Social communication in the Antropocene: new implications for humanistic management

In the Anthropocene we face elaborate social, economic and environmental problems that cannot be solved in any simple way. The dominant reason is their complexity and world-wide range. Furthemore, a profit-centered management is engaged in generating and supporting the crisis: a management pathology that can be seen as one of its roots (Mintzberg, 2019). A novel approach to management, albeit supported by traditional ideals is, at this time, verymuch needed: we need re-focusing its actions into human-centered (Mintzberg, 2015; Kostera, 2020). We believe that humanistic management is nowadays not just a sound model but a necessity. Such management manifests itself in three crucial aspects (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2013): placing the human being at the centre of managements processes; creating a collective force that builds up heritage and culture; and recognition of human practical experience and reflexion. All of these processes are realised in practice in organisations through managerial communication (Mintzberg, 2009; Kostera and Szeluga-Romańska, 2015). Bruno Ollivier (2010) claims that each communicational situation inevitably embraces three dimensions: technical, linguistic and social. Longitudinal ethnographic research (such as Szeluga-Romańska, 2014) reveals that the role of the manager is profoundly influential in the shaping of key organisational communicational processes and may help to metamorphose the contents (written into the form) through good metaphors into practices that forge organisational social relations (Kostera, Szeluga-Romańska, 2015; Mintzberg, 2019). This paper proposes to include attentive communication into the groundworks of humanistic management with the intention to impact social relations and actions in a way that would benefit and preserve complexity, which is necessary in the Anthropocene. It can be a useful and powerful tool/process not just to share information, facts, but also to increase awareness, educate and improve collective engagement into contemporary elaborate problems.