Social Justice for Sustainable Management

The changes in modern welfare states engendered by globalization, environmental issues and social needs encourage the search for innovation in management and public administration models. Democratic values, social justice and expectations of people are regarded as the main concepts guiding and innovations in management and leadership today. The purpose of this study is to compare the conceptions of social justice and social sustainability, to assess empirically the changes in perceived social justice and social cohesion during structural socioeconomic transformations and to provide guidelines for future development of sustainable management models. Findings show that in the case of different levels of economic development the perception of the population of social justice in different countries is related to the level of economic development, but for countries that have similar levels of economic development the relationship between perceived social justice and the GDP per capita is insignificant. Thus these findings reveal that despite similar economic development and the same socioeconomic development models there were significant differences in the assessment of social justice of a country by its population and countries with higher ratings of perceived social justice after a while tend to have a more cohesive society with lower levels of social exclusion.