposed
to hope for, and believe in.

To this sharp and illuminating analysis, I would like to add a point made by sev-
eral authors, and argued particularly convincingly by Roy Jacques (1996): man-
agement (and organization) theory, as we know it, is not just a kind of science,
but also an ideology. The latter is often referred to as managerialism, a name put
to it deliberately to point to the ideological dimension and thus bring it to the
public eye. Managerialism is an ideology focused on control: of organizations and
environments (Enteman, 1993; Parker, 2002). Elements regarded as unpredictable,
uncontrollable or evasive, and this is especially true of the so-called human factor,
are seen as disturbants to be subjected to even stricter efforts at control, and, if pos-
sible, made to resemble the more predictable factors as closely as possible by such
means as rules and regulations, economic pressures, deprivation of personal and
professional judgement, in the hope of achieving an organizational world where the
rationality myth would actually work. If, as a Polish writer, Andrzej Stasiuk (2014)

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has it, Soviet communism was one huge effort to eliminate materialism, or at least
make it pliable to the collective human will, then the current system, based on
managerialism, is an effort on a similarly extensive magnitude, aimed at eliminat-
ing the human element, making it as controllable as the ‘deterministic’ subsystems
of the Trist–Emery model of organization (Emery and Trist, 1960): structure and
technology. What modernity had recommended, its liquid version has put into
practice, not by enforcing rules and structures, but by eroding them, making them
and the humans equivalent and, ultimately, obsolete, through a radical reduction
to quantifiable entities, and, ultimately to financial categories, making all aspects of
human activity subject to measurement and counting (Martin, 2002).

Scholars concerned with this dehumanizing development, the humanists in man-

agement, propose to alter this trend and to re-connect theory, education and prac-
tice, after having emancipated it from the ideological managerialist influence, by a
strong affirmation of people, the human element. Humanistic management can be
defined by three key characteristics. The first is its focus on the human condition,
needs and rights. The aim of humanistic management is seen as the human being,
his or her good, dignity, emancipation and development (Batko et al., in press).
It is based on the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant ([1785] 1997), which
upholds that the human being should never be regarded as a means to any end,
such as profit, economic growth or effectivity, but should only be seen as an end in
her or himself. All other duties and obligations follow from the obligation toward
the human being. Management following this path cannot take any other primary
form than that of dialogue, following philosopher Józef Tischner (1990; on dialogi-
cal management see Batko et al., in press).2

Secondly, humanistic management often (even if not always) seeks inspiration in

the humanities (Gagliardi and Czarniawska, 2006; Steyaert et al., 2016), which offer
both knowledge and a culture sensitive towards the human context, be it politi-
cal, historical, ethical, anthropological, etc. Such a knowledge helps to broaden
the cultural capital and permits the adoption of modes of learning that go beyond
linearity and the narrow myth of rationality. Furthermore, it can help us to develop
a genuine understanding and generous, open-ended creativity, not undertaken to
achieve economic profit but to explore and expand human mind and consciousness
(Orzechowski, 2009).3 This adherence to humanistic roots also concerns the way

2 An international association of researchers, consultants and practitioners, the Humanistic Management Network is
aimed specifically at the bringing together of theory, education and practice. The Network proclaims a pro-market
but, at the same time, pro-human agenda for business practice, education and research. Its website defines human-
istic management as ‘the pursuit of strategies and practices aimed at the creation of sustainable human welfare’
(Humanistic Management Network, 2014) and the upholding of ‘humanity as the ultimate end and key principle of
all economic activity’ (ibid.). The concern of HMN is to further humanistic ethics in business practice and reflection.
3 One of the most notable academic institutions explicitly dedicated to research in humanistic management is
the Faculty of Management and Social Communication: a college of one of the world’s oldest universities – the
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. It was created in 1996 by Professor Emil Orzechowski and has, since,
as the first and one of the very few throughout the world, the formal right to grant academic titles in management
within the field of the humanities (Orzechowski, 2009).

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humanists in management write, not following the imperatives of the academic

genre of the mainstream, that is, the striving at linearity and utter clarity, but fol-
lowing the flow of a non-linear, literary style of writing (more on this topic in, for
example, Gabriel, 2000). Not every management author can be a Proust or a Kafka,
but we can all read them, learn from them and be concerned about ‘good writing’,
perhaps as much as the scientific contents.

Thirdly, humanistic management is focused on the human condition and experi-

ence (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2013). It is an academic discourse adopting a
human perspective, exploring organizational reality from the point of view of the
feeling, thinking, embodied human, be it underling or boss, professional or techni-
cal, privileged or poor, and dedicated to bringing her or his voice into the domain
of public consciousness, to offering space to the mainstream and to the margins,
to the young who represent the future, and the ghosts of the dead. Humanistic
management does not evaluate or judge, it never raises itself over the level of the
human condition, never aspires to put any idea before it. It is led by the constant
awareness of our humanity and human solidarity which comes before everything
else, whether we are bosses or underdogs, blue or white collars, middle class or
members of the precariate.

History of humanistic management in literature

One of the first management scholars to adopt such a perspective was the American
management consultant and thinker Mary Parker Follett (1949),4 one of the founders
of our discipline. She has been vastly overlooked by many textbooks and educational
programmes, and is one of the most under-appreciated great minds of management
and organization theory, not only because she was a woman, a ‘founding mother’
rather than ‘father’, but also because of the precursory character of her perspective,
still not sufficiently understood by the mainstream. In her writings the human being
has a leading and decidedly constructive role. She did not share the assumption, so
popular in her times, that the human factor is the cause of most of the organizational
disturbance and error and should be controlled, restrained and streamlined by the
use of standards, procedures, technology, structures and rules. She regarded rela-
tionships, difference and conflict, as natural and positive, helpful for organizing and,
in fact, in many instances a necessary condition for its emergence. She proposed
structures and regulations following from human characteristics and abilities, and
not intended as frames serving to limit and order all social activity. Mary Parker
Follett was also among the few organization theorists of her time to point to the
dangers of eliminating all conflict; she argued that this could lead to an erosion of
cooperation and shared responsibility. Seen this way, conflict could be a force for
organizational development, but in order to be able to use it, the manager has to
understand and respect his or her human nature – and the human nature of others.

4 Texts originally published 1929–1941.

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Another classical thinker, following the humanistic lines of thinking about man-
agement and organizations, was French philosopher Simone Weil ([1933]1987;
Grey, 1996). She argued that all management that degrades the human being is,
in fact, a kind of violence. Depriving work of meaning and skill is, she pointed
out, profoundly immoral and humiliating to the human beings fulfilling the roles
of employees. Simone Weil was not a persistent Marxist,5 even though she spoke
highly critically about capitalism and the alienation of work that it brings on people.
Revolution in itself could not solve these problems, as what lies at their core is not
the economic system as such, but oppression, an instrumental treatment of human
beings that breeds injustice and violence. The solution is to adopt Kant’s categorical
imperative in management, whatever the social or economic system.

Weil was equally critical of management practices based on Taylorism, and those
derived from Leninism. Both were, in her time, dominant: each in its geopolitical
location, they were often considered each other’s opposites. To Weil, however, they
were equivalent in their instrumental treatment of the person: treating him or her
as a means to some other end, be it profit or the creation of a communist state.
What Simone Weil proposed was not so much an economic or structural reorien-
tation of management, but a moral one – it is only through the acknowledgement
of the human being as a subject, not a means to any end but end in him- or her-
self that the moral dimension, lost during modernization, can be brought back to
contemporary management.

The third founding author of humanistic management was the British organiza-
tion scholar Heather Höpfl6 (1992, 1994). Her writings are poetic, multi-layered
and sublime, in content as well as form. They talk about things profoundly human:
feelings, relationships, spirituality, hopes and how they relate to organizations
and organizing. She often addressed the roles humans play in organizations and
the fates that these roles are connected with; how people and organizations learn
and  develop; how the managers and the managed differ and how they are basi-
cally the same, depending on each other but rarely acknowledging the mutuality
of the relationship. Power is, in her thinking, often violent but superficial, reliant
on a kind of rhetoric that promises control but, in reality, offers no more than an
obsessive avoidance of ambivalence and flux. She posited the poetics as a source of
subversive force, a formidable counter-power, by which not just the human in the
role of the underdog but the humanity in each and every one of us acquires hope
of liberation, the ultimate figure of human dignity. By being aware of this figure we
are able to subsist the worst that mainstream management has to offer: violence,
fear and suppression of soulfulness. Silence is, in Höpfl’s understanding, the most
powerful act of organizational resistance – it helps resist dehumanization. The

5 It can, however, be upheld that Karl Marx himself was a precursor of humanistic management – Capital ([1867]1992)
is not just an economic, but a strong humanistic voice.
6 Owing to her untimely death her body of work appears unfinished and rather scattered, although there certainly will
be collected volumes forthcoming. Her first writings focussed explicitly on humanistic management are dated in the
early 1980s. I refer here to the two texts, because of their symbolic significance for the discipline.

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poetics prevails because it runs deeper than the rhetoric; when the masque falls,
management equipped with poetic consciousness is able to transcend the impera-
tive to control and becomes an act of organizational motherhood.

The humanistic perspective in management is an heir of such ideas, present in

management and organization theory, from its very beginning. Not a contempo-
rary invention, but, rather, a continuation of a strong minority tradition, it focuses
on human rights, dignity, meaning of life and the disalienation of work. I will
now present 10 contemporary works rooted in this perspective, some of which are
well known in the international discourse, and some less so. This is by no means
a complete or representative collection, but rather a personal selection: the 10
books are to show the variety of leitmotifs present within the humanistic turn in
management. They are all books, not articles,7 because I believe that the book is an
important outlet (and also genre) of humanistic writing, allowing for a non-linear
and dialogic style. What they all have in common is a focus on one or several of the
three main characteristics of humanistic management I have outlined above: focus
on the human being; seeking inspiration in the humanities; and concentration on
human experience.

Ten important books

In the book Good Novels, Better Management edited by Czarniawska-Joerges and

Guillet de Monthoux (1994), a circle of management and organization scholars
presents a work of fiction and discusses how and what managers can learn from
it – what knowledge relevant to business administration can be found in literary
oeuvres. The book follows the logic of classic case studies, to be pondered over,
discussed and explored, not deterministically ‘solved’. Literature works bril-
liantly because, said the editors, ‘[c]ases would never work if they were merely
“information” or “data”. . . . A work of art influences the world of art through
aesthetic quality, style, empathy and meaning’ (p. 6).

Roy Jacques (1996) presented the history of management not from the mainstream
perspective of the experts, bosses and owners, but from that of the employees, and
through the lens of the industrial work relations in the US. The author showed how
history, culture and experience define and give sense to management discourse and
practice, and indeed, to the very idea of management itself. Despite the claims of
managerialism, management is not and cannot possibly be ‘objective’ or detached
from the human context, because then it loses what it so painstakingly has been
striving for: its status as a science, contributing to our knowledge of how organiza-
tions work.

7 A thing that truly awakens the big bad wolf in me is the notion of the ‘paper’. There are a few fitting outlets for
submitting papers, but none of them has much to do with reading or engagement. Remember Barthes (1975), his
pleasure and bliss of the text? I’m pretty certain he, just like I, would find the thought of enjoying a paper not only
absurd but repulsive. Vive the texte! À bas le paper!

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In his delightfully non-linearly written Pandemonium (1997) Gibson Burrell called

for a theory of retro-organization, invoking history, philosophy, literature and per-
sonal experience. Contemporary organizations pose as rational and logical con-
structs, but by the going beyond this superficial illusion, enforced by the imperative
of linearity (‘linearity kills!’, the author warns on p. 8), it is possible to retrieve what
is truly alive and human: the darkness, pain, pleasure, fear and illumination. By
bringing all of these human aspects back into organization, the book reclaims the
energy and life force that have been lost by sanitized modern organizations.

Yiannis Gabriel (2000) shows that myths and stories are a vibrant and obvious
part of organizations, offering a way to relate to each other and, above all, to
them – the organizations – as profoundly human ways of life. His book is made
up of beautifully narrated stories, and makes its points by them and through them,
showing how stories collected in and about organizations, true and fictional, come
into being and are passed on; what inspires their birth; how we can learn from
them. Different story genres and storytelling traditions offer many possibilities
of approaching organizational experience and making it possible to understand it
and learn from it.

Management Education and Humanities (2006), edited by Pasquale Gagliardi and

Barbara Czarniawska, is a book dedicated to business education: its flaws and ways
that it can be improved to better fit the needs for sustainable management. The
answer to many of the most resonant questions that managers today are faced with
is to be found in the humanities. Both humanism and the humanities have much
to offer in terms of perspective, understanding, ways of thinking, but also concrete
knowledge that can be re-used and applied to the world that managers are living in
today, much better than the currently dominant reductionist and limited education
offered by most business schools.

The book Humanism in Business, edited by Michael Pirson, Heiko Spitzeck,

Wolfgang Amann, Shiban Khan and Ernst von Kimakowitz (2009), questions the
current mainstream assumptions about the purpose of the economic system. The
aim of the book is to explore the possibility for and the cornerstones of a different
system, one that is life-serving and has the human being at its heart. Not financial
measures but values and human dignity would be the basic determinants of such a
system, providing the ground to a transformation of all the three levels of society:
the systemic, the organizational and the individual.

Mats Alvesson’s The Triumph of Emptiness (2014) presents current times as based
on nothingness, but not in the profound, but rather vacuity, banality, dressing up
in ever more grandiose and upbeat tones. Words lose a connection to meaning,
performing a kind of relentless, excruciatingly persistent role of marketing tools.
We are surrounded by images and facades, shouting ‘leadership, professionaliza-
tion, excellence’, but carrying no substance, not connected to any deeper experi-
ence, disappointing, devoid of intent to take responsibility or form a relationship.
Where rhetoric and visibility are everything, all that remains for the humans and

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their organizations is a never ending bragging contest that largely remains its own
reward and punishment.

The theme of Roman Batko’s book (2013) is the ethos of the public sector organiza-
tion. He narrates the story of its evolution and the way it has been morally eroded
during the modern era, and how now neoliberalism and austerity have made it not
only largely dysfunctional but also completely missing the role that it had once
aimed to fulfil – service to the public. What the public sector organization lacks so
badly is most of all its soul, the ethos of public organizing. The way to remedy this
does not lead through technical or economic solutions in the first place, but by the
bringing back of meaning and dignity.

My own recent book, Occupy Management (Kostera, 2014), is a proposition

addressed to the graduates of the various management education programmes so
abundant in recent decades: to re-utilize and reclaim the knowledge they have
gained in order to take over the responsibility for their organizations, or create
new ones. It suggests ideas helping to cease to comply with oppressive and harmful
managerial orders, create a new system on the dysfunctional body of the old one,
without a violent or bloody revolution, but through a radical recycling of ideas. I
call for a green revolution, using existing managerial ideas as productive compost
for growing of a more sustainable organizational world.

The book edited by Michael Pirson, Ulrich Steinvorth, Carlos Largacha-Martinez

and Claus Dierksmeier (2014) brings attention to the importance of fair play in the
marketplace and the insufficiency and unsustainability of neoliberal shareholder
capitalism. The contributors and editors believe in a market economy that goes
beyond the superficial and shortsighted workings of the current system, pointing
to the reasons for its failure not in the characteristics of the system as such, but in
how it has lost its ties to what made it vibrant and meaningful in the first place: the
sense of community and cooperation. The authors believe that capitalism can be
transformed, by reconsidering such issues as property rights, money and education.

Now and the future

All of the books and networks described here can be seen as research agendas and
directions for academic activities the future 15–20 years. Part of the reason why
I selected each of them is to show possible and important areas and issues that
can (and need to be) addressed and further explored. However, the programme of
humanistic management for the future is, for me, a much broader concern than just
the continuation of these points. The guiding light is to bring the human dimension
back into our organizations: the way we think, talk and act.

So, perhaps most immediately, it is important to work towards the broadening

and deepening of the area of reflection where economic and humanistic manage-
ment meet and support each other. The Czech economist and economic advisor to

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former President Vaclav Havel, Tomas Sedlacek in his book entitled Economics of
Good and Evil (2011), maintains that the meaning of economics is indeed ethical; it
is a science of good and evil. Contemporary economists and politicians who employ
it tend to completely ignore this, preferring to think of economics as a purely
mathematical discipline. However, even the formal and mathematical models have
strong moral underpinnings, such as the assumed vision of growth, society, social
structure and relation and what is worthy of our trust. Economics is based upon
a number of assumptions of ideal conditions and normative standards. Sedlacek
addresses these, asking what, by who and for whom? These questions, often disre-
garded by mainstream economics, are of crucial importance and should be reflected
upon consciously, to find our own place in the economic story of the world, which
is as old as humanity. There is no need to separate economics from a human per-
spective; quite the contrary, it is only by bringing them together that we can re-gain
what is lost – an understanding of value being, ultimately, about goodness, the good
life, and not limited to finance.

Strategic management scholar and advisor to the former Polish President Bronisław
Komorowski, Krzysztof Obłój (2013) describes management as an act of conscious
responsibility. Within the space managed with responsibility and humility, there
emerges a sphere of comfort where people can develop their dreams and passions,
with a sense of having a grasp of what is happening around them, where the organi-
zation is going, and what activities to undertake. Economy is the knowledge of
strategic limitations and such strategic thinking can offer genuine sustainability, in
the sense of continuation, a story of human organizations, to be continued.

Ultimately, as the physicist and management scholar Krzysztof Leja (2014) wrote
on his blog about academia, let us hope for the slow but confident dismantlement
of the rigid division into humanistic and non-humanistic disciplines, as academia is
about people asking questions and finding answers through the art and craft of our
profession, and this is as true of physics as of management theory.

In terms of concrete possible directions for future research for humanistic manage-
ment such a programme may include, most vitally, possible alternatives to neo-
liberal and corporate management practices and theories, as well as ideas for and
examples of organizing and management that could be adopted after the current
era of interregnum (Bauman, 2012). Nobody knows what the future will be like,
except that it cannot be easily extrapolated from what is today. Nothing can be
reasonably foretold or forecast; however, social science may do well to propose.
This is, in my view, the main task of humanistic management: to offer critique of
the current state of affairs, as well as hope and constructive suggestions. This task
is what most characteristically distinguishes humanistic management from CMS,
Critical Management Studies, which also often are concerned about human welfare
in organizations.

More detailed areas and problems may include such issues as remedies to work
alienation, alternatives to divisive and irresponsible management practices,

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propositions for ecologically conscious management strategies, ideas and inspira-

tions for self-management and self-organization, modes of organizing with con-
flict, feminist management practices, inclusive management practices and LGBT
affirmative organizations.

Barbara Czarniawska - 9781784717018

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