Based on Hannah Arendt’s notion of love, this article develops a life affirmative ethics, which we argue can guard against indifference and evil and enable ethical agency. In being the means through which existential journeys are made to what gave and gives birth to us, storytelling is important for such ethics. The love of our relations, communities, places, landscapes, oceans, family, people and animals is embedded in such storytelling. She referred to it as thinking—what she called a person’s two-in-one conversation with themself. In this storytelling, we engage in conversations with life. We use two stories of new sustainability managers to think through how love of the world—amor mundi—can help enable ethical agency in corporate contexts. Pondering over and thinking about the richness of life including pain, violence, struggle, conflict as well as joy and happiness are parts of an affirmative attitude to life that is part of maturing as a person, and which may help us learn to manage sustainably. Through Arendt, we learn that love is a question of mutual loving, where true solidarity with others relies on curious and compassionate thinking. This happens through revisiting our becoming and our experiences of the good life. Such thinking is the way in which we collect ourselves from dispersion, resist power relations and maintain a curious and caring relationship to the world’s plurality.

This chapter introduces Hannah Arendt’s perspective on action and storytelling as relevant for the understanding of storytelling as organizing beyond organizational boundaries. A theoretical framework combining Arendt’s concepts with David Boje’s future-oriented approach to storytelling and Barbara Czarniawska’s approach to organizing as the institutionalization of action nets is used to analyze how Closing the Gap, a story from the World Health Organization, was used during the development of a strategy for social sustainability in the city of Malmö. The story enacts or suggests different organizing logics and principles when told in different contexts. The implications concern the politics of social sustainability when framed as questions of public health and when using Arendtian concepts for studying storytelling as organizing.

This paper constructs an ethics of managing by reading Latour’s notion of Gaia with Arendt’s notion of storytelling. Gaia implies reframing the ethical foundation for making stories as well as it has ontological consequences for how we perceive stories. We suggest reframing storytelling into storymaking. This concept attunes to how storymaking is part of making life that becomes through, relies on, and is answerable to multiple other lives: human as well as nonhuman. Second, storymaking allows depicting managers’ imagination of themselves and what they do in the complex webs of relations that managers are part of. We put storymaking to work in discussing the processes of translation that occur when new managers transition from management education for sustainability to work life. Our re-storying of their stories attunes to their ethical compass and how they enact it into being. We attune to the tensions involved in building a stable foundation for their storymaking and the compromises they make in coping with fleeting and, at times, chaotic organizational realities. Attuning to how organizations make life and affect the conditions of caring for life is important for judging organizational action. Second, storymaking allows understanding of managing as a process that involves making stories about life spiritually and materially, thereby stabilizing life amid chaos. 

Leadership education has become a billion-dollar business and is a popular field among researchers and students in universities. Multiple debates about what leadership is and how to perform it flourish. In a recent debate book, Anders Örtenblad (2018) has collected contributions that debate whether leadership should be a profession. Jørgensen and Svane (2018) argue that the answer is no to this question from the premises that leadership education would then be defined by the powerful and because it would entail an instrumentalization and standardization of leadership. Hertel and Fast (2018) suggest that leadership is connected to a certain way of being in a context. Therefore, they argue, that it is impossible to define universal principles of leadership. These arguments against turning leadership into a profession are grounded in the idea that leadership is a situated, relational and collective practice rather than a personal and a technical practice. Turning leadership into a profession implies the assumption that leadership emerges from the actions of superior individuals. These debates connect to our position regarding the central theme of the book, which is that we are for leaderless management. Using Hannah Arendt’s (1998) distinction between action and work, we develop a position within leaderless management, which we call leaderless leadership. This position is founded upon action and involves specifying the critical dimension of democratic participation in decisions that concern the whole organization. Arendt argues that action is where people become political among other people. It presumes the perception of a common space among them. Action is thus where people assume responsibility for a world they have in common with others (Arendt 1998, pp. 50–55). Action is etymologically associated with leading and is not only a natural part of the human condition, but also an obligation because it implies taking responsibility for the complex matters of the world.

Hannah Arendt is not one of the more frequently cited names in today’s dignity discourse, despite having made an early contribution to the debate popularized (McCrudden 2008) by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In her book, On the Origins of Totalitarianism, written around the time of the declaration and when many were experiencing rightlessness, superfluousness, and statelessness, she devotes a chapter to “the perplexities of the rights of man,” in which she formulates her view of the “right to have rights.” In her foreword, she states that “human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth” (OT, p. ix).