31 HUMANISTIC TOURISM: BACK TO HUMANISM IN BUSINESS AND SOCIETY – Contributions
31 HUMANISTIC TOURISM: BACK TO HUMANISM IN BUSINESS AND SOCIETY – Contributions by Maria Della Lucia
In searching for what “I don’t know” about local development and regeneration I began to wonder what “I don’t know” about what really moves organizations, territories, and institutions, all of which are simply communities of people. And then, I started to ask myself what it means to be human and what matters most to humanity. My actual question, in fact, was who I was, and what was important to me as a woman and a researcher. This is why I started re-framing the new in the old through the lens of Humanistic Management. Humanistic management is an anthropocentric and values-based management approach that has become a novel area of research, practice, policy, teaching, and education across all sectors: an alternative business and development approach that draws together the concepts of business ethics, conscious capitalism, cooperative capitalism, social business, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability. HM endeavours to change the current economic paradigm by moving from “mechanistic management” to the humanizing of business and to bring the spirit of humanism to economies and societies (Melé, 2016). It seeks profits for human ends (Melé, 2016) and values the unconditional human dignity of every human being (Spitzeck, 2011). Transformational leadership is crucial to values-based management and radically change the interplay between human beings, corporations, and society. Tourism offers significant opportunities for the practical application of humanistic management at the micro-meso-and-macro levels as tourism is a driver of economic development which reveals inherent paradoxes, vulnerabilities, and crises. For these reasons, since 2017, and thanks to fortunate encounters, I have redirected my research toward the relationship between humanistic and tourism management (Della Lucia & Giudici, 2021a), humanistic management and sustainable tourism (Della Lucia & Giudici, 2021b), and enhancing higher education in tourism management through HM (Della Lucia et al., 2021a).
The Humanistic Tourism difference and advantage
Humanistic Tourism (Della Lucia & Giudici, 2021a) is a novel notion positioned at the nexus between humanistic and tourism management based on sharing and implementing humanistic management principles – dignity, ethics, and legitimacy. Humanistic tourism is a business and development model that strives to establish a values-based disciplinary perspective on tourism management which emphasizes the humanistic difference and the humanistic advantage (Della Lucia et al., 2021c). The humanistic difference becomes apparent when humanistic tourism questions established perspectives – mainly inherited from economics, human resource management, and efficiency-driven management – in tourism management, and lays bare their inadequacies. The humanistic advantage involves explaining, analysing, and interpreting the importance of human dignity and