Critique of Managerial Reason
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Critique of Managerial Reason Luigino Bruni 1 Received: 28 February 2020 / Accepted: 10 November 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
The culture conveyed by global firms becomes the perfect tool to embody and strengthen the spirit of our time. Nothing is capable of enhancing and strengthening the values of the individual and his passions as the capitalist company. This is why the words and virtues of ‘business’ are becoming the words and virtues of our social life including politics, health care, education, and so on. Merit, efficiency, competition, leadership, incentives and innovation are now the only ‘good’ words of communal life. In the absence of other safe places capable of producing a different culture and values, the virtues of companies present themselves as the only ones to be recognized and cultivated. This essay discusses virtues that, although not considered important by the current business culture, nevertheless are becoming more and more crucial for the survival and growth of organizations. In particular, work-related suffering shows that there are virtues that are not ‘buyable’. This advances a point about the necessity of welcoming vulnerability in work communities to prevent the systematic destruction of its values, creating a global culture of immunity. Conversely, such destruction will eventually lead to the dismantling of most of the world organizations. Keywords Managerial ideology . Meritocracy . Incentives
Introduction The multinational company culture is gaining more and more ethical space in our time. Categories, language, values, and virtues of large corporations are generating a universal grammar suited to describe and define ‘winning’ individuals and collective stories. In the XXth century, the paradigm of good institutions was, in Europe in particular, politics (i.e. democracy and participation); in the XXIst century, business and its values replaced political values.
* Luigino Bruni [email protected]
1
LUMSA, Rome, Italy
Humanistic Management Journal
In just a few decades, the capitalistic companies that - in Marxist theory - used to be considered as the primary place of exploitation and alienation, have become the icon of excellence and human flourishing. When the collective passions surviving the twentieth century are fear and insecurity, and individualism still reigns sovereign, the culture conveyed by global firms becomes the perfect tool to embody and strengthen the spirit of its time. Nothing is capable of enhancing and strengthening the values of the individual and his passions as the capitalist company. This is why the words and virtues of ‘business’ are becoming the words and virtues of its society: politics, health care, education, and so on. Merit, efficiency, competition, leadership and innovation are now the only ‘good’ words of communal life. In the absence of other safe places capable of producing different cultural outputs and values, the virtues of the companies present themselves as the only ones worth recognizing and cultivating. Companies o
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