Care is a central aspect of human existence. What we care about and who we care for largely determine our way of being. The subjects of care present a frame of reference for our human functioning.
The survival of the fittest and other Darwinian notions have become slogans for the business world which favors competitive, instrumental, and capitalist values . However, in his Descent of Man, Darwin (1871: 403–404) wrote the following:
Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of our nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced either directly or indirectly much more through the efforts of habit, by our reasoning powers, by instruction, by religion , etc., than through natural selection.
David Loye (2009) found that In The Descent of Man, Darwin writes 95 times about love….
Of moral sensitivity I found he wrote 92 times….Of competition, he wrote 12 times; of cooperation—called mutual aid in Darwin’s time—27 times….For Darwin the prime driver for human evolution—and completion for his theory of evolution….is our capacity for the “moral sense,” i.e. moral sensitivity, an evolutionary inbuilt thrust within us for the development of a sense of right versus wrong.
Care and ethics then are considered by Darwin as higher level imperatives, and more important than fighting and competition.
Care is essential to our life, and caring is an essential part of who we are.
We need care for our survival. Attachment theory (Bowlby 1982) proposes that all individuals are born with an innate desire to seek proximity to others in times of need or distress in order to enhance their survival prospects. Children as well as other mammalian infants are largely unable to feed or protect themselves as their survival is dependent on their ability to maintain proximity to older, wiser, and more capable adults. The ability of an individual to form an emotional and physical “attachment” to another person—by being taken care of—gives them a sense of stability and the security necessary to take risks, branch out, and grow and develop as a personality. This sense of security (or lack thereof) then becomes the basis of their own individual style of attachment which then remains relatively fixed over the lifespan of the individual. Ainsworth et al. (2015) discovered that attachment formation is an “innate” or instinctive form of human behavior.
Caring for others is also essential part of our humanity . Our brain is wired to react empathetically to the pain of others as a means of signaling danger and eliciting help. Functional MRI scans show that if an individual watches someone undergo electric shock, their brain lights up in the same areas as those in the brain of the person in pain (Bufalari et al. 2007). When we have feelings of caring or love for other people, we feel better. Moreover, a growing body of evidence shows that providing care can be beneficial to the caregiver, leading to reduced stress, increased happiness, and an increased sense of social connectedness (Inagaki and Orehek 2017).
1 Care in Organizations, Caring Organizations
Within organizational settings, caring is usually thought of as pertaining either to leadership roles or to team and peer social ties. But from the organizational or management point of view, there are more stakeholders to care about.
The problematic of care appears in management in relation to how to manage the stakeholders of an organization. Stakeholder theory (Freeman et al. 2010) says that businesses and other organizations should consider the interests and claims of stakeholders and manage their activities accordingly. From this perspective, the effective management of stakeholders is a strategic activity that is necessary for the success and the long-term survival of an organization. Ignoring stakeholders is dangerous, not just because it is morally inappropriate, but also because it does not make economic sense.
There are two interrelated problems with the stakeholder approach: (i) the narrow conception of stakeholders and (ii) the fallibility of stakeholders concerning their own well-being (Zsolnai 2018).
Companies usually define their stakeholders in a narrow way. Only owners, managers, employees, creditors, suppliers, and local communities are considered stakeholders . This narrow definition of stakeholders is often a recipe for disaster in terms of organizational functioning.
Mitroff (1998) argues that when stakeholders are defined too narrowly, and/or are not identified correctly, this leads to the solving the wrong problems precisely. When managers confront a problem which is located at the edge of their competence, especially a novel problem, or a case outside the bounds of accepted thinking and practice, they are either stymied to the point of paralysis, or fall back on the only resource they have: reducing a novel or unique situation to a problem that they already know how to solve. “The trouble is that the problems that one knows how to solve may bear little resemblance to the actual problems one needs to solve. As a result, extreme cases and outlier problems and situations pose a real and a serious challenge to the professions and to accepted modes of thinking. In the extreme, they lead to serious errors, catastrophic failures, and major disasters and crises” (Mitroff and Silvers 2009).
Psychology and behavioral economics have revealed that people are rather poor at predicting their own future well-being . They are fallible in understanding what they will like in the future, and how they will feel in future states of affairs.
Based on experimental research, Nobel prize-winning Daniel Kahneman (2011) states that people are myopic in their decisions, lack skill at predicting their future tastes, and can be led to make erroneous choices through their fallible memories and incorrect evaluations of past experiences.
Kahneman suggests differentiating between experienced utility and predicted utility . The experienced utility of an outcome is a measure of the hedonic experience of that outcome. The predicted utility of an outcome is defined as the individual’s beliefs about its experienced utility at some future time. Predicted utility is an ex-ante variable, while experienced utility is an ex-post variable in the decision-making process.
According to the rational choice model used in stakeholder theory , decisions are made on the basis of predicted utility . If experienced utility greatly differs from predicted utility, then this may lead to sub-rational, or even irrational choices. The problem of predicted utility raises the question “Do people actually know what they will like?” The answer is a definite “No.” The accuracy of people’s hedonic predictions is generally quite poor.
Related experimental studies suggest two conclusions: (i) people may have little ability to forecast changes in their hedonic responses to stimuli and (ii) even in situations that permit accurate hedonic predictions, people may tend to make decisions about future consumption without due consideration of possible changes in their tastes (Kahneman 2011).
Since people use their evaluative memories to guide their choices about future outcomes, deceptive retrospective evaluations may lead to erroneous choices. Kahneman identifies two major obstacles to maximizing experienced utility : People lack skill at predicting how their tastes might change, thus it is difficult to describe as rational agents those individuals who are prone to making large errors when predicting what they will want or enjoy in the future. The other obstacle is a tendency of individuals to use the affect associated with particular moments as a proxy for the utility of extended outcomes. Errors in lessons drawn from experience will inevitably be reflected in deficient choices about the future (Kahneman 2011).
Managing for a narrowly defined set of stakeholders cannot guarantee that the functioning of an organization is ecologically sustainable or beneficial for society more generally, including future generations . Considering the interest of stakeholders solely on the basis of the latter’s own calculations may lead to unacceptable outcomes. Business and other organizations should expand their set of stakeholders and go beyond trying to meet goals rationally founded on calculated self-interest.
In his magnum opus, The Imperative of Responsibility : In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, Hans Jonas (1984) describes the impact of modern technology on the human condition as follows:
- 1.
The nature of human activities has been altered and enlarged due to their magnitude and novelty, and their impact on man’s global future.- 2.
Responsibility is correlated to power, and must be commensurate with the latter’s scope and its exercise.- 3.
To replace the former projections of hope, an imaginative ‘heuristics of fear’ should be developed to inform us of what may be at stake, and what we must beware of.- 4.
Ethics are created and underpinned by how man perceives his duties toward himself, his distant posterity, and the plenitude of life under his dominion. (Jonas 1984: x)
Jonas argues that an imperative of responsibility might be framed like this: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.” Or, expressed negatively: “Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life” (Jonas 1984: 11).
Human responsibility is never formal, but it is always substantive. It involves humans being responsible not primarily for their own conduct and its consequences, but for the matter that has made or will make a claim on present action. The well-being , the interests, and the fates of others have, by circumstance or by agreement, come into our care , which means that our control over them involves at the same time our obligation toward th...