Abstract
The concept of dignity has traditionally been framed by ideas of human rights, such as respect, worth, and esteem. It is a notion that does not usually extend beyond human social interactions within our homes and workplaces. This is largely explained by powerful and ancient distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, based not only on physical and genomic differences but on our vastly different experiential and behavioural registers and our capacities for choice, action, and cognition. The attendant status gap that tracks these apparent differences sustains the ‘moral categories’ of animal and human and helps explain why we tend not to think of dignity as an animal quality. For millennia, however, humans have relied upon the productive capacities of other species for transport, defence, law enforcement and food. The important work that other animals do for the human animal prompts us to think more deeply about the organizational status of that animal and their dignity in labour.
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Notes
- 1.
We recognize that the term ‘animals’ does precisely that but we use it (somewhat self-consciously) here for simplicity in referring to nonhuman creatures. We do not include insects, plants, bacterial or cellular organisms within our working definition as we feel these warrant separate specialist analysis. We are aware of the charge of mammalian hegemony (Buller 2015) that such an approach has the potential to engender but it is well beyond the scope of the current chapter to look meticulously at dignity and all nonhuman species.
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Hamilton, L., Mitchell, L. (2017). Dignity and Species Difference Within Organizations. In: Kostera, M., Pirson, M. (eds) Dignity and the Organization. Humanism in Business Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55562-5_4
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