By Ulf Johanson and Emmanuel Aboagye

In 1642, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, a captured field marshal was worth 20,000 thalers. A colonel was worth 1,000. An ordinary private, 8. Captors weighed the cost of keeping a prisoner alive against the revenue his rank could fetch, and when states later stripped soldiers of that market value, casualties rose (Frey & Buhofer, 1986). It is a brutal illustration of a habit of mind that never really left us. This is an economic practice of putting a price on a person, then reasoning from the price rather than the person.

We open our new book, Pluralistic Economics: A Philosophical Focus on Workplace Health and Social Sustainability, with that episode not because we think today’s workplaces resemble a seventeenth-century battlefield, but because the underlying logic is more familiar than we would like. From Roman Cato’s ledgers of enslaved labor to Adam Smith’s comparison of a skilled worker to “an expensive machine,” economic thinking has repeatedly reduced human beings to inputs to be optimized. Modern management accounting, occupational health calculators, and return-on-investment models often do the same thing in gentler language. They ask what a healthy, engaged, or absent employee is worth, rather than what is owed to them.

This book is our attempt to put the question back the right way round.

Who this book is for?

We wrote Pluralistic Economics for people who sit at the intersection of two conversations that too rarely meet: the economics and management literature on cost, value, and organizational governance, and the philosophical and ethical literature on human dignity, ownership, and what a good working life requires. That makes it a book for occupational health and safety researchers and practitioners, management accountants and controllers, HR and organizational-development scholars, students of business ethics and political economy, and policymakers working on social sustainability, wherever they are frustrated by economic models that treat people as line items.

You do not need a background in heterodox economics to follow the argument. What you do need is a willingness to ask why our calculation tools count what they count, and what they leave out.

‘A stimulating and timely book on workplace health and social sustainability. Grounded in empirical evidence on occupational safety and governance, it develops into a wide-ranging examination of value, ethics, and ideas of the human in economic thought– a rare combination of philosophical depth and rigor on what an economy owes to the people who work within it.’
– Jun Yao, Meiji University, Japan

What the book covers

Mainstream economics training still tends to reward students for mastering abstract models “at the expense of understanding how real economies function within social, ethical, and historical contexts.” Spash (2024) has argued that orthodox economics is simply not equipped for today’s intertwined social, ecological, and human crises, and calls for a shift toward heterodox, pluralist alternatives grounded in fairness and ecological integrity. We share that diagnosis, and Pluralistic Economics is our attempt to apply it concretely to the world of work.

The book unfolds in three parts. Part I, The Practical Mechanics, starts to defines social sustainability, confronts the “hard numbers” behind sickness absence and presenteeism, interrogates the biases built into common calculation tools, and shows how stakeholder-oriented governance can turn employee health from a hidden cost into a genuine strategic asset.

Part II, The Philosophical and Existential Bridge, is where the argument widens. We look at the ethical paradigms, consequentialist and deontological, that quietly underpin every organizational decision, at how societal norms and “business character” produce moral blindness, and at a central existential choice we borrow from Erich Fromm: whether an economy organizes life around having (ownership, accumulation) or around being (activity valued for its own sake). We argue for economies that move people from what we call, following that tradition, the Realm of Necessity toward the Realm of Freedom.

Part III, Application and Vision, brings the argument home through the Mo and Domsjö case study of economic democracy, examines how socio-technical design can protect human dignity against the surveillance pressures of AI-driven management, and closes with a compass for what a pluralistic economy could look like in practice.

Throughout, we push back against three common objections to pluralism in economics, identified by Gräbner and Strunk (2020), that economics is already pluralist enough, that greater plurality would emerge on its own if it were needed, and that pluralism is simply unscientific. None of these, we argue, survive contact with the scale of today’s social and ecological crises. Pluralism, done carefully, is not a retreat from rigor; it is an expansion of relevance.

An invitation

We begin the book with a stanza from Hávamál, the Old Norse collection of wisdom sayings, about the watchful guest who learns not by dominating the conversation but by paying attention. It is an odd epigraph for an economics book, and that is rather the point. We would like readers to approach workplace health, cost calculation, and organizational governance the same way: attentively, relationally, and without assuming that what can be measured is the same as what matters.

If that resonates, we hope you will read on. The Introduction sets out the full argument and the road map for all ten chapters in detail; this post is simply the doorway in.

---

Ulf Johanson is Emeritus Professor, formerly at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.

Emmanuel Aboagye is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.