Human Relations special issue call for papers: Freedom,work and organizations in the 21st century: Freedom for whom and for whose purpose?

NEW DEADLINE: 1 October 2020

Guest editors:

Lynne Andersson (Fox School of Business, Temple University, USA)

Dirk Lindebaum (Cardiff Business School, UK)

James Chamberlain (Political Science & Public Administration, Mississippi State University, USA),

Michelle Greenwood (Monash Business School, Monash University, Australia),

Frank den Hond (Hanken School of Economics, Finland & Faculty of Social Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, the Netherlands)

Freedom is one of those concepts that many – if not most – people are intuitively happy to embrace. Freedom is good, and more freedom is better. At the same time, ‘the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist’ (Berlin, 1969/1999: 159). Freedom is core to many sociocultural politico-economical events, be they contemporary (e.g. Brexit) or historical (e.g. the US Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution). Small wonder that, with this pedigree, freedom is perhaps the archetypical western value, and thus culturally circumscribed. However, upon deeper inspection, freedom can also be a problematic concept.

We learn from Enlightenment philosophers (e.g. Kant, 1996) that freedom is an obligation and a right; that is, we are obliged to treat ourselves and others as ends in themselves and not merely as means to some end, and to develop ourselves in the fullest sense of the meaning. Liberal thinkers across disciplines (e.g. Rawls, Berlin, Dewey, Fromm or Mill) value freedom, and recognize that this in turn requires certain constraints on individual conduct. These constraints can at least be partly explained through some of the different conceptualizations of freedom. For example, Berlin argues that negative freedom is concerned with the question, ‘What is the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’, whereas the positive freedom concept seeks to answer the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’ (Berlin: 1969/1999: 160).

For the purpose of this special issue, we wish to explore both how freedom structures and legitimizes organizations, and how it provides a critical benchmark against which to evaluate them. Rather than privileging one particular account of freedom among numerous candidates, we encourage submissions that examine it from diverse perspectives, reflecting the intuition that how freedom is mobilized (and for what purposes) varies across contexts and is intimately connected to specific relations of power and interests. As such, this special issue exhibits a firm commitment to better understanding social relations in and around work (Turner, 2017).

In relation to work, different forms of freedom raise distinct questions and problems. For example, workers enjoy significant negative freedom when management takes a hands-off approach, but unless workers are actively involved in decision-making at the level of the organization, they remain subject to domination and relatively unfree. Another example concerns occupational freedom more broadly: individual workers may be free to choose jobs in the sense that no other agent is determining this for them, yet they lack freedom in the sense that they have little input on the broader labour market. So, when multiple persons, groups, or organizations come together, questions of how much freedom, what kind of freedom, and whose freedom is to be pursued (or constrained) are inescapable and of utmost political magnitude. Individual versus community, ‘freedom from’ versus ‘freedom to’ (Fromm, 1941/2011) or freedom versus equality are but a few of key contradictions that can emerge.

Like others before us, we maintain that freedom is inextricably linked to dominant socioeconomic conditions (Fromm, 1941/2011). That is, work is never abstract, but it is concrete work in a specific economic system (industrial vs cognitive capitalism) or context (e.g. manufacturing vs digital work) that shapes how free we are and how we relate to each other. Elizabeth Anderson’s (2017) treatise on ‘private governments’ and the objection of constructing ‘community’ around the idea of paid work (and the loss of freedom it entails) in the current capitalist system (Chamberlain, 2018) are only two examples to this end. The contemporary relevance of examining freedom is also underlined by reports showing that the richest eight individuals hold the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity (Oxfam, 2018), and that more than 40 million people across the globe work under conditions of slavery (Andersson et al., 2018). These accounts underline that some people are economically freer than others. But freedom is also under pressure when businesses are ‘using artificial intelligence to scrutinise staff behaviour minute-to-minute by harvesting data on who emails whom and when, who accesses and edits files and who meets whom and when’ in order to evaluate staff (Booth, 2019).

In a policy and practical sense, therefore, we believe that far too much scholarship in management and organization studies focuses upon the regulation and manipulation of workers for organizational or economic purposes, as opposed to the emancipation (Lindebaum, 2017) of workers and the understanding of neoliberal capitalist constraints upon it. It is our hope that scholarly attention to freedom in the context of work can contribute to building novel solutions and robust action (Ferraro et al., 2015) in terms of new forms of worker activism, reconfigurations of work, and the building of institutional forces to pressure and counter neoliberal ideology (Fleming, 2014; Redman and Snape, 2004).