Novo Nordisk is one of the few highly reputed pharma businesses and there is a reason for it. Rather than stick to its economistic origins that so many of its competitors live and organize by, Novo Nordisk allowed itself to experiment and react to stakeholder criticism. Rather than reactively...

Prior research on organizational trust has not rigorously examined the context specificity of trust, nor distinguished between the potentially varying dimensions along which different stakeholder groups (e.g., employees, customers, investors, etc.) base their trust. As a result, dominant...

Management theory and practice are facing unprecedented challenges. The lack of sustainability, the increasing inequity and the continuous decline in societal trust pose a threat to ‘business as usual’ (Jackson and Nelson, 2004). Capitalism is at a crossroad and scholars, practitioners and...

From the early decades of the twentieth century, a dominant characteristic of the modern “capitalist” corporation, especially in the United States, was the separation of asset ownership in the form of publicly traded shares from allocative control over the corporation's resources by salaried...

The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as...

This article explores how both corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be improved by using insights from complexity theory. Complexity theory reveals that decentralized governance architecture is required for firms to absorb competently the increased intricacies,...

Public trust in business, or the degree to which external stakeholders such as the public trust business in general is largely understudied. As the relevance of public trust in business becomes ever more obvious to practitioners and scholars, the levels of trust in business have reached...

Utilitarianism arguably provides the philosophical justification for suboptimal management theory. We provide a historical perspective on the development of management theory from its utilitarian basis, and highlight the missing conceptual link between management theory and human dignity. We...

We live in a world of multiple crises and business is most often seen as part of the problem. In this paper, which concludes the book "Humanistic Management in Practice", we outline an alternative for business, as part of the solution. We present an analysis of the 19 cases in the book, which...

This book aims to unearth accounts of businesses that excel at doing well and doing good. They make products and services that address genuine human needs and they do so in ways that equally respect all stakeholder concerns. This book also follows the Humanistic Management Network’s previous...