Calling for Humanistic Scholarship in China

Abstract

Scholarship refers to the formal and serious study of subjects such as medicine, physics, biology, history, philosophy, and business.Good scholarship demands that researchers apply rigorous scientific methods to find valid knowledge that can improve life, both human and nonhuman.Hence, scholarship and science share the common ideal of contributing to the development of a better society and a better world.Albert Einstein said, 'Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief objective of science' (Einstein qtd. in Isaacson, 2008: 374).Similarly, Oscar Handlin, one of the greatest contemporary historians, argued 'Scholarship has to prove its worth not on its own terms, but by its service to the nation and to the world' (Handlin qtd. in Boyer, 1996: 17).Clearly, scholarship, science, and the idea of 'humanism' are connected.In this editorial, we discuss the importance of humanistic scholarship -scholarship for the purpose of improving human welfare by focusing on the social outcomes of organizations -for business research and particularly for Chinese management research.We begin by analyzing the current status of humanistic studies in general management research and then provide data on humanism-oriented research in Chinese management over the past thirty years.Results show a dramatic dominance of economic focus relative to human welfare focus, especially in the studies published in the Chinese journals.We conclude with a call for more research on humanism-related topics to counterbalance the dominant economic focus.Management and Organization Review (MOR) welcomes such papers. HUMANISM IN MANAGEMENT RESEARCHThe term humanism has a deep philosophical, religious, and ethical foundation in the literature.This editorial is not the place to debate the proper definition of this term.We use it here simply to refer to respect for the dignity of humans and justice ©2013

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 — 28 citations exist upstream.

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