ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to improve the quality of people and relationships within Values-Based Organization (VBOs), and within the economy and civil society as well. It focuses on the crises within organizations, motivational and relational crises in particular. The economy and society as a whole are going through some epochal changes, much greater and more general than just the globalization of markets. Firms and markets are growing more and more distant from the model that people once implemented in order to imagine. The French anthropologist Louis Dumont has dedicated a significant part of his scientific career to the study of hierarchic societies and to their comparison with modern egalitarian societies. A civil society grows well when it makes possible the existence of more different types of organizations, when it respects and fosters their specificity and culture.
