Frontiers of Business Ethics – serie

The book is an exploration of the relevance of Indian classical wisdom in reorienting modern management. It highlights the urgent need for facilitating an internally directed spiritual dimension to business management, including management education as an alternative to instrumental rationality and extreme materialistic orientation in today’s profit-driven business world.The book presents spirituality or enlightened consciousness as the essence of a transformational or rather transcendental leader to improve the quality of work-life within by creating a humane and enduring organizational culture. It does this by drawing inspiration from modern Indian leaders like Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda. It also offers insights into alternative sources and methods of learning in management and life from ancient Indian wisdom and selected European literature to infuse creativity, joy, meaning and purpose into work and life. The book facilitates East-West dialogue on value-based holistic management in a globalized business scenario. In the modern business paradigm dominated by western management principles and practices, the book attempts to offer an Indian model of management founded on spirituality, human values and sustainability to deal with the alarming crises in a pandemic-stricken world by suggesting alternative ways of thinking and living for a sane, happy and sustainable future for both our planet and people.

How can businesses and business leaders help solve the big ethical, social and ecological challenges of today? Within this context this book offers theoretical and practical approaches to making the world a better place for existing and future generations. It uses diverse, often multidimensional frames of reference and illustrates them with real-life cases to show positive solutions. The author’s broad professional background and humanistic worldview are reflected in his application of psychological and virtue-oriented theories as well as philosophical approaches. Some of the articles have an essay format, others share his experiences and experiments in his ethics classes using roleplays to cultivate empathic and prudent ethical behaviour. A primary motivation of the book is to inspire leaders as well as teachers and students of leadership and business by enriching their worldviews to see ethics as a fundamental aspect at all levels of economic activity.

Competitive economics produces an enormous abundance of goods and services but at an intolerable environmental and social cost. Competition has become an end in itself, which leads to detrimental effects on nature, society and future generations. A change of paradigm is needed. Business should respect the ecological and social limits in which it operates and embed its activities in the natural and social systems. This book promotes a collaborative attitude of doing business based on a positive view of the self and others. Theoretical contributions, reflections, cases, examples, and initiatives collected in the book show that a collaborative enterprise is not only possible but also a feasible and desirable alternative to the current, self-defeating, managerial models. Innovative firms seeking to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with all of their stakeholders while producing values for their business ecosystems represent well-grounded hopes for a really sustainable future.

Current theories of leadership, spirituality and ethics are inadequate for the global, rapidly changing and complex environment in which leaders work today. Emerging from this book’s critical analysis comes a new theory of leadership: co-charismatic leadership. This does not mean leadership focused in ‘charisma’, or the special qualities or charm of an individual. Charisma originates from the Greek word for gift or grace. Rather it emphasises the relational nature of charisma, as both shared throughout the community and dependent upon mutual relationships within the community. The charismata are in effect virtues, to be practised in the community by all members, hence the ‘co’ in the title. The authors argue for a leadership that enables virtues, informed by the ongoing narrative of and dialogue in the community, to be practised in the community and beyond. These virtues enable the practice of responsibility, and taking that responsibility for ideas, values and practice is itself central to leadership. Through the practice of responsibility everybody in the organisation becomes a leader in some way. The task of the authorised leader is to enable all this. This book will appeal to both practitioner and academic audiences alike as it provides an engaging mix of theory and practical application which tests and applies the concepts explored in a range of practical case studies.

The centenary of E.F. Schumacher’s birth (1911-1977) offered an urgent opportunity to revisit his work and life. Against the background of the crisis at the beginning of this century, reconsidering Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful or frugality paradigm makes clear that advances in responsible economics continue to be a priority. This book contains the proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference of the European SPES Forum on ‘Responsibility in Economics and Business: The Legacy of E.F. Schumacher’, which was organised in September 2011 by the Centre for Ethics of the University of Antwerp in collaboration with the Business Ethics Center of Budapest. The aims of this conference were to celebrate the 100th anniversary of E.F. Schumacher’s birth and to engage with Schumacher’s vision to help address the present need for responsibility in economics and business. The answers to our current economic crisis presented in this book prove that the legacy of an economist and philosopher like Schumacher are not confined to a utopian economic paradigm. Utopian economic paradigms are concerned with a better economic situation in the future. Schumacher reconsidered today, however, makes it clear that society needs responsible economics invested in the sustainability of the globe, right now.

This book addresses ethical and spiritual issues in economics. The central idea advanced in the book is that the extreme focus on the self by economic actors leads to the destruction of both material and non-material values.The assumptions of self-interest in behavior represent the core of mainstream economics today. From this perspective, the welfare of economic agents depends on their own consumption; their goal is to maximize their own welfare; and their choice is guided by the pursuit of their own goals.Throughout the book the author argues that self-interest-based actions and policies have a detrimental impact on nature, future generations, and society at large. If we want to survive and flourish in the material world we have to transcend the self and embrace wholeness. This value shift requires enormous changes in economics, politics and social life, but there may not be any other option in light of the current state of ecological degradation and human suffering.

Globalization and information technology are driving the world into a new era. Is it the responsibility of business to pursue the common good – and more precisely, to participate in the construction of the global common good? This book brings together contributions from various disciplines, written by scholars who are at the forefront of this debate. It provides multiple insights into a tripartite relationship: business, globalization and the common good. It helps explain why the business sphere will probably not be in a position to ignore the common good much longer, and why this latter concept, widely ignored in today’s management realm, is likely to become part of tomorrow’s corporate policies and practices in the global context. Finally, this work opens up a plethora of avenues for future research, calling for the development of transdisciplinary approaches and for the elaboration of a research program embracing theoretical, empirical and spiritual perspectives to tackle this complex issue.

Recent years have seen a great debate and much progress in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Headway has been made in the development of the CSR agenda and the dissemination of management models. All these advances have been accompanied by an ideological debate that paradoxically always leads to a call for greater clarification of what is meant by CSR. This book stands at this crossroads. It can be seen as a chronicle and at the same time a synthesis of this whole debate. Yet ultimately it proposes a way of understanding CSR and a way of approaching it, and as such also takes sides in the debate. By making a distinction between social action, corporate social responsibility, the responsible and sustainable company and the relational company, the author clarifies the various ways of approaching the relationship between business and society, and opts for the expression ‘relational company’ as a reference framework for providing insight into the new role that the company can play in contemporary society, linked to the idea of citizenship. From this perspective, the author offers a re-reading of fundamental issues for business management such as the stakeholder relationship, the development of organizational values and ethics, accountability, and the meaning of success in business.

This book examines frugality as an ideal and an ‘art de vivre’ which implies a low level of material consumption and a simple lifestyle, to open the mind for spiritual goods as inner freedom, social peace and justice or the quest for God or ‘ultimate reality’. By rational choice we can develop a more frugal and sufficient way of life, but material temptations can always overwrite our ecological, social and ethical considerations. But the spiritual case for frugality is strong enough. Spiritually based frugal practices may lead to rational outcomes such as reducing ecological destruction, social disintegration and the exploitation of future generations.

In this socio-philosophical book, the author explains why gifts are not just moral expressions but function as binding social practices. The first part concerns the conceptual analysis of the logic of the gift whereas the second part focuses on practical expressions of gift practices in a business context, more particularly bribery and philanthropy. How can gifts turn into bribes? Why does corporate philanthropy not necessarily imply some form of altruism? Is corruption a mere expression of cultural characteristics such as discretion and loyalty? Clear criteria are provided within the logic of the gift to distinguish gifts from bribes. Another goal is to clarify the myth of corporate donations and how such presumably good corporate behaviour could either damage or enhance the long-term reputation of a firm. Gift practices are sometimes exploited blatantly to cover up less benevolent behaviour. Understanding gift practices within a business context will allow practitioners to pursue an appropriate strategy of corporate social responsibility. Indeed, despite its inherent ambivalence, a gift should be understood as a worthy ethical and social practice within a specific cultural or organizational context.