Managing for Social Justice: Harnessing Management Theory and Practice for Collective Good

The book introduces a preliminary, integrative conceptual framework on the intersections between management and social justice with a view that the quest for social justice is not an endpoint rather an ongoing journey. With contributions from management scholars and practitioners, it highlights, examines, and explores the continuities and discontinuities, gains and losses, and struggles and successes in this quest for reimagining organizations as sites and vehicles for advancing social justice in the world.
To nurture and facilitate flourishing individuals and collectives, we need bolder, more innovative, and more creative models of engagement. Further, we need models for speaking and learning from different perspectives and building common ground through shared values of equity, connectivity, and compassion and moral expansiveness while recognizing the complexities of the world we inhabit via our organizations and the need to develop nuanced understandings of the same.
Contributing authors address questions such as: Are social justice and management mutually exclusive concepts? How can we draw on effective management for advancing social justice aims? How do we bend the arc of organizational life towards more justice? What are the rights and obligations of organizations and their members to the world at large, and to their local communities and societies?
Through its re-imagining of organizations and management as vehicles for social justice instead of just as tools of oppression, injustice, or regressive organizing in an extractive economy, this book brings together critical and positive organizational approaches challenging fundamental assumptions about how our society, people’s collectives, and workplaces are organized with capacity building, incremental change, sustained change, institutionalized change, dynamic ongoing problem-solving/ assessment/ redesign, and more.
Management scholars will learn the nuanced and complex intersections between management theories and practice and different types of justice/injustice in a global context both as antecedents to modern organizations and workplaces and the ways in which these intersectional actors advance and change the organizations and workplaces of the future.

Latha Poonamallee is Associate Professor, Chair of Management Faculty, and University Fellow at the New School, USA.
Anita D. Howard is an adjunct professor in the Department of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, USA and a mentor executive coach at the Weatherhead School of Executive Management Education, USA.

Simy Joy is Faculty Fellow at the Center of Excellence for Social Innovation (CESI) at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, India.