Repoliticizing management

"This book draws out the implications of Jurgen Habermas's social theory for the critical study of management, organization and employment. Its principal aim is to propose a definition of legitimate corporate action based on Habermas's principles of communicative rationality and discourse ethics. It concludes that corporate legitimacy - the successful combination of market economics with distributive and environmental justice - is only possible in the context of deliberative forms of democratic workplace governance." "The book is unique in that it systematically applies the full range of Habermas's arguments to management and economics, but also uses insights from these disciplines to inform a critique and reconstruction of Habermas's work. The result of this theoretical dialogue is a distinctive new conceptualization of the relationship between social interaction and economic structures and institutions. This is turn is shown to have serious implications for our understanding of corporate social responsibility and of the part managers and employees can play in putting it into practice."--Jacket.