The shift from human capital to human being: developing partnership and care in the era of embedded global economy

Current mindsets and traditional practices get in the way of optimizing people’s potential and performance and negatively affect business and societies. “Ism’s” divide nations and people.  Men still dominate women, children, and other vulnerable communities in many cultures, and women often do not have an equal seat at the opportunity table. 

Even the use of the term “high-quality human capital” by economists and organizational theorists only weakly focuses on people.  At its best, the term acknowledges that people are the more critical factor of production in the post-industrial knowledge/service era.  On the other hand, the term treats people more as machines than as human beings, detaching life and lives from managerial decision-making, and disassociating organizations from their communities and larger society. Organizational cultures, too, often driven solely by the drive to dominate in the market or the search for short-term profits, neglect our real sources of long term value, global sustainability and meaning: people. 

People are more than machines or capital, the productivity afforded by technology, or even the knowledge resident in their heads.  People provide the creative pulse in organizations as well as the source of their successes and failures.  They create the socio-economic health of our societies. People, as well as the organizations and societies in which they live, work, and perform, thrive in relationship and with care.  Yet, relationships oftentimes fall second to self-advancement or self-preservation, and care is perceived as weak, expensive, or “just feminine.”

The way forward: to build human capacity through partnership and care.  With partnership and care, people transcend cultural and philosophical boundaries as well as organizational hierarchies and tribal differences.  Partnership – fueled by care - shifts us from hierarchies of domination, which rule through fear, or “power over,” to hierarchies of actualization, where power is used to empower rather than disempower others.  Partnership-oriented cultures lead to innovatory performance, long term success, environmental sustainability, and human well-being.  Care, a building block of life, a value-in-action, and a powerful and strategic human resource, empowers humans to be more fully human which incites the flourishing of knowledge, creativity, and even more care.  Care is worthy of investment, policy, and practice because it delivers both measurable results and a more human world.

The creation of a sustainable global society will take a socio-cultural-economic paradigm shift across all institutions, leaders, and households so that care is viewed as a valuable resource and partnership is respected. For example, traditional measurements of performance (such as GDP and GNP, profits and share price) must advance so that people, care-giving activities, and care in market and nonmarket economies are valued in both the short and long term. 

At this stage, however, research that allows us to improve our understanding of care as a resource for creativity, sustainability, and performance is still rather limited.  Researchers and practitioners interested in beginning to fill this gap are invited to submit their work to this special issue.  Theoretical and/or empirical papers of a quantitative and/or qualitative nature on all aspects of institutional, organizational, and societal management are invited.  Cross-cultural and/or cross-disciplinary research perspectives are preferable. 

Topics could include but are not limited to:
 • Augmenting traditional economic theory, organizational strategies, socioeconomic definitions, and gender identifications with care  
 • Building partnership cultures in a cross-culturally complex world
 • Relationship of caring strategies, practices, and policies to performance and creativity
 • Cultural values and traditions that support or hinder the development of caring policies and practices 
  • Impact of gender definitions on valuing and giving importance to care
  • Impact of gender definitions on development of caring leadership/management models
 • Relationship between socio-economic indicators, the  valuing of care work, and the building of human capacity 
 • Cross-cultural management strategies for valuing women, vulnerable communities, and/or disenfranchised workers in organizations
 • Developing an underlying cross-cultural standard for care in nations and organizations

Submission guidelines
Papers submitted must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently under consideration for publication with any other journal.  Submissions should be approximately 4,000 to 6,000 words in length.  Submissions to Cross Cultural Management must be made using the ScholarOne Manuscript Central system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ccmij).  For more details, please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/ccm.htm and consult the author guidelines.

A separate title page must be uploaded containing the title, author(s), and contact information for the author(s).  Suitable articles will be subjected to a double-blind review; hence authors should not identify themselves in the body of the paper.  The deadline for submissions has been extended to 1 December, 2011.  Authors with questions about paper and topic suitability should email the guest editors. 

“Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal” is listed in both Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities in Management & Marketing and ISI’s Social Sciences Citation Index®.

Guest Editors
Dr. Kristine Kawamura, St. Georges University, Grenada
Email: kristinekawamura@yahoo.com

Dr. Riane Eisler, Center for Partnership Studies, California, USA
Email: eisler@partnershipway.org