Business and love appear to have little to do with each other. We hold the opposite to be true if the concept of love in business draws from two corresponding grammars. This paper contributes to the ‘agenda for growth and affirmation of people and the environment’ in business. By focusing on the grammars of love and business we operationalize the concept of love in ways that business executives, managers and employees can understand, adopt, and implement. With references to the theory (...) and practice of management and organizations, we aim to contribute to expanding the theory and practice of responsible organizations and their leaders caring for others. (shrink)

Human dignity is introduced in the humanistic management school to distinguish humanistic from economistic perspectives on organizational business practices. Placing human dignity at the core of management leads to a different outlook on doing business, organizing and leading. Within the humanistic management literature, there are several distinct paths to ground human dignity in humanistic management. One school views human dignity as a form of motivation, another focuses on its value-laden components, and still others view human dignity as a form of (...) human development. We introduce relational anthropology as a fourth possibility, emphasizing relationality in the notion of human dignity, with love at its core as the essence of human experience. However, as the experience of human dignity is universally human, culturally specific and extremely personal, interpretations of experienced dignity could be very different for different people. We continue to discuss a cosmopolitan view on human dignity, in which we reject both naïve universalism and lazy relativism, pointing to the challenge of leading moral plurality. We close by summarizing the different approaches to human dignity in a conciliatory framework and outline why we believe an explicit emphasis on qualitative, phenomenological research is the best way forward, bringing love to the stage as the potentially unifying principle for humanistic management. (shrink)

Humanistic management emphasises the importance of respecting humanity in and through meaningful work within organisations. In this paper we introduce a Levinasian approach to organising. Levinas argues that the Other appeals to us and allows us to take responsibility towards the Other – i.c. an employee, a customer, a supplier, etcetera. In this article our focus is on employees. By taking the Other as a starting point of his reflections, Levinas helps to transform the organisation and management of work and (...) humans in business organisations. Based on the concept of alterity and becoming susceptible to the appeal that comes to us through what Levinas refers to as the ‘face of the Other’, we argue that the philosopher calls for ‘an agapeic turn’ to management and organisation. This turn means that the focus on the well-being of the employee – and the needs, interests, ideas, and expectations as perceived by him or her – should be at the core of organising. As a result, this paper calls for an increased focus on self-determination and self-organisation to allow the Other both voice and control over her or his behaviour, actions and contributions to the outputs and outcomes of one’s organisational unit. Through our focus on a Levinas approach, we concretize and deepen the traditional understanding of agape, making it more relevant to our functioning in a business setting. As a result, agape is introduced as an analytical concept that guides the structuring and the effectuation of human interaction in and through organisations. (shrink)