Today’s economic system works quite well—for the already well-off, as the global Covid-19 pandemic aptly demonstrated. It works substantially less well for the vast majority of people in the United States, who were already struggling to earn a decent living prior to the pandemic and whose situation became even more evident in the wake of the novel Coronavirus, Sars-Cov-2. In the United States, for example, workers’ wages were basically flat for about 40 years,1 even before the massive unemployment caused by the pandemic. There is even an emerging group that Guy Standing calls the “precariat,”2 comprised of “millions of people scattered around the world, living and working in insecure jobs and conditions of life.”3 This instability and uncertainty—even before the pandemic—is a consequence of today’s capitalism—manifested as neoliberalism—and unrelenting pressures for globalization of business and economies.
Today’s economic system and associated social supports work even less well for the billions of people globally still living in relatively abject poverty. Despite some progress made on the UN’s aspirational Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN concluded in 2019 that much more need to be done to achieve these aspirations for a world of peace and prosperity for people and planet.4 The current system is working not much at all for producing a sustainable natural environment for humanity or the planet’s other living entities and ecosystems, as many scientific reports forcefully argue,5 particularly since one of the SDGs (#8) calls for continual growth and “economic development,” an ecologically problematic notion, which very much frames the goals in the context of today’s economics.
How the world operates today is based on a story. It is a story that we humans, at least in the so-called developed world of Western thought, have told ourselves for hundreds, even thousands, of years. In that story, humans dominate and control nature. This story tells us that we humans can and should exploit nature’s resources, working self-interestedly to grasp as much of her wealth for ourselves as possible. This (in my view) misguided belief about human dominance of nature fatefully combines with a more recent economic narrative of neoliberalism, which argues for the production of financial wealth above any possible other forms of wealth.
Today’s dominant story, even in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, is still neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as we will explore in detail later, argues for individual but not shared responsibility, and for “free markets” that will magically solve all social and human problems if simply left alone. It argues for endless economic growth without regard for the social or ecological consequences of that growth. Importantly, it also argues for small governments that protect private property and individuals while ignoring social and natural well-being. The global Covid-19 pandemic, if nothing else, has put to rest these myths.
Transforming towards Valuing Life
Economics and business practices need to be reoriented to what an economy should actually deliver: an equitable distribution of wealth, health and wellbeing, while protecting the planet’s resources for future generations and other species. By reorienting goals and expectations for business, politics and society, we can build a wellbeing economy that serves people and planet. A wellbeing economy will put people at the centre of a new economic purpose and close the gulf between the economy and democratic control. It will deliver good lives for people first time around, rather than requiring so much effort to patch things up. It will not harm people and the environment, and so will avoid having to deliver expensive downstream intervention to fix the damage caused by an economic model fixed on growth.6
This statement represents the thinking of a coalition of people from many different institutions around the world called WEAll, the Well-being Economy Alliance.7 These people and many of the groups and networks they represent are working together to build a better world, in part by telling a new story about human beings and how we live and work together with planet earth.
The still emerging story, which is actually an ancient story that draws on Indigenous wisdom and Eastern thought as well as principles that give life to systems, places us humans firmly in nature. It recognizes that we are dependent on and interdependent with nature’s bounty, and aware of her potentialities and the limits imposed by her constraints. It is a story that can be retold in many different ways by diverse people who have vastly dissimilar agendas—and who all want a better world, a more just, equitable, and flourishing world, for their children’s children.
These ideas arise out of a recognition that today’s dominant story, embodied in the tenets of neoclassical economics (otherwise known as neoliberalism) and in the story of man’s [sic] “dominion” over nature, is no longer working. The novel Coronavirus, if nothing else, demonstrated that reality in 2020, as social support, employment, and governmental system, not to mention health systems, strained and in many ways broke under its impact. While today’s dominant story has been incredibly useful in pulling many people out of poverty around the world and in creating the technologically sophisticated and interconnected world familiar in the “developed” parts of the world today, it doesn’t work for vast majority of people. That story is certainly not working for the many other creatures of the world, who are now undergoing what has been termed the sixth great extinction that now threatens one to two million species.8 Possibly most importantly, this system doesn’t work for the natural environment’s capacity to support human civilization as we know it over the longer term.9
We need a new story or set of stories. We also need powerful and resonant new memes to support that story and engender new and different mindsets, practices, policies, and institutions. These new mindsets and practices need to be life-affirming for all living beings, other living beings, and natural ecosystems as well as for humans. They need to honor Indigenous and traditional values of relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, and redistribution to emerge an equitable, just, and flourishing world for all. They need to be based in values of dignity, well-being, and equity for all. They need to be supported by markets that go beyond “free” to become fair and provide decent and meaningful work to all capable people. They need to be supported by business models and accounting systems that take full costs of production of goods and services into consideration.
They need to be articulated by economic models that redefine development and efficiency in ways that support the planet’s ability to generate well-being and dignity or what for short I will call flourishing for all, without further depleting natural resources or impoverishing people and states. In fact, these new stories need to be aimed at regenerating and restoring our world to a better state than it currently is in. They need to be oriented towards goals of well-being and dignity for all, rather than profits for the few. They need to be built on metrics and measurement systems that take these broader, holistic goals into account.
The chapters that follow explore these ideas in much more detail and hopefully illustrate pathways for moving individuals, communities, societies, and businesses in these new directions. Before we get there, however, it is important to understand today’s dominant story, the memes that support it, and a bit about where and why it has gone wrong.
Today’s Cultural Mythologies
If you listen to or read the news, you are undoubtedly familiar with what anthropologists call cultural mythologies,10 the stories and ideas that shape understandings of what the world is and how it works. In some ways, these stories are so embedded in most of our thinking that it is sometimes hard to recognize them as just stories—myths—that we tell ourselves about how the world works. Saying that these dominant narratives are “just stories,” however, is to belie the power that they have to shape beliefs, attitudes, and, ultimately, behaviors and practices.
Today’s cultural mythologies in the “developed,” Western, industrialized parts of the world, first of all, are deeply embedded with thinking that derives from the period called the Enlightenment, also sometimes known as the Age of Reason, during the 18th century. Enlightenment ideas revolving around the primacy of scientific knowledge, empirical evidence, and reason over religious beliefs still pervade thinking today. When such beliefs emerged, they had the impact of decreasing peoples’ willingness to bow to authority and tradition, that is, to religious and political leaders, rules, and other authority figures who had been dominant before scientific beliefs took hold.
The Enlightenment replaced these older ways of interacting with the world with scientific understanding, data, and reason. Deeply embedded in the U.S. Constitution, Enlightenment ideas overthrew (at least in theory) the notion that men should dominate women, that authority figures of all sorts, whether church, aristocratic, or political, necessarily held both wisdom and the rightful power to enforce their dictates over people.11 They also, however, entrenched ideas about rationality, reason, and the scientific method, with its powerful emphasis on empiricism and what has come to be known as positivism (i.e., emphasizing empirical facts), as the way the world works.
In many respects, Enlightenment ideas supported empiricism, rationality, logic, mathematical proofs, and purportedly “objective” ways of knowing to the near-exclusion of subjective insights and experiences, not to mention theology and religion or any form of metaphysics. They, along with the philosopher René Descartes, who is famous for his statement that “I think, therefore I am,” were influential in Western thinking. This thinking separated mind from body rather than viewing humans as integral wholes with both subjective and objective qualities. In this positivist worldview, intuition, inspiration, reflection, and introspection, and even qualitative understandings and research, are not useful ways of learning and knowing. Enlightenment thinking argues that the social order, like the natural order, derives from general laws that can be discovered and are scientifically verifiable.
Values associated with the Enlightenment are deeply embedded into the U.S. Constitution (and also the founding documents of some other nations, including France), including principles of reason, scientific method, and both political and individual liberty. Add to these values, the secularization of learning and separation of church and state, religious tolerance and skepticism. Further, the Enlightenment developed the idea of human, social, and technological progress, a view now deeply embedded in Western thinking, along with a foundation of empiricism or “objective truths”12 rather than faith as a basis of knowledge. Personal experience and subjectivity were downplayed. Even the idea of human rights derives from Enlightenment thinkers.13 What followed was a rather mechanistic conception of the world and how it works, accompanied by a view that humans are fundamentally rational moral beings who operate largely individualistically and in their own self-interest.14
This move towards science also devalued traditional Indigenous wisdom, which tends to be nature- and place-centric as well as highly relational with all beings, rather than human-centric.15 Many Indigenous cultures place important value on relationships, which are nurtured through practices of reciprocity, redistribution, and taking responsibility for the whole community.16 Approaches to the world in Indigenous cultures tend to emphasize holistic perspectives on humans’ place in (not separate from) nature, as interdependent and connected with the whole and all of its other living beings. In that sense, humans or “man” is not separated from nature, and responsibility is taken for the care or stewardship of the whole.17
Economics as we know it today also devalues life itself. Yet principles that give life to human (socioeconomic) systems, including purpose, boundedness, novelty, connectedness, diversity, and wholeness,18 are vital to building a flourishing world. The book will come full circle back to these ideas towards the end for they form the centerpiece of possible new narratives that will influence attitudes, behaviors, and practices in our world.
Today, Enlightenment beliefs are augmented by other powerful and compelling beliefs and concepts that underpin the economic narrative, a narrative that drives the ways that businesses and economies work. This narrative, like that of the Enlightenment, suggests how we humans (should) relate to major institutions like businesses and governments, as well as to each other. Based on a largely quantitative approach to the “science” of economics, this approach makes a number of critical assumptions about human nature and human societies. Known as neoliberalism, the narrative finds its most potent manifestation in the doctrine, even dogma, of neoclassical economics. Neoliberalism is based on a core set of beliefs, evidenced as memes or core cultural artifacts, which include words, ideas, images, phrases, symbols, and artistic expressions that shape beliefs, attitudes, and practices.19
These dominant economic (and business) memes include ideas about free markets, private property, free trade, laissez-faire governments, and continual “progress.” Importantly, humans in this conception are assumed to be free, rational, and predominantly self-interested. In that list, the links to Enlightenment values of rationality, freedom, and liberty, and even individualism are evident. Constructed into a narrative about how the economy should work, tenets of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics can be summarized as follows:
Businesses and economies operate best with free markets, free economies, and free trade on a global scale, that is, with as few rules and restrictions as possible. Growth is a core objective of this system because free and unregulated markets are expected to benefit everyone. Further, free markets take care of most if not all problems. The bottom line is financial wealth, measured in maximized shareholder wealth and profitability for businesses and growth in gross domestic/national product for countries/societies (or, as they are known, “economies”). Private property is a core value. Thus privatization of what might have once been considered public goods is advocated. Further, “laissez-faire” government, that is, deregulation or as little government regulation/intervention in markets as possible, is favored, since such regulation might reduce profits. Competition, among businesses and even nations, is a hallmark of the free enterprise system as thus defined, with a winner-take-all attitude based on individualism and libertarianism, free trade, economic freedom, and social Darwinism, favoring policies that include economic liberalization, privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and spending limitations for governmental agencies.20
Collectively, this narrative and its supporting memes create an “economistic” paradigm about businesses, economies, and even human beings.21 Economistic thinking contrasts with the more humanistic paradigm with which this chapter opened, and which is currently competing with the older economistic one.22
The dominant paradigm of neoliberalism has resulted in globalized markets, a growth-at-all-costs mentality among businesses and economies, and a great deal of wealth for the already wealthy. It has also generated growing inequality, a climate change crisis, a human-caused sixth great extinction of species,23 massive topsoil erosion, inhumane agricultural practices, significantly divisive politics, the opportunity for uncontrolled pandemics like Covid-19, and numerous other social and ecological ills. While this system has allowed many people to emerge from abject poverty, at the same time it has left many others behind and generating potentially socially destabilizing gaps between rich and poor. All the while it creates a potentially existential set of ecological and social threats for humanity.
I will explore these ideas in more detail later. Here, let it suffice to say that several important factors contribute to problematic states for many people: the availability of meaningful and decent work, a climate and natural environment that supports the human project while not destroying the natural environment, and sufficient equity in the system to support a sense of fairness and open possibilities for all. Below, we briefly examine the issues associated with each of these important aspects of well-being, dignity, and an economy in service to life.
So What Has Gone Wrong?
The world is not in good shape ecologically, which will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter, or socioeconomically, as outlined below. Political divisiveness, populism, and partisanship, climate change, growing inequality, pandemic potential, various impending sustainability crises, and terrorism and many other ills send clear signals that something needs to change and change radically. Importantly, today’s system, particularly our economic system, is rooted in an increasingly outdated understanding of the purposes and functioning of businesses.
The purpose of business under neoliberal thinking is frequently and deliberately articulated as maximizing wealth for one group of stakeholders—shareholders. As some legal scholars argue, however, that sense of purpose rests on a misunderstanding of the law.24 That misunderstanding, however, is important because businesses are certainly among if not actually today’s most dominant and powerful institutions. Many companies have global reach and impact on both individuals as customers, employees, and investors, and on whole nations. All of these factors (and others) lead to problems in generating flourishing for all and an economy that serves life not wealth. Below are just a few of the imbalances and significant issues that today’s economic and business systems have generated.
Inequality: Wealth for the (Very) Wealthy
On the one hand, the wealthy are doing very well. In a 2017 report titled “An Economy for the 99%,” Oxfam found that just eight men control as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 billion people in the world, and the richest 1 percent owned more wealth than 99 percent of the rest of humanity.25 That report was updated in 2020 to indicate that 2,153 billionaires control more wealth than 60 percent of the world’s population, with the number of billionaires having doubled since 2010.26
The 2019 Oxfam report on inequality noted that men own 50 percent more of global wealth than women. Further, men control more than 86 percent of corporations, while unpaid care work is estimated at around $10 trillion (yes, that is a “t”). Oxfam estimated that the world’s billionaires’ wealth was increasing on an average of $2.5 billion a day by 2019.27 The trends around equality clearly are not getting better.
One Oxfam report reached a stark conclusion: “Left unchecked, growing inequality threatens to pull our societies apart … It leaves more people living in fear and fewer in hope.”28 This position has already been acknowledged by business leaders in the World Economic Forum. In discussing global risks around inequality, these leaders suggest that there is a real potential for a dystopian global future,29 a future that became manifest during the Covid-19 crisis in many ways and point to the stark realities and failings of today’s human systems. Such economic stratification, that is, the well-off commanding ever-more of the resources and wealth to the exclusion of the masses, that is, growing inequality may be a recipe for civil unrest.30
The Future of Jobs
Add to inequality a growing global jobs crisis and the inequality crisis does not seem to have a good trajectory. For one thing, technological advances, artificial intelligence, and digitalization are in many ways reducing the need for human workers in all types of jobs, although there is contention about how many jobs will be lost to automation. One alarming and frequently cited study of the susceptibility of U.S. jobs to computerization by Frey and Osborne found that as much as 47 percent of U.S. employment may be at risk in the future as a result of computerization and a result of automation.31 The authors point out that while in the past technological progress resulted in deskilling of some jobs and was oriented towards routine and repetitive tasks, the advent of “big data” means that many nonroutine, more highly skilled jobs requiring significant cognitive ability are now amenable to computerization.
Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing at this writing, is likely to change the future of jobs considerably. As economies shut down to deal with the disease, workers who were formerly considered low level or unskilled have gained credence and visibility, including grocery store workers, technicians of all sorts who keep infrastructure running, health care workers, farm workers, delivery and online services, and teachers, to name just a few. Many people who were not out of work altogether began to learn how to work from home. Teaching was being done (when it was being done at all) through distance learning methods, suddenly imposed on instructors with little warning or preparation who then evidenced tremendous creativity in their responses. Or it was being attempted by parents struggling to combine at home work (or unemployment) with getting their children to learn online—no easy task for many. Travel, particularly business travel, largely ceased for the duration of the pandemic, and many people learned how to communicate through online conferencing platforms instead of in person. It is possible that some jobs will now be valued in new ways after the crisis—changing the shape of the future of jobs—as more people recognize how dependent the rest of us are on the work of people in those jobs.
It is not just unskilled or less-skilled jobs at risk—or possibly becoming more valued. Some of the routine aspects of more service-oriented and high-skill work will be done, sometimes better, by computers using various combinations of algorithms, big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced speech recognition software. Among those people whose work is at risk are doctors, lawyers, financial advisors, educators, farmers, drivers of all sorts of vehicles, accountants, and other jobs that used to require human interaction and brainpower to be done effectively. Robotic devices have already displaced many lesser-skilled workers. Expected price declines for such technology will only result in even greater adoption and worker displacement, even in low-wage contexts like China.32
Having sufficient jobs for everyone who wants to work and earn an equitable and decent living in the future looks problematic, particularly since it is likely that many businesses shuttered during the pandemic will never reopen. On the other hand, some estimates suggest that millions of new jobs will emerge as a result of artificial intelligence and automation, more than compensating for job losses. Should this more optimistic prediction come true, one serious implication is that more than 50 percent of the workforce will require significantly new skills and training to be able to perform those jobs.33 The loss of decent and well-paying work for people without advanced technological skills is also important because, for many people, work provides a significant source of meaning and purpose in their lives, something essential to well-being.
Technological and Other Disruptions
As computers’ abilities to cope successfully with tasks demanding creativity and social intelligence increase, Frey and Osborne say that “generalist occupations requiring knowledge of human heuristics, and specialist occupations involving the development of novel ideas and artifacts, are the least susceptible to computerization.”34 That is, highly skilled jobs that require understanding of people (emotional intelligence) and creativity are at the lowest risk of automation. Managerial, financial, educational, health care, engineering, science, media, and artistic work are probably least likely to succumb to automation.
Along similar lines, the McKinsey Global Institute identified 12 potentially disruptive technologies that will likely affect the nature and availability of work in the future. These technologies include mobile Internet, automation of knowledge work, the Internet of Things, cloud technology, advanced robotics, autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles, next-generation genomics, energy storage, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery, and renewable energy. They will affect the availability of what the International Labor Organization calls decent work over the coming decades.35 McKinsey finds that as many as 140 million jobs, mostly knowledge work, could be substituted by algorithms by 2025, although new types of highly sophisticated jobs will likely also be gained in that process. Artificial intelligence (AI), for example, is expected to replace as many as 40 percent of existing jobs by the early 2030s.36 While AI is also expected to add many jobs, it will likely replace lost jobs with ones requiring much higher skill levels—skills that not many people have, according to Fortune.37
Offshoring and Outsourcing
Other major factors affecting job availability include offshoring and outsourcing, which are different manifestations of similar phenomena. Outsourcing can mean purchasing goods and services from outside venders or contracting work out, frequently abroad from the focal nation, to areas where wages tend to be much lower and labor supply greater. Offshoring, which means to base some of a company’s manufacturing or service delivery outside of the focal nation where costs are lower, has much the same effect of reducing jobs in the focal nation. The terms are used here interchangeably.
One report suggests that job outsourcing in the United States increases unemployment. Prior to the pandemic, the data suggested that 14.3 million jobs were outsourced, while 5.9 million Americans were unemployed.38 Among the most popular reasons for outsourcing are cost control, the ability to gain access to resources that are unavailable to companies internally, and the desire to free up internal resources.39
Hidden Unemployment
The situation is even more complicated than losses from automation and outsourcing/offshoring suggest. The International Labor Organization estimates a total global workforce of about 3.45 billion, about a third of whom or 1.27 billion are women. That figure suggests that there are about 200 million people unemployed and actively seeking work. 40 Another two billion adults in the world, however, were classified as “outside” the labor force—not employed or looking for employment before the pandemic erased many jobs, which only made the situation worse. As the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) argues in a report on jobs and automation, many of these two billion people might, in fact, work if work were available and the majority (about 1.38 billion) are women.41 Even if losses are less than some hypothesize, however, the ODI report concludes that “What is not in question is that the impact will involve a long-term adjustment, with significant costs for workers in both industrialized and developing countries.”42
Moving Forward
This chapter has only been able to outline a few of the major forces and trends that affect today’s business systems and employees, and, by extension, societies. Numerous other issues could be cited: the dehumanization of many companies’ production systems, supply chain issues around how people and the natural environment are treated, for a couple. There is also a clear lack of democracy in most workplaces, with little potential for “voice” in many businesses. There are issues associated with human trafficking, excessive marketing of unnecessary, useless, and even harmful products, not to mention inhumane animal husbandry practices, industrial agriculture that fosters topsoil erosion, overuse of pesticides and human-made fertilizers, among a host of issues. Such problematic practices point to the need for transformation of the socioeconomic and business system—and they do not even account for issues around sustainability, climate change, and exploitation of nature’s bounty.
The next chapter explores the socioecological (as opposed to economic) context in which today’s businesses and our societies operate. It highlights the systemic risks we as a species are facing—many of which are self-induced. It then attempts to provide a basis for understanding what it will take to stop humanity from driving itself off of that societal and ecological cliff.
The road ahead will not be easy to negotiate, which is why we need to think about transforming the system. There are powerful forces at play that want to keep today’s momentum and trajectory on the same path as it has been, without recognizing the need for change. At the same time, it is important to note that there are increasing numbers of people who already recognize the problems and are willing to work towards transformation and well-being for all, where “all” includes both all humans and the rest of Nature’s beings. The rest of the book begins to articulate what that transformation to well-being might look like and how each of us might play our part in moving change or what my late friend Malcolm McIntosh called the “necessary transition”43 forward.
1 DeSilver, D. 2018. “For most US Workers, Real Wages have Barely Budged in Decades.” Pew Research Center FactTank, August 7, 2018, https://pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ (accessed April 13, 2020).
2 Guy Standing. 2012. “The Precariat: From Denizens to Citizens?” Polity 44, no. 4, pp. 588–608.
3 Guy Standing. 2012. “The Precariat: From Denizens to Citizens?” Polity 44, no. 4, pp. 588–608, p. 589.
4 United Nations. 2019. “The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2019.” https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2019.pdf, (accessed April 13, 2020).
5 Among many others: Diaz, S., J. Settele, and E. Brondizio. 2019. “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES.” https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/2020-02/ipbes_global_assessment_report_summary_for_policymakers_en.pdf (accessed May 3, 2020); Ripple, W.J., C. Wolf, T.M. Newsom, P. Barnard, W.R. Moomaw and 11258 others. 2019. “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” Bioscience, https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806?searchresult=1; IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 2018. Global Warming of 1.5 C: All Chapters. 2018. http://ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ (accessed April 20, 2020).
6 Wellbeing-Economy Alliance (WEAll) Brochure. 2019. https://wellbeingeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/WEAll-brochure_INEdits_Final2.0.pdf (accessed April 13, 2020) p. 9.
7 For more details, see https://wellbeingeconomy.org/
8 Diaz, S., J. Settele, and E. Brondizio. 2019. “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and EcosystemServices, IPBES.” https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/2020-02/ipbes_global_assessment_report_summary_for_policymakers_en.pdf (accessed April 13, 2020).
9 Ripple, W.J., C. Wolf, T.M. Newsom, P. Barnard, W.R. Moomaw, and 11258 others. 2019. “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” Bioscience, https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806?searchresult=1 (accessed April 13, 2020).
10 Dow, J. 1986. “Universal Aspects of Symbolic Healing: A Theoretical Synthesis.” American Anthropologist 88, no. 1, pp. 56–69.
11 Szalay, J. 2016. “What Was the Enlightenment?” LiveScience, July 7, 2016, http://livescience.com/55327-the-enlightenment.htmlf (accessed May 26, 2020); also Brooks, D. 2017. “The Enlightenment Project.” New York Times (accessed February 28, 2017) https://nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-enlightenment-project.html (accessed May 26, 2020); and Soll, J. 2015. “The Culture of Criticism: What Do We Owe the Enlightenment?” New Republic, May 20, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/121837/what-do-we-owe-enlightenment (accessed May 26, 2020).
12 Zakai,A. 2006. “The Age of Enlightenment.” The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, 80–99. Cambridge UK: Cambridge.
13 Szalay 2016; Brooks 2017; Soll 2015.
14 Zakai 2006.
15 I use these ideas humbly and with recognition that I am a white woman of privilege working in a colonialized environment.
16 Harris, L., and J. Wasilewski. 2004. “Indigeneity, An Alternative Worldview: Four R’s (Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, Redistribution) vs. Two P’s (Power and Profit). Sharing the Journey Towards Conscious Evolution.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science: The Official Journal of the International Federation for Systems Research 21, no. 5, pp. 489–503.
17 Edwina Pio and I have discussed these ideas in a paper, Invoking Indigenous Wisdom for Management Learning, in press 2020.
18 Kuenkel, P., and S. Waddock. 2019. “Stewarding Aliveness in a Troubled Earth System.” Cadmus 4, no. 1, pp. 14–38; also, Waddock, S., and P. Kuenkel. 2019. “What Gives Life to Large System Change?” Organization and the Natural Environment, DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1086026619842482
19 Susan Blackmore has best articulated the functioning and power of memes. Blackmore, S. 2000. The Meme Machine, Vol. 25. Oxford Paperbacks; Blackmore, S., L.A. Dugatkin, R.B. Peter, J. Richerson, and H. Plotkin. 1997. “The Power of Memes.” Scientific American 283, no. 4, pp. 64–73; and Susan, B. 1997. “The Power of the Meme.” Skeptic 5, no. 2, pp. 43–49.
20 Waddock, S. 2016. “Foundational Memes for a New Narrative About the Role of business in society.” Humanistic Management Journal 1, no. 1, pp. 91–105.
21 Pirson, M. 2017. Humanistic Management: Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-Being. Cambridge University Press.
22 Laszlo, C., S. Waddock, and R. Sroufe. 2017. “Torn Between Two Paradigms: A Struggle for the Soul of Business Schools.” AI Practitioner 19, no. 2, and Michael. P. 2017. Humanistic Management: Protecting Dignity and Promoting Well-Being. Cambridge University Press.
23 Diaz, J.S., and E. Brondizio. 2019. “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” IPBES. URL: https://ipbes.net/sites/default/files/2020-02/ipbes_global_assessment_report_summary_for_policymakers_en.pdf (accessed May 3, 2020).
24 Stout, L.A. 2012. The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
25 Oxfam Briefing Paper. January 16, 2017. “An Economy for the 99%.” https://oxfam.app.box.com/v/an-economy-for-99-percent/1/15862322999/122574711571/1 (accessed January 20, 2020).
26 Lawson, M., A. Parvez Butt, R. Harvey, D. Sarosi, C. Coffey, K. Plaget, and J. Thekkudan. 2020. “Time to Care. Oxfam Policy Papers.” https://oxfam.org/en/research/time-care (accessed April 14, 2020).
27 Oxfam. 2019. “5 Shocking Facts About Extreme Global Inequality and How to Even It Up.” https://oxfam.org/en/even-it/5-shocking-facts-about-extreme-global-inequality-and-how-even-it-davos, (accessed April 6, 2019).
28 Oxfam Briefing Paper, An Economy for the 99%, p. 2.
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