By Ashley Bovin, Library Assistant
What comes to mind when you think of “success” in work and business? Measurables like reduced costs, financial growth, and better quality products and services?
What about feelings of connection and belonging, peace, purpose, happiness, and hope?
Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work by Jess Rimington and Joanna L. Cea makes the case that those outcomes are not only possible, but are already happening in many organizations—in addition to those qualities we’d typically attribute to success.
The book begins by illustrating how our cultural ideas around work are based in the values and systems of capitalism and wealth extraction. This has resulted in what the authors’ mentor, Dr. Virgil A. Wood, has coined a “loveless economy”. Because the well-being of the worker is rarely considered in achieving success and maintaining “the economy”, workers end up feeling drained, disconnected, and unable to care well for themselves and their communities. We’re stuck working in ways that don’t work, and perpetuating these systems, because we believe “that’s just the way it is”.
To break out of these loveless patterns, the authors present the need to create “beloved economies” that would serve, rather than deteriorate, the health and well-being of our selves, our families, and our communities.
Readers won’t need a strong grasp of economics to understand and appreciate this book. The authors clarify that “...at its core, an economy is simply a shared set of decisions created by people to manage the collective resources available”.
They further explain: “An economy is affected and created by the everyday decisions we make in the places where we work—whether the work happens in a business, a government agency, or a volunteer neighborhood association. [...] We make economies real by behaving according to our belief that they exist” (p. 65).
If we want to shift away from the loveless economy, they say, we can—because we are not separate from the economy. We can make different everyday decisions, individually and together.
Through several rounds of interviews over a span of years, the authors and their collaborators identified “breakout actors” who seemed to be working differently than “business as usual”. Ongoing research distilled these seven common and interdependent practices among those breakout actors, unpacked with care in their own chapters:
- Share decision-making power
- Prioritize relationships
- Reckon with history
- Seek difference
- Source from multiple ways of knowing
- Trust there is time
- Prototype early and often
Shorter chapters profile a variety of breakout actors, showing that these practices are not only working, but revitalizing for workplaces and communities.
Beloved Economies is hefty at close to 400 pages, but engaging and easy to read. The book revisits ideas often, which some readers might find repetitive and tedious. However, this also seems necessary as a way of helping readers break out of the lifelong spell of business as usual that the book seeks to help us snap out of.
Anyone who’s wondered why it’s so normalized that we work in ways that don't work, or who wants to help build new ways of working, will find Beloved Economies a refreshing and fortifying read.
