New transmission mechanism for the sustainable and humanistic development of human capital: Demand for the ‘rigidity turn’

The author considers the becoming complex reality as developing nonlinearly and demanding new transmission mechanisms for the formation of human capital and also factors that contribute to changes in these realities: self-reflection of both nature and society; social gaps and traumas as becoming a ‘norm’; backward and forward trends; the increasing number of bifurcation points; ambivalences; side effects of digital innovations; consequences of global pandemics, etc. - all of them facilitate changes in the mechanism for the development of human capital. In the 1960s, G. Becker and T. Schultz introduced the term ‘human capital’ to start the studies of factors that make mechanisms of its formation more complex. Since then, many theories have been introduced to explain challenges to human capital, because various transmission mechanisms of influencing human capital have been formed as culturally and politically determined. Today, there are two challenges affecting the nature of human capital: digitalization and the global covid-19 pandemic create new requirements for human capital and change the transmission mechanism of its formation. However, the dominant pragmatic and formal-rational approaches to human capital distort its humanistic and sustainable components. The author insists on the need to create a new transmission mechanism for the sustainable and humanistic human capital development, which would include social-cultural and value elements, humanized digital technologies, bioethics and social epidemiology - in order to help social actors to function more effectively under the global complexity and nonlinear development. The author outlines the theory of the ‘rigidity turn’ as a social discourse, which aims at studying long-lived phenomena of social order and developing intellectual and practical foundations of the sustainable and humanistic formation of the human capital.