Abstract

In a modern, postindustrial society there can be no question that the management community bears a substantial share of the responsibility for assuring that the unfolding future serves ever more fully ends that are truly human and that the way in which the institutions that dominate such a society are managed continually enriches and enlarges the opportunities for individual choice and fulfillment. Managing the work relationship is central to pursuing these objectives. It remains in many respects the most important institutional interface in the society, certainly the one to which more people are more immediately exposed for more of their lives than any other-far more than any particular group of the disadvantaged or the dispossessed. A great deal of mischief has followed in the wake of the so-called leisure society, which has been the subject of unremitting attention and speculation in the popular press. The challenge posed to the management community is deliberately to shape and augment management knowledge so that it will prove consonant with the modern, postindustrial society. If managed institutions in every sector of the society fail to elicit the necessary level of human response and loyalty, then the larger social problems are going to remain unsolved.