A Feminist Critique of Organizational Humanism

Abstract

This article argues that most recent organizational "innovations" or management prescriptions for the future are simply extensions of the human relations or humanist theories of the 1950s and 1960s. Two limitations of these models are suggested: organizational humanism sees diversity as something to be managed rather than valued, and humanist prescriptions often end up being manipulative or disguised forms of control because underlying assumptions of hierarchical control remain in place. Feminist thought is proposed as a way to move beyond these limitations, to stretch our thinking about what organizations of the future might look like, and to offer new ways of approaching the challenges of managing over the next decades.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.