Simply, a Home

by Christine Marlet | Dec 4, 2023 | All, Women and Men Cooperation at Home | 0 comments

Every year, the Family and Business Conciliation Centre of the IAE Business School, Austral University, Argentina publishes a Guide to Good Practice to help business organisations towards better and more conscious corporate family responsibility

This year’s Guide, presented a few days ago in Buenos Aires, is entitled ‘Towards the care of human ecology: family, business and society’. Our director, Antonio Argandoña, has written the first chapter in which he highlights the importance of the home, as a physical space, as a place for relationships and dealing with the community, as an area for vulnerability and dependency, and as an environment for care and work.

Prof. Argandoña argues that home can mean different things. Its dictionary definition is: roof, residence, seat, dwelling etc but he adds that it is much more than that: it is the place for a person’s private life, to which they retreat to restore order and regain control over life.

Home Renaissance Foundation has published several books on home and its meaning and function in society, and Argandoña who has edited many of these publications, takes the opportunity to quote some phrases from academics in ‘The Home: Multidisciplinary Reflections’.

For example, Marta Bertolaso and Alfredo Marcos say that the home is ‘the open space for the silent flowering of the human’. According to M. C. Patrao Neves in her chapter “Self and others: Home as a cradle on a non-violent relationship”, home is ‘the most hidden, private, safe and comfortable place for the ‘I’ (self), where it is sheltered from the natural world, to which it belongs as its most intimate refuge, and where it addresses the world and the ‘other’, opening itself to transcendence’.

Philosophical and anthropological definitions require a little more time to think about than we usually spend when reading an article of this kind, but I would like to delve briefly into one of Argandoña’s reflections: “The household is not a voluntary organisation, to which one chooses to belong; it is necessary and “natural”, although it is also the result of the decisions and actions of the people who form it“.

The home exists “out of obligation”, because of the very important social function it fulfils, because we have needs for food, for physical protection, for shelter, for care when we are ill or tired, and even when we are not, because human beings are social and need to relate, to belong to something, for something to remind us of who we are. Our homes are our roots.

In fact, M. Douglas writes in ‘The idea of a home: a kind of space’ (1991), that “like any human creation, the home can and does have faults: it can be a realm of power, of loneliness and suffering, of hostility and oppression”. But we have not been able to create, throughout history, any other first or basic community that fulfils so well the essential function of home.

For all these reasons, as Argandoña explains in his chapter, it is essential to reach companies with this type of reflection and complex analysis of our reality. Workplaces are the other significant communities to which we dedicate a lot of time and effort, we give the fruits of our talent, and without a doubt, should understand and contemplate where we come from and the mark that home leaves on us. It is through this understanding that we can find the best practices for work-life balance together.

Angela de Miguel-Director of Communication Human renaissance Foundations.

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