Beyond sackcloth and ashes: Socio-management as an analytical framework

Concern with ‘socially responsible management’ has been growing in universities, reflected in a burgeoning literature and the interest of bodies like the United Nations. Until now these developments have remained largely marginalized but circumstances are apparently changing. Economic crisis has recently been followed by damning indictments, coinciding with renewed and stinging criticism from within the universities themselves. For example: Schumpeter (2009) views 2009 “as a year of sackcloth and ashes for the world's business schools” Currie et al. (2010) accuse the schools of actively promulgating the “recipe for disaster” that they see as the “neoliberal economic consensus that swept both developed and developing economies in the late 1990s and early 2000s” Ferlie et al. (2010) call for a focus on “broader social interests and concerns.” The time seems right for a radical shift. Certainly, there is ample evidence that a shift would impact on people’s wellbeing. This is the context in which we suggest a thorough revision of conceptualisation and understanding, research and teaching regarding socio-economic activities and the way they are managed. Across management studies and its related fields, attempts to analyse economic activity in relation to its wider socio-economic impact exist, but are disjointed. Established traditions of critical analysis are constituent, for instance, to social marketing, labour process and socio-economic analysis. Recently, critical work on corporate social responsibility and principles of sustainability has started to dominate mainstream debates. However, what is needed is a new framework based upon fresh perspectives and conceptualisations so as to provide common space for critical analysis of the way in which socio-economic activity is managed. This paper aims to introduce socio-management as such a framework. Our starting-point is to recognise interdependencies between individuals, businesses, organisations, communities, societies and territories; and to enable the articulation and scrutiny of these interdependencies. We do so by introducing a general model of those individual and collective actors and their interactions and interdependencies that need to be taken into account to analyse economic activity in its complex socio-economic embeddedness. We also focus on selected actors and interdependencies in more depth, drawing on contributions from different, established disciplines. We consider, for example: • Producers and consumers Social marketing analysis reveals dangerous consumption behaviours – both of individually harmful products and of all products to excess – that are driven by business practices that fail to address the full human costs. The tobacco industry is the most obvious example but alcohol, pharmaceutical, fast food and most recently oil are also implicated (Gapper, 2010); as indeed is marketing in general, with its push to encourage ever more consumption in a finite and overheating world. • Organisations and working lives Mainstream HRM is dominated by issues of implementation and performance measurement (Harley and Hardy, 2004; Strauss, 2001), and a re-casting of corporate strategies as people- friendly investment policies that mutually benefit employees and employers (inter alia, Storey, 1987; Guest, 1987, 1999). That perspective leaves little room for work’s wider social context. Shifting the focus to working lives reveals that members of organisations are also members of families and wider social groupings, implying responsibilities that employees bring into the workplace and that are thus intricately entwined with HRM. • Professions and paradigms of management practice In HRM, professional rhetoric typically centres on “business partnering” and how the function can “add value” to “business customers” rather than employees (CIPD, 2006). However, while HRM has lost ‘social legitimacy’ as steward of the social contract between management and employees (Kochan, 2007), it is struggling to become a full strategic business partner (ibid; Guest and King, 2004; CIPD, 2003). Uncovering the different paradigms driving the selfunderstanding of the HRM profession provides rich insights into the translation of (critical and uncritical) theory into the practices of managing socio-economic activities. • Decision-making and the interest of publics Each and every type of socio-economic process, system and organisation is characterised by a particular type of governance, and different types of governance are associated with different welfare effects (inter alia, Cowling and Sugden, 1998; Sugden and Wilson, 2005). Drawing on Dewey (1927), this governance perspective suggests a public interests criterion for analysing the impacts of different ways of managing socio-economic activity (Sacchetti and Sugden, 2009; 2010).