Integrating Thinking Globally and Acting Locally to Design a Sustainable Human-Centered Organization

Abstract

Two decades ago it was said that there was “consternation and anxiety as classic ‘good management/ wealth, productivity, and economic efficiency lose ground to the degradation of the quality of life and nature” (Aktouf 1992). The obsessive commitment to financial-mindedness and short-term profits in Western management practice, research and education has by now resulted in myopic negligence, if not outright reckless disregard, of such degradation. Not a day goes by now without the publication of managerial guidebooks, critical reviews, books, articles and pamphlets that are testaments to how we are living in a period when human activity and progress are being seriously questioned (e.g., Boyer, Cook & Steinberg 2011). Despite the mass of the above kinds of writings that claim to “revolutionize” management research and education, management education has developed a persistent comfort zone that counter productively pushes, to the margins of its curricula, new ideas and writings that challenge the dominant concept of what is “good management”, however.