The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name.

 
       
         
    STUDIA PHILOSOPHIA - Issue no. 2 / 2012  
         
  Article:   FULFILMENT OR SLAVERY? SOME PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE PARADOXES OF THE CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTIONS OF WORK IN ECONOMICS AND OTHER HUMAN SCIENCES..

Authors:  .
 
       
         
  Abstract:  A critical examination of the manner in which work and labour have been conceived by economists in the neo-classical theories of production, in effect seeing work as a « disutility », reveals some remarkable paradoxes and even contradictions both between this neoclassical conception and certain other areas of economic thinking and even more obviously with the manner in which work has been conceived in certain other areas of human science, in particular in contemporary psychology and in classical political theories (of human rights). The inescapably value-laden nature of abstractions in respect of human beings and activities in the human sciences is first laid bare drawing on the insights of Gunnar Myrdal and of critical social theory. In the light of this the paradoxes and contradictions are subjected to a philosophical analysis which on the one hand seeks to explain the time-resistant persistence of the neoclassical conception in terms of the enduring but rarely made explicit power of the master-slave relationship as a framework of thought and interaction in so many areas of human affairs and in particular in the business world; and on the other hand some explicitly normative suggestions are made as to how in the light of certain moral philosophies we ought to be conceiving of work if in the human, sciences we are to do proper justice to human dignity and human rights.

Key words: Work; neoclassical theory of labour; production functions; forced labour; slavery; wellbeing at work; normative discourse; value-laden social theory. 

 
         
     
         
         
      Back to previous page