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We Need A New Work Culture

And we can’t wait for more enlightened management to show up or grow up.

Stowe Boyd
Work Futures
4 min readOct 30, 2020

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Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

The discourse about a more enlightened future of work that hinges on the enlightenment of business owners and managers is basically a surrender, like handing over your wallet to a thief and asking him to please, at least, give back your drivers license.

If the suffragettes had waited for men to grant them the vote instead of organizing and marching, they’d still be disenfranchised.

We need a new work culture, one that is larger than company cultures, and one that is not the product of corporate mythologizing or the propaganda of internal communications. We need a deep work culture grounded in science and centered on the welfare — financial, psychological, and physical — of working people, not a shallow culture that glorifies bronze age charismatic leadership while downplaying the strength of emergent order that arises from the messiness of social self-governance.

The majority of businesses operate on premises that are grounded in folklore, not science.

Unions once played a role like this in America, and still do in other countries, but a combination of forces — corporatism and political forces on one side, and the…

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Work Futures
Work Futures

Published in Work Futures

The ecology of work, and the anthropology of the future

Stowe Boyd
Stowe Boyd

Written by Stowe Boyd

Insatiably curious. Economics, work, psychology, sociology, ecology, tools for thought. See also workfutures.io. @stoweboyd.bsky.social.

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