Latha Poonamallee, Milano School, The New School
Latha Poonamallee
Associate Professor of Management and Social Innovation
Chair of Management Programs
Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment
The New School
Managing for Social Justice: Harnessing Management Theory and Practice for Collective Good
Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023
This book, edited by Latha Poonamallee, Anita D. Howard (Case Western Reserve University), and Simy Joy (Indian Institute of Management) introduces a preliminary, integrative conceptual framework on the intersections between management and social justice with a view that the quest for social justice is not an endpoint rather an ongoing journey. With contributions from management scholars and practitioners, it highlights, examines, and explores the continuities and discontinuities, gains and losses, and struggles and successes in this quest for reimagining organizations as sites and vehicles for advancing social justice in the world.
To nurture and facilitate flourishing individuals and collectives, we need bolder, more innovative, and more creative models of engagement. Further, we need models for speaking and learning from different perspectives and building common ground through shared values of equity, connectivity, and compassion and moral expansiveness while recognizing the complexities of the world we inhabit via our organizations and the need to develop nuanced understandings of the same.
Contributing authors address questions such as: Are social justice and management mutually exclusive concepts? How can we draw on effective management for advancing social justice aims? How do we bend the arc of organizational life towards more justice? What are the rights and obligations of organizations and their members to the world at large, and to their local communities and societies?
Through its re-imagining of organizations and management as vehicles for social justice instead of just as tools of oppression, injustice, or regressive organizing in an extractive economy, this book brings together critical and positive organizational approaches challenging fundamental assumptions about how our society, people’s collectives, and workplaces are organized with capacity building, incremental change, sustained change, institutionalized change, dynamic ongoing problem-solving/ assessment/ redesign, and more.
Management scholars will learn the nuanced and complex intersections between management theories and practice and different types of justice/injustice in a global context both as antecedents to modern organizations and workplaces and the ways in which these intersectional actors advance and change the organizations and workplaces of the future.
Dr. Poonamallee is a tenured Associate Professor of Management & Social Innovation and Chair of the Faculty of Management at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment & School of Undergraduate Studies, and University Fellow at The New School.
She works on two major research areas both focused on how management, organizations, and leadership can be vehicles to create a more sustainable, prosperous, just, and equitable world.
She serves as Editor in Chief of the Society of Advancement of Management Journal, a preeminent journal that has been published for over 75 years. She also received a Fulbright Scholarship to assist Botswana government, USAID, and Botswana Civil Society in developing a nation-wide social entrepreneurship ecosystem.
She is also the co-founder and Chairperson of In-Med Prognostics, a neuroscience firm that uses AI and Deep Tech to develop brain health predictive analytics. This firm has received accolades such as the Falling Walls Conference (Germany), BIRAC grant (Government of India grant), and GE Health Care’s Edison Startup Collaboration Venture.
Dr. Poonamallee received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University, M.B.A. from Pondicherry University, and B.A. and M.A. from University of Madras.