Carelessness impoverishes our relations with others and the planet, causing extinction and permanent global crisis. Rejecting the aff opens space for ways of desiring differently that disrupt individualist logics.

Therefore, if political care is at the centre of organizational and social life, as I argue it should be, ‘caring for’ various needs of others, including care providers, should become one of its crucial components. Hence, another important theoretical implication of the framework offered is the need to politicize the notion of care by focusing on who receives and delivers it (Tronto, 1993, 1995, 2013), as reflected in Tronto’s idea of ‘caring with’. The framework inflects political care with psychoanalytic ideas on affect and body, offering a deeper understanding of the current predicament of carelessness in organizations and society (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). Today, though the most meaningful and socially valuable jobs are linked to care, defined as tending to, mending and repairing, such categories are often associated with poverty or even slavery (Graeber, 2018). These arrangements rely on the nexus of symbolic significations and ideologies reaffirming stereotypical associations of care with women’s attentiveness to others, particularly close others, and caring with dispossession. As a result, they impoverish our sense of self by ignoring care as both a human ability and a human need (Fotaki et al., 2020, chapter 1). At the same time, work relationships are often instrumental rather than infused with care because caring for co-workers involves trade-offs when organizational performance and productivity are at stake (Antoni et al., 2020). A declining sense of responsibility for the needs of others (Cantillon & Lynch, 2017; Lynch, 2009) often reduces care to compliance with public relations as part of managerial discourse and practices, while meaningful caregiving continues to be associated with the trivial, the private and the emotional, the importance of which is unacknowledged. The neoliberal injunction associating citizenship with compulsive consumerism supports these significations while it produces unhealthy associations and toxic attachments that corrupt organizations’ institutional and moral fabric (Long, 1999). However, it also reveals that dominant discourses, organizational structures and norms are unstable if not supported by affect, opening the space for desiring differently by creating new imaginaries and significations (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Fotaki, 2015). Thus, the proposed approach draws attention to emotions, including our unconscious fears and desires to reveal the fantasmatic constitution of neoliberal capitalism that is not immutable and can be changed. Producing alternative accounts of care as offered above can disrupt existing symbolic norms propagated by the neoliberal market logic and the affective power structures on which the paradigm rests. We can use them to form new attachments, moving away from the illusory pursuit of individual wants towards recognizing our inextricable links with others and all forms of life and non-sentient matter.

The third and final contribution is to develop a holistic notion of care without exclusions, which is contextually (socially, politically and translocally) embedded and embodied (Fotaki & Harding, 2017, chapters 5, 6). Critical care theorists have applied care ethics to international relations (Held, 2006; Robinson, 1999) to develop an approach that responds and attends to others’ differences without presuming universal homogeneity. This article furthers this debate by framing care as rooted in ontological and political vulnerability (Gilson, 2016; Hamington, 2004; Held, 2006; Petherbridge, 2016; Robinson, 1999). It highlights connections between close and distant relations while affirming a principle of care for the most vulnerable as a foundation for developing universal holistic global care.

The proposed theorization contrasts the central premise of the ethics of care that care occurs in concrete situations between individuals. For instance, Noddings (1984) argues that we cannot ‘care for’ those beyond our reach. Influenced by some ethicists of care (Noddings, 1984), Liedtka (1996) claims that caring is strongest towards others capable of reciprocal relationships. In contrast, Tronto (1993) argues: ‘On the most general level, we suggest that we must view caring as an activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (p. 103). The world includes our bodies, ourselves and the environment, which we seek to interweave into a ‘complex, life-sustaining web’ (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40, cited in Tronto, 1993, p. 103). Therefore, the proposed holistic political care recognizes individuals’ obligation of care toward concrete persons (other individuals), but is also extended to non-human beings and non-sentient matter. Proximity and caring are positively related, but more is needed to develop holistic care. For instance, Ettinger’s matrixial theory offers an important reference point beyond prevailing environmental discourses and the notion of nature as total otherness (Solstrief-Pirker, 2022). Tronto (1995) suggests that given limited capacity and resources, determining which and whose needs we should meet must be guided by the principles of justice. Her notion of ‘taking care of’ others’ specific needs also acknowledges this reality from a different perspective, implying that caring requires an ethical stance and work to sustain interdependent worlds. Kathlyn Lynch (2022) offers the concept of ‘affective equality’, as distinguished from economic ideas, to address problems of exclusion from and inequality of care, which resonates with embodied affect as a critical component of political care proposed in this article. Specifically, it champions integrating psychoanalytic insights on intersubjectivity and intercopropreality with universalist principles of justice, the absence of which undermines care (Kittay, 1999, p. 108), to resolve this dilemma. The embodied and affective connectedness between the self and other provides a frame to consider all bodies as equivalent rather than focusing on what separates them without eliding their differences. Overall, the dual political conception of care (underpinned by psychoanalytic insights) I offer explains the neoliberal capture of care and the ambivalence surrounding this concept in society. At the same time, it outlines the means for an alternative and more expansive constitutive view of care.

Practical Implications

The proposed re-theorization of care also has important policy and organizational implications. It offers new vistas for developing radical alternatives to managing crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, centring around care-based concern for all affected people (Branicki, 2020). Branicki (2020) and Mandalaki et al. (2022) propose the care perspective as a promising avenue to address pre-existing and new inequalities in the post-pandemic world, also shedding light on the problems of organizational inequalities, primarily affecting women and feminized others. On an organizational level, this implies recognizing the value of caring jobs and rewarding the invisible labour of care in various professions, including academia. On a larger social scale, it means creating political alternatives to counteract the failed neoliberal ideology.

Until recently, the apparent multiple failures of the neoliberal economic model have not diminished its political appeal. However, numerous environmental, social and political challenges, including climate change, growing inequalities and refugee crises, have called into question neoliberal orthodoxy’s individualism and the value of market principles as a mechanism for governing public life. It has become clear that the prevailing market logic of maximizing profit at all costs ignores the lives of many (Sell, 2021). For instance, the failure of neoliberal governance observed during the pandemic allows us to reconsider care as a public policy issue and make it a cornerstone of health policy. Such awareness may help us redefine the role of care in society. This would imply a refusal of the market mentality in public health services, treating patients as consumers with supposedly insatiable needs while assigning them individual responsibility for their health (Fotaki, 2006). Directing public resources toward the services and activities we care about as a society would prevent viewing health services as a consumer product rather than a social good accessible to anyone in need. Care ethics would then not be a matter of personal choice but a social issue.

Following Tronto (1995), we should reject political and social institutions and organizations that do not embrace the logic of care. Instead, we should build caring institutions through alternative political processes that consider women’s needs, contributions and prospects, along with many other actors (Tronto, 1995). Fostering interdependence and distributing care not as a commodity but as a basis for relating is integral to caring institutions. However, to situate care at the centre of our institutions and our democratic polity, it is key to consider how power can be more evenly distributed (Tronto, 2013). Becoming enmeshed ‘in a complex web of socio-material relations within which we develop an ethical orientation towards those around us also enhances our ability to reimagine and participate more fully in democratic processes’ (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, p. 28). Repositioning care at the centre of our social and organizational lives also means re-valuing care jobs and principles vis-a-vis economic considerations. The pandemic has been a brutal reminder that we cannot live without nurses, cleaners, bus drivers, delivery people and rubbish collectors whose care has seen us through it. Therefore, we must reward this work while building organizational structures to care for carers. In addition to rethinking the assumptions and values driving our societal institutions, this may also help us address humanizing and making business organizations inclusive.

The final implication concerns our academic work, including research, knowledge transfer and teaching. Organizational scholars and public intellectuals are called to contribute to critical debates on the distribution of care to those most deprived through their work and academic activism, restoring the fundamental principles of justice. Our ‘caring about’ must include those on the edges of our societies such as the homeless (Stevens, 2017), and those who lack legal rights and protections and access to essential health services (Fotaki, 2019b). We should also be concerned with the ethics and politics of care for the most excluded populations, such as refugees and poor migrants from the Global South, the majority hosted by neighbouring countries in the developing world (Parekh, 2020). Considering these issues in organizational research is a new way of embodying and practising care for others and a different way of caring for one’s scholarship (Howard-Grenville, 2021). Crucially, the focus of such research should be on reflecting the material and affective experiences of real people’s lives rather than using new, ‘exciting’, non-traditional settings and empirical contexts to apply well-worn depoliticized organizational theories. Feminist theories highlighting embodied experiences, situated knowledge, and practices of horizontality in co-producing research provide a much better conceptual apparatus and concrete ways to address ‘grand challenges’ (Ferraro et al., 2015). Rather than seeing people as novel research subjects, such approaches also allow a deeper understanding of how they resist dispossession. The idea of shared vulnerability might make researchers examining ‘extreme’ and challenging contexts more amenable to learning from the experiences of people who find themselves in the direst circumstances yet manage to care for each other (Kim & Smets, 2020). It may also help reframe the ‘problem’ of the dispossessed from abstract global debate into something that resonates in people’s lives, challenging the perception of refugees, forced migrants and various groups of new poor as unrelatable ‘others’ (Fotaki, 2019a, 2019b).

The proposed care approach should extend to management and business education. Teaching morality and values is an essential aspect of business education but cannot be limited to associating care with compassion or empathy (Slote, 2007). Analysis of what business education might be like if we took care ethics seriously suggests far-reaching changes to the topics, contexts and theories of educational curricula, driven by cases of reciprocity and consideration for the other. We can use real-life examples to help students learn important lessons about different forms of care provided by diverse people, groups and associations who have come together during emergencies such as Covid-19 (Sitrin & Sembrar, 2020). Finally, to acknowledge caring as a capability, it should be nurtured and developed as an essential part of education, including business education, because care practice requires competence and skill (Tronto, 1993). Overall, I suggest that by rethinking the notion of care through this prism, organizational scholars might develop inclusive research, teaching and writing forms to oppose exclusion and ‘othering’. The framework presented in this article provides a guide for radical redesigning of education to help students (and ourselves) form alternative attachments, to desire differently. Such a shift is a precondition for countering individualism, competition and the value extraction philosophy driving neoliberal capitalism in the late twenty-first century if we are to survive the multiple crises we face.

Conclusion

In this article, I propose a holistic care framework for rethinking organized life in society as an antidote to the toxic neoliberal market orthodoxy. This is not merely an alternative moral theory but a different way of thinking about ethics and politics of care which provides an essential corrective by reframing our definitions. The article combines various insights from feminist psychoanalytic writers’ works, emphasizing embodied affect and shared vulnerability. It also proposes a new politics of cohabitation, sharing, recognition and respect for the other. Crucially, offering holistic political care takes the social dimension of human existence seriously. Translating the fundamental premises of the framework into research, teaching and specific interventions in the policy arena may help us envision new forms of organizing that oppose exclusion and ‘othering’ in society. As we face various threats and societal challenges, we shall depend on one another for survival more than ever (Cremin, 2021).