Empowering People – Transforming Organizations – Uniting Society

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What is Common-Good HRM?

Since the rapid collapse of highly controlled planned economies and the consequent dominance of the neo-liberal socio-political agenda, modern society has become characterized, if not inherently defined by the primacy of private ownership, economic freedom and consumer sovereignty. Parallel, over the past few decades, a combined, deepening and continuing process of economic and societal structural transformation (e.g., market-liberalization and deregulation, individualization and globalization and especially digital-capitalism), has resulted in a devaluing of traditional social-structures, a weakening of established public institutional frameworks, an erosion of collective common-good values and an undermining of democratic debate and the “public sphere”. 

Economic growth and individual material success has as a result been a pyrrhic victory, achieved at the price of a loss of human-values and dignity, communal-power and social-dialogue and the goal of the common-good. From a purely profit-centric, free-market perspective this scarcity of social-coherence and communality has to-date not proved a major concern or hindering factor. However when facing the new multi-level “grand challenges” of human-exploitation, social-inequality, economic-disruption and the existential threat of ecological destruction, a lack of business ethics and societal responsibility (resulting in declining stakeholder power and agency), is gradually causing a crisis of legitimacy and trust for organizations (as central social-actors), and our research domain of human resource management. 

A new “Common-Good HRM” paradigm, which we introduce, is an attempt to conciliate the conflicting needs of market-freedom and societal-rights and individual desires for material prosperity versus the necessity to protect limited collective common-good resources. It therefore addresses the core question: How can HRM redefine its role and purpose with the aim of creating the ideal conditions for integrated human, organizational and societal flourishing?