Responsible Management-as-Practice: Mobilizing a Posthumanist Approach

Abstract

The emerging field of responsible management (RM) studies the integration of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics in managerial practices. Therefore, turning to practice theories for the study of RM appears to hold great promise of conceptual and methodological contribution. We propose a posthumanist practice approach for studying RM-as-practice. Managerial practices are conceived as the agencement of heterogeneous elements (humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans, materials, and discourses) that achieve agency in their being interconnected. Thus, RM is understood as processual, relational, emergent, and sociomaterial. We contribute a framework for the empirical study of RM-as-practice on the basis of three sensitizing concepts: situatedness, sociomateriality, and textures. We further discuss the implications of understanding responsibility as response-ability, an engaged practice for relating to the other and the RM researcher’s role as internal to the practice agencement under study, thus, opening the debate on our own response-ability.

Responsible managing as educational practice

“…However, it is possible and necessary to enlarge this traditional view beyond formal settings and consider other spaces and practices outside of business schools that may offer educational managing experiences. A comprehensive education concept as an experiential continuum (Dewey, 1963) for understanding managing itself as an educational practice enabling people inside and outside organizations to enact responsible social practices (Price et al, 2020; Gherardi & Laasch, 2021).…”

“…Responsible managing requires more than stating what needs to be done, and it is a matter of practice that represents collective knowledgeable doings (Gherardi, 2019), in which people (inside and outside organizations) learn collaboratively (Raelin, 2016) through educative experiences (Dewey, 1963). As such, I assume that management and education are both social practices (Schatzki, 2001; Reckwitz, 2002) that overlap through collective accomplishments that create connections-in-action of bodies, materialities, discourses and knowledges (Gherardi, 2019) and can promote responsible managing (Gherardi & Laasch, 2021).…”

“…I am steering away from the traditional perspectives of management as individual-driven, rational (Cabantous & Gond, 2011), neutral and unproblematic (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992) to another of managing as a collaborative (Raelin, 2016) and educational agency (Thomas & Anthony, 1996). The second contends that managing should involve more than efficiency (Cummings, Bridgman, Hassard, & Rowlinson, 2017) and profit maximization (Barnett, 2019; Rhodes & Fleming, 2020) if it intends to be a responsible practice (Price, Gherardi, & Manidis, 2020; Gherardi & Laasch, 2021).…”

A posthumanist research agenda on sustainable and responsible management education after the pandemic

“…But not only. Recently, authors (Laasch and Gherardi, 2019;Gherardi and Laasch, 2021) have called upon the need to overcome the "great divide" between the academic practices on responsibility (in teaching and research) and managerial practitioners' responsible practices. They rather claim for a cross fertilization of learning processes.…”

The Interdisciplinary Responsible Management Competence Framework: An Integrative Review of Ethics, Responsibility, and Sustainability Competences

“…Accordingly, enacting practices of responsible management (RM) (Gherardi & Laasch, 2021) requires competences from the ethics, responsibility, and sustainability (ERS) disciplines (Forray & Leigh, 2012;Laasch et al, 2020a;Rasche & Gilbert, 2015). RM requires all three: competences to engage in ethical decision-making and behaviour (ethics discipline), to realise stakeholder responsibilities (responsibility discipline), and to balance social, environmental, and economic impacts over time (sustainability discipline).…”