Dignity is a key pillar of Humanistic Management. Dignity is what distinguishes humanistic management from traditional economistic management. There are three relevant aspects of dignity:
- Dignity as a general category encompassing that which has no price
- Human dignity as inherent and universal
- Human dignity as conditional and earned.
Despite its ambiguity, the notion of dignity can improve management research’s theoretical accuracy in the future.
Dignity represents, in humanistic management, a category of everything that has an inherent value and cannot therefore be part of an exchange logic. This includes categories that are intrinsically valuable, like the dignity of character, the dignity of the environment, or the dignity of aesthetics. It, of course, includes human dignity as well, but can extend beyond the dignity of human beings to all things animate or inanimate that do not have a price, but are nevertheless valuable.
Importantly, however, applying this “categorical” dignity to human relationships is the crucial difference between humanistic and economistic perspectives on how best to organize groups of people.
The following are some recent articles and papers.
Michael Pirson 