My management classes tend to treat humans as units. My professors say things like, “To achieve the same level of output, you can replace labor with capital” or “Reduce fixed costs by eliminating salary payments”. My classmates nod and take notes and there I am thinking, but these are human beings! With feelings and families! Setting aside the fact that I empathize with fictional textbook characters,* I’d like to point out that employees in the real world will be living and breathing people you can’t just write off by encircling Option A instead of Option B. It’s easy to talk about eliminating costs and squeezing out the most profits, but what happens when you do so?
I wish our university had a more caring aspect in its management classes, in the sense that we are taught how to make profits in the best and most humane way possible and not at the expense of other people. This is why I think profit maximization should be redefined to include a humane nuance. It shouldn’t be about how much money your company can earn; it should be about how you can contribute to the local economy, help sustain the environment through ethical business practices, and improve the well-being of your employees. In this way, everyone ‘profits’.I know that this is already being taught in our university’s classes, but I think it should be given more of the limelight as the core of our business philosophy. Instead of teaching about ethics and sustainability in separate chapters or additional lectures, these things should constitute a vital part of each lesson. I also wish our textbooks were worded differently so that the treatment of human interactions wasn’t so clinical.
Anyway, these are just my two cents on the topic. I love my school and its potential for empowering its students to be men/women for others — we should make the most out of this. Can you tell how much I love my Theology classes?
*God. Not even storybook characters.I always felt this way somewhat when I was taking Management classes, except accounting since it was pretty much math. The philosophy classes I took went against what I was learning in Management somehow. (“Don’t treat people as mere numbers and capital”, says one Philosophy teaching, then management says “Profit Maximization is the primary concern.”)
Oh the discouragement.
I also dig the graphic a lot.
Hear, hear. I have to *forget* everything I’ve learned from Marx, Adorno, Althusser, and Tolentino every time I go to my BA 101 class. So much for being a critical media practitioner. We need them theories in our life people! Haist.
(via robcham)
