July 28, 2020
10:00-11:30 a.m. ET
Web conferencing, details will be sent before the event once RSVP is received
Re-Visioning Global Transformation for Humanistic Management & Organizing
The super-wicked problems of our time (Levin et al., 2012) have caught the attention of the organization and management scholarly community (Howard-Grenville et al., 2019). We will consider many of these challenges in this International Humanistic Management Association (IHMA) PreConference Series Panel Discussion, with a focus on creating new visions that transcend zero-sum thinking, surface economistic assumptions that encourage false tradeoffs, and propagate remedies rooted in humanistic management principles.
Please join us to co-construct this high engagement space to seed interdisciplinary dialog and action across social, environmental, political, and economic dimensions. Our Distinguished Panel of three management thought leaders – Anita McGahan, Paul Adler, and Jim Walsh, all past presidents of AOM – call for broader vision on issues such as immigration (McGahan, 2020), alternative economic futures (Adler, 2019), and the frailties and shortcomings of humans (Walsh, 2018; 2019).
The goal of this Panel Discussion — to broaden our individual and collective vision and problem-solving of complex societal challenges — involves exploring and activating management research, education, and practice that transcends self-imposed constraints and limiting mental models. This requires making connections across various disciplines to envision and enact new management approaches and organizing paradigms in our careers, organizations, and society more broadly.
Distinguished Speakers
Anita McGahan’s research analyzes and theorizes industry change, sustainable competitive advantage, and the establishment of new fields. Her scholarship has generated new understanding by integrating a broad array of perspectives around what is important to human beings—and arguably to all of nature’s beings—to promote much-needed systemic, organizational, and policy transformations with urgency. McGahan will discuss immigration and impassioned management scholarship (McGahan, 2020). Businesses in a wide range of industries profit from the immigration of vulnerable people who are crossing international boundaries to escape war, famine, poverty, and persecution. She will explain how the field of management faces a moral, humanitarian, and social imperative to deal comprehensively with the implications of this fact.
Based on ideas from his recent book (The 99 Percent Economy: How Democratic Socialism Can Overcome the Crises of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2019), Paul Adler will argue that we face six crises – economic turmoil, workplace disempowerment, government unresponsiveness, environmental degradation, social disintegration, and international conflict – that cannot be overcome so long as our economy takes a capitalist, private-enterprise form. To overcome these crises, he will explain why we must assert democratic control over production and investment; redirect them to meet the needs of people and planet rather than the need for private profits; and exercise that control, by socializing the ownership of the country’s productive resources. His research offers a transformative model of how to manage the entire economy as an integrated whole, and what such a democratic form of socialism would look like.
Jim Walsh will complement these discussions by considering a plausible root cause of these problems – the fact that we humans can be super-wicked ourselves. We are just as capable of unspeakable acts of cruelty as we are breathless acts of love. As such, he will ask us to consider the dark side of human nature, how it contributes to our problems, and how we might tame it if we are to solve the grand challenges of our time. Indeed, so tamed, we might even forestall our extinction as a species (Ceballos et al., 2017). His remarks build on previous considerations of human shortcomings (Walsh, 2018), calling for each of us to look in the mirror, reflect on our role in these problems, and take personal responsibility for transforming ourselves as a way to transform systems (Walsh, 2019).
The IHMA PreConference Series is an Initiative of the United Nations PRME Working Group on Humanistic Management and supported by the IHMA Centers Consortium.