NEVER ASKING, NEVER KNOWING

Workers must no longer be considered as cost factors to be “compressed” or “rationalized” but as allies to be won. — …managers must forfeit their long-cherished and, at times abusive, privileges to move toward a new form of organization centered on the human being as well as on a flexible and creative approach. — This is the practical and ideological price to be paid if we are to halt and reverse the process of industrial decline that has plagued large North American corporations over the last decade.

Omar Aktouf
Management and Theories of Organizations in the 1990s: Toward a Critical Radical Humanism?
Academy of Management Review; 17:3.1993

comment-One place to start is to review managerial capability in terms of (what are) managerial folk psychological assumptions. However, the conventional starting points almost always are anchored to normative ways of assessing managers. A pernicious quality of those norms is that they contribute to the very problem of dehumanization. It basically never happens that a manager is asked, for example, “What do you think a human being is?”

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