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Do individuals have freedom or are they free? This project utilizes phenomenology and Erich Fromm's concepts of having and being to explore the issue of awareness through the lens of individuals working in public and private organizations. It argues that awareness of freedom is not only structurally constrained within organizations, but serves to conflate a way of being. Further, it suggests, individuals, and especially societal leaders, have a responsibility to take a stand and act according to what provides them with meaning so as to preserve and expand access to individual freedom.
We are presently at a point of unique circumstantial convergence where recession, an increased emphasis on business ethics, and marketer’s reluctance to accept shifting social agendas have combined to identify the need for a new approach to marketing. Using concepts from the human resources, marketing and psychology literatures, and especially Erich Fromm’s ideas concerning economic character, this paper posits that marketers – as a professional community – are driven to promote consumerist outcomes; victims of an automaton amalgam of calling and character. The analysis suggests the vulnerability of both marketer and consumer are mutually reinforcing and that we need, somehow, to break this damaging cycle of dependence. We know little, however, about how marketers think and feel about their discipline, so this paper also promotes an agenda for marketer behaviour research, as a countervailing balance to a currently disproportionate focus on the consumer.
In 1937 Theodor Adorno, in a letter to Erich Fromm, described women as exemplars of commodity fetishism, >agents of the commodity in society<. Adorno wanted Fromm to join him in a study of the invidious psycho-social effects of this phenomenon. Fromm did not respond to this invitation, possibly because his own views on women were diametrically opposed to Adorno’s. To Fromm, women were not agents of capitalist corruption but avatars of altruism, their nurturing qualities providing models for socialist morality. These polarized images of women have their roots in Enlightenment gender theory. This essay outlines the myths of Woman promulgated by Enlightenment intellectuals, in particular the Janus-faced doctrine of ‘female influence’ that dominated eighteenth-century writings on women, which portrayed them simultaneously as acquisitive hedonists and as paragons of self-sacrificial benevolence.
Erich Fromm
(2012)
Erich Fromm
(2012)
Escape from Theology: Theistic and Nontheistic Religion in the Socialist Humanism of Erich Fromm
(2012)
Freud: Darkness and Vision
(2012)
Beck (1995) has outlined an influential social theory in which the role of modern risks has been highlighted. Modern societies are characterized as qualitatively distinct from premodern societies due to the self-generated new risks of annihilatory potential. Jonas (1979) has proposed an approach highlighting fear as a heuristic guideline for approaching further scientific research and technological development. According to this framework, imagining annihilatory risks inherent in a particular technology and research should make us forego the potential benefits of this technology, as the potential costs are too high. Mittelstraß (1992) argues exactly the opposite and claims that not less but more research and technological progress is necessary in order to enhance the survival chances of the human species. In order to reduce the possibility of deliberate action, which may trigger the annihilation of the human species, however, Mittelstraß (1992) calls for the development of a strong ethos of responsibility. The question, though, remains on what kind of rationale this ethos of individual responsibility may be grounded? It is suggested in this paper that Fromm (1947) provided the answer to the question of how such an ethos may be created and sustained.