THE PROFIT MOTIVE

The Profit Motive

The Profit Motive

Introduction

Although for-profit activities can have positive effects on society, there is increasing concern among both the public and the academic community regarding its negative effects, in particular on human development and well-being. Despite the growing concerns, there is little guidance on effective organizational responses to this potential risk. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to provide relevant organizational responses to the problem in order to identify the guiding principles that should inform a human value oriented workplace culture. Research undertaken in this area to date can be grouped into two divergent perspectives; those who regard for-profit activity and human value as standing in fundamental contradiction to each other and those who contend that for-profit activity and human value can co-occur without tension, and even be made to support each other.

Discussion

Organizational life cannot ignore the importance of human value for the production of economic value. In employer-employee relationships, this reality may refer to the use of human development-related motivators for the pursuit of profit-oriented goals of the organization. The counterpart, the role of economic value in facilitating the production of human value, is also a reality, albeit too often emphasized over the other side of the relationship. It is noted that conflictualism (be it of Marxist or classical liberal source) tends to produce drastic recommendations, where action is beyond the realm of management practice, for different reasons. In the case of the Marxist argument, its logical conclusion is the transformation of the whole capitalist political economy, involving a social, political and economic engineering approach, at the macro level. The key aim of this lavish societal project is to have economic-value producing time for organizations coincide with human-value producing time for employees; that is design labor time that would produce both types of value.

On the other hand, in the case of market liberalism, individuals should give the expectation altogether that profit-making organizations could offer to their employees (especially through work processes) anything to do with human development. This does not exclude the possibility of fortunate coincidences, but one should not expect that organizations could design such overlaps. Moreover, according to Friedman (1970), profit-making organizations should not be expected to take a direct interest in human value priorities that are not justified by the production of profit for the organization, hence for its shareholders. In this context, preoccupation for the production of human value is confined ...