Love and Meaningful Organizing. Introduction to a Special Issue and a Tribute to Prof. Dr. Manuel Guillén

An Inconvenient Concept for Business?A hazy look.That is what I often get when bringing up the topic of love in organizing in my conversations with senior business leaders.Love is not a much-used term in the context of business (Sisodia 2014).Referencing the late Tina Turner, you see them struggle: 'What's love got to do with it?'.Everything is the simple answer-leaving aside that the misapprehension of love's relevance for their organizations is fully understandable.The term 'love' causes confusion, as the term is often limited to refer to romantic love between two individuals.This reference to 'eros' is only one out of four different meanings of love.In Ancient Greece, love as eros referred to the love received from and given or returned to others (Guillén 2021).In addition to eros, however, the Greek distinguished storge, philia and agape (Lewis, 1960).It is this latter meaning of love as agape, described as the expression of the fundamental respect for others 1 and the commitment to their wellbeing and flourishing (cf.Hummels et al. 2021; Hummels and Nullens 2022), that addresses the processes, actions and activities of organizations, and the distribution of outputs and outcomes.As such, love can be seen as "a foundational principle for humanistic management" (Lee 2022) or, as is argued in this special issue of the Humanistic Management Journal, to management in general.Clarifying the meaning of love is one thing, making it applicable in the context of business is quite a different-and difficult-thing.The concepts of love and business seem to come from different worlds, where people speak different languages, with different, clearly 1 The term 'others' refers to other persons as well as to non-human forms of life.That is, others include animals but also the planetary ecosystem in which current (and future) generations live and thrive.Failure to respect the ecosystem means failure to respect the interest of future generations and to life on this planet as such.