Reverence Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The paper explores posthuman or more-than-human organizing that opts for more equal distribution of dignity among hybridical actors (resources), and combines it with awareness of the distributed character of any action. /// The way we organize the world has led us to the climate-ecological catastrophe, for no matter which of the proposed beginnings of the Anthropocene we consider – the Great Acceleration, industrial revolution, colonization of Americas, turn to agriculture, etc. – each of them refers to the changes in relations between humans and nonhumans, or in the anthropocentric lenses: to the forementioned way we organize the world. /// This statement, although generalizing, allows one to search for both, the blame and the rescue, in the ways the world is being organized, that is in what one calls organizing, governing, coordinating or – as in this presentation – management. /// Resources are one of the key notions of management, representing what is non-human in managerial reality. A popular definition states that management is a set of activities directed at the organizations resources with an aim to achieve organizations goals. Not only the resources are deprived of their agency here, but also dignity: they are instrumentalized, objectified and exploited. I try to explore some possible ways of overcoming this predicament in the optics of agency and dignity. /// As a point of departure I choose humanistic management sensitivity: the importance of human dignity in organizational reality. Finding it not sufficient for the times of the swirl of the crises of the Anthropocene, I look for possible solutions not limited by Western imagination. Here I draw firstly on actor-network theory agreeing on the relationality of reality, namely treating actors as networks of other actors, that as well are networks and so on, and to comprehend action as a network effect, not a particular, individual merit (or blame). Unfortunately ANT has no points of interest in the actors dignity, emancipation or wellbeing. Due to the need for critical look I could turn to critical management and postcolonial studies, which alas again do not supply all, only a part of the thought repertoire: they are emancipatory but only towards human actors. This is where critical posthumanism (viewed as post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism) comes in, which after all again provides us only with a part of the necessary range of tools, for it is in general essentialist, treating non-human actors as endowed with dignity, but also as (generally) finished beings (eg. animals, plants), privileging what is alive. And here we go back to relational actor-network theory. /// Where does that lead us to? I will try to tailor an answer.