Developing Humanistic Management Policies

Humanistic management represents a paradigm shift and therefore does not only impact the way academics do research, practitioners practice business, and educators teach, but also how civil society and the political system create overall support structures. What some call the creation of supportive ecosystems is labelled “policy” in this chapter. Policy includes public policy set by traditional government entities, but also rules and guidelines, and the relevant associations that civic-minded actors create. These various initiatives create a larger support system for economic actors, of which a selected number is presented below.As outlined in Chapter 1, the capitalist system that prevails in many parts of the world faces many challenges, from climate change to environmental destruction, to poverty and social inequality, to terrorism and renewed political radicalism. Even in those countries most supportive of free trade and free markets, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, dissatisfaction with “business as usual” has reached new heights. For example, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, as well as their populist messages to reign in free trade, undermine the idea of “markets above all,” a message that has been carried around the world successfully since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Often labelled the “Washington Consensus,” scholars such as Joseph Stiglitz suggest that there is a globally coordinated effort to support Pure Economism in public policy. Originally representing ten principles to focus the concerted efforts of the World Bank, the IMF, and the US Treasury Department on supporting economic development in Latin America, the term has since become synonymous with neoliberal policies that are indifferent to dignity and well-being. While development economists and public policy experts debate the reality of such far-reaching “consensus,” an increasing number of citizens around the globe are protesting against the dominant ideology of economism. Even actors who benefitted from the system now distance themselves.Bruce Watson of the Guardian observed in 2014: 2013 may well go down as the year in which serious structural problems in the global capitalism game became impossible for even its winners to ignore. It was, after all, the year a factory collapse – blamed on inattention to maintenance standards resulting from the furious pace of manufacturing necessitated by low prices for fast fashion – led [the] Gap and others to work to improve workplace safety in Bangladesh. It was the year the Koch brothers, the billionaire bankrollers of the Tea Party caucus, publicly distanced themselves from the budget-shrinking policies of their creation. And it was the year in which Walmart, the undisputed master of global retailing, admitted that it is facing lower revenues due to income pressures: In other words, the working poor – Walmart's target demographic, which also includes many of its own employees – are being forced to watch their pennies and, consequently, are spending fewer of them at Walmart. If capitalism, as it's currently practiced, is starting to run into fundamental structural problems, the next question is what can replace it.In the following pages, a number of policies are showcased that support more humanistic practices. Once again, we will employ the model developed in previous chapters (see Figure 10.1). In the first section, we look at policies that support dignity in management practices (Pathway 1) and, in the second part, we consider policies that pursue well-being creation rather than just wealth creation (Pathway 2).