Espiritualidad Y Negocios

Society and Economy 34 (2012) 3, pp. 489–514 DOI: 10.1556/SocEc.34.2012.3.8

SPIRITUALITY AND BUSINESS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY OVERVIEW
LUK BOUCKAERT1 – LÁSZLÓ ZSOLNAI2
2

Professor emeritus, Catholic University of Leuven Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest, Business Ethics Center E-mail: laszlo.zsolnai@uni-corvinus.hu

1

The paper gives an interdisciplinary overview of theemerging field of spirituality and business. It uses insights from business ethics, theology, neuroscience, psychology, gender studies, and philosophy to economics, management, organizational science, and banking and refers to different religious convictions including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the Baha’i faith, and the North-American aboriginal worldview. Theauthors argue that the materialistic management paradigm has failed. They explore new values for post-materialistic management: frugality, deep ecology, trust, reciprocity, responsibility for future generations, and authenticity. Within this framework profit and growth are no longer ultimate aims but elements in a wider set of values. Similarly, cost-benefit calculations are no longer the essence ofmanagement but are part of a broader concept of wisdom in leadership. Spirit-driven businesses require intrinsic motivation for serving the common good and using holistic evaluation schemes for measuring success. The Palgrave Handbook of Business and Spirituality, edited by the authors, is a response to developments that simultaneously challenge the “business as usual” mindset. Keywords: religion andspirituality, spiritually inspired economics, spiritually-based leadership, business ethics, post-materialistic management, economic wisdom JEL-codes: A13, M10, Z12

1. INTRODUCTION

Business ethics as an academic discipline and a management practice related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It was a promising movement in the shadow of theglobalization process. It started in the United States and followed five to ten years later in all industrialized coun1588-9726/$20.00 © 2012 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

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LUC BOUCKAERT – LÁSZLÓ ZSOLNAI

tries, including those in Europe. Some companies developed their first codes of ethics, mission statements and charters of values at that time. Seminars were held for managers in order to lookat ethical dilemmas and analyze ethical case studies. The Body Shop, the well-known cosmetics company, went a step further in the 1990s by launching a major social and ethical audit of its operations. In its famous report “People, Planet and Profits”, Shell applied the notion of sustainable entrepreneurship to a new sort of reporting, which measured and analyzed not only the company’s financialgoals and results, but also its ecological and social goals. At the end of the 1990s business ethics was considered a key factor in building good reputations, gaining trust and motivating people. In its Green Paper (2001), the European Union considered CSR a new instrument of social regulation. However, the success of business ethics also had a downside. The easy talk of ethics worked at the sametime as a dazzling narrative, creating the illusion that good ethics is good business and, just one step further, that good business is good ethics. After 2000 we were first confronted by a wave of scandals related to the ICT sector (think of the cases of Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, Ahold, Lernout and Hauspie). In 2008 a second bubble burst and brought us a banking crisis, a debt crisis and aneconomic recession. As a result of these crises, people lost their confidence not only in the market mechanisms of self-regulation but also in business ethics as a system of moral self-regulation fuelling relations of trust and good reputation. A period of self-reflection on the role and nature of business ethics has started. The crucial question is not “Do we need more business ethics?” but rather...