Now on Aeon is a piece that will be of interest to AHP readers. In “The dark shadow in the injunction to ‘do what you love’” Kira Lussier writes,

The 1960s, renowned as a decade for social experimentation, was also an era when corporations were experimenting with new structures and styles of work. Against the backdrop of the counterculture, social movements and consumer society, management writers and social theorists alike argued that a widespread transformation in values was afoot – a transformation that required new approaches to managing people and marketing to consumers.

Management thinkers drew on Maslow to develop new theories of ‘participatory management’ that professed to give workers more autonomy and authority in work. Responding to criticisms of bureaucratic conformity and alienation, management gurus wielded the hierarchy of needs to argue that psychological fulfilment was not opposed to but in fact compatible with corporate capitalism. We could work hard, make money, and be happy. Win/win, right?

Read the full piece here.