Wietse Van Ransbeeck

🔨 Do we need a new society of builders? The word builder is everywhere today. In tech, in entrepreneurship, in politics. We celebrate founders, engineers, those who launch the “new.” But what if our idea of a builder is far too narrow? Hannah Arendt’s vita activa reminds us that human activity is richer than just producing or coding. She distinguished between labor (sustaining life), work (crafting durable things), and action (initiating something new in the public sphere). If we extend her thinking, we get a broader “builder’s vita activa” - a society of four kinds of builders: 1️⃣ Sustainers, who hold life together through care, maintenance, regeneration. 2️⃣ Makers, who shape tools, infrastructures, and institutions. 3️⃣ Initiators, who dare to begin something new in public. 4️⃣ Meaning-Makers, who tell the stories that give endurance to our deeds. But here’s the tension: each of these roles is in crisis. Sustainers are indispensable, yet undervalued and feminized. Simone de Beauvoir warned that women were historically confined to repetitive immanence, denied the projects of transcendence. Today, we still romanticize “care” while outsourcing the tedious parts often to those with the least power. Unless care is made visible, fairly shared, and properly rewarded, this quadrant collapses under strain. Makers, ie. the engineers, founders, builders in the narrow sense face another challenge: automation. As AI absorbs routine making, human craft risks being hollowed out. If we don’t guard against reducing work to pure efficiency, we risk losing not just jobs but meaning: the pride in building something durable. Initiators - those who act together in public - face shrinking space. Action depends on plurality and visibility, yet today’s public spheres are fragile, captured, or algorithmically distorted. Without scaffolds that protect plurality and resist capture, collective action becomes brittle, fleeting. Meaning-Makers, our artists, educators and journalists remain sidelined, seen as “extras” in a world obsessed with KPIs. Yet without them, even the greatest initiatives vanish into silence. Action needs memory, stories, institutions that carry meaning forward. So what does this mean for a new society of builders? It means we can’t reduce building to the start-up founder myth. A flourishing society values all four builder roles: ⭐️ It revalues care, making it visible and fairly distributed. ⭐️ It protects human craft from being hollowed out by automation. ⭐️ It invests in civic infrastructure so initiators can act without capture. ⭐️ It funds meaning and memory so our actions endure. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a provocation. In an age of automation, care crises, and shrinking public space, the challenge is to rebalance and revalorize what it means to build. If we want transformation that is durable, just, and human, we must expand our idea of who the builders really are and unite them! School of Management SoM-HSG auch ein Zielbild?

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