01 Nov Read and react to the following 2017 article by Lloyd Sandelands (in the?Resources section)?in the context of leadership that includes important financial
Read and react to the following 2017 article by Lloyd Sandelands (in the Resources section) in the context of leadership that includes important financial responsibility in a sport business position with a focus on how a sport organization engages with the outside market.
Include Biblical integration in the topic with a Scripture connection or reference citations and reference to at least two sources in addition to those provided in the prompt.
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The Real Mystery of Positive Business: A Response from Christian Faith
Article in Journal of Business Ethics · November 2017
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3186-7
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Journal of Business Ethics ISSN 0167-4544 J Bus Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10551-016-3186-7
The Real Mystery of Positive Business: A Response from Christian Faith
Lloyd E. Sandelands
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The Real Mystery of Positive Business: A Response from Christian Faith
Lloyd E. Sandelands1
Received: 27 July 2015 / Accepted: 19 April 2016
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract I ask why an increasing number of business
scholars today are drawn to an idea of ‘‘positive business’’
that they cannot account for scientifically. I answer that it is
because they are attracted to the real mystery of positive
business which is its incomprehensible and unspeakable
divinity. I begin by asking why the research literature has
yet to speak of positive business plainly and with one
voice. I find that it lacks for the right words because it
comes to human being in business as a science attuned to
its objects rather than as a religion attuned to its spirit.
Next, I say what I can about the real mystery of business,
keeping in mind that we can say about it only what we can
say about God. This brings me at last to the Christian
insight that human being, in business and everywhere else,
is the mystery of Jesus Christ in whom we are reconciled to
God. Business is positively human as it invites us to be as
Christ, to be a fully human person in joyful communion
with others in God. This, in sum, is how to speak plainly
and with one voice of the positive business that our hearts
desire but our science cannot say.
Keywords Positive business � Being � God � Metaphysics � Thomas Aquinas � Christian humanism
Introduction
Imagine a business as a joyful solidarity of persons for the
common good. Imagine its good to be that of each person
and that of all persons together. Imagine its solidarity to be
that of an integral communion of persons who are unique
and fully alive in their individuality. And imagine its joy to
be that of being fully human, the joy greater than any
passing pleasure. Pure fantasy? There are businesses today
that reach for this ideal and have been described in its
terms, including such names as AES, Herman Miller,
Menlo Innovations, Reehl Manufacturing, ServiceMaster,
Southwest Airlines, Tom’s of Maine, and Zingermans’
Community of Businesses (see, e.g., Baker 2011; Bakke
2005; Benefiel 2008; Blanchard and Barrett 2011; Chappell
1993; De Pree 1997; Hoffer-Gittell 2005; Nayar 2010;
Ouimet 2010; Pollard 1996; Sheridan 2013; Weinzweig
2010). This ideal is given voice by William Pollard, CEO
of ServiceMaster:
In ServiceMaster, leadership begins with our objec-
tives: To honor God in all we do. To help people
develop. To pursue excellence. And to grow prof-
itably. Thus, our role and obligation as leaders
involves more than what a person does on the job. We
must also be involved in what that person is
becoming and how the work environment is con-
tributing to the process (p. 129).
This ideal is remarkable because stands athwart a broad
cynicism about business today—too often celebrated by
novelists and Hollywood—that sees business as a selfish,
cruel, and unrepentant scramble for wealth, a worship of
Mammon. And this ideal is perplexing because it calls
business executives to run business in a new way. What,
they ask, should the business of business be, if it is not
& Lloyd E. Sandelands
1 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
123
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DOI 10.1007/s10551-016-3186-7
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business itself (Sandelands 2009)? And to what end should
business point, if not to the profits of business owners
(Friedman 1970)?
Positive Organizational Scholarship
Into this milieu has stepped a new field of business
scholarship called Positive Organizational Scholarship
(POS).1 Founded in 2003 at the University of Michigan
(see Cameron et al. 2003), POS ‘‘is concerned primarily
with the study of especially positive outcomes, processes,
and attributes of organizations and their members… [it]
does not represent a single theory, but it focuses on
dynamics that are typically described by words such as
excellence, thriving, flourishing, abundance, resilience, or
virtuousness, … [and it] is distinguished from traditional
organizational studies in that it seeks to understand what
represents and approaches the best of the human condi-
tion’’ (p. 4). If not stated in so many words, positive
organization or positive business is as above: a joyful
solidarity of persons for the common good. Its positive
outcomes, processes, and attributes are for the common
good of persons and organizations; its dynamics of excel-
lence, thriving, flourishing, abundance, resilience, and
virtuousness are those of integral human solidarity; and its
‘‘best of the human condition’’ is the joy of human persons
fully alive. In 2011, eight years from its founding, positive
organizational scholarship was recognized as a subject for
an Oxford Handbook which gathered 79 chapters from 152
authors from around the world (Cameron and Spreitzer
2012). The burgeoning interest in POS has not been con-
fined to business scholars but has come also from business
students and activists who are likewise drawn to its humane
promise.2
Positive organizational scholarship is of natural interest
to business ethicists because it speaks to their central and
abiding question; ‘‘What is the first good of business; the
good that makes sense of and gives order to its other
goods?’’ Turning from the prevailing idea that the first
good of business is profit or shareholder value, POS points
toward a rival first good, which in its founders’ words is
‘‘the best of the human condition’’ (Cameron et al. 2003,
p. 4), and lately ‘‘the highest aspirations of humankind’’
(Cameron and Spreitzer 2012, p. 2). In so saying, POS
orients business to a good of a different kind than economic
value; not to a good that Aristotle in Metaphysics (XII, p.3)
and Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica (prima pars,
question 5) called ‘‘pleasant’’ because it pleases in some
way (as might wealth or power), and not to a good that they
called ‘‘useful’’ because it leads to pleasant goods (as
wealth might buy consumer goods); but to the good that
they called ‘‘honest’’ which is not good because it is
pleasant or useful but is good because it is loved for its own
sake. The good of positive business, loved for its own sake,
is the honest good of human being itself (‘‘the best of the
human condition,’’ and ‘‘the highest aspirations of
humankind’’). This is the good of human virtuousness (see
Manz et al. 2008). And this is the good that underlies and
informs virtue ethics (Pinckaers 1995).
However, while positive organizational scholarship
offers many synonyms for this good—such as flourishing,
purpose, resilience, compassion, and high-quality connec-
tion—it has yet to pin down the fundamental idea of the
positive that underlies and joins these. Critics of POS thus
point out that its many ideas about ‘‘the positive’’ have yet
to come into one voice (see Caza and Carroll 2012; Dutton
and Glynn 2007), that its many ideas of the positive are not
clearly distinguished from ideas of the negative (Fineman
2006), and that in some cases what is called positive may
be the negative of political or class oppression (Simpson
et al. 2014). And indeed, even the POS handbook editors
Cameron and Spreitzer concede the criticism. After noting
that there are scores of ideas about what ‘‘positive’’ means,
they come to the surprising conclusion that:
Precise conceptual definition, however, does not
necessarily provide scientific clarity: consider for
example, definitions of terms such as ‘‘love’’ or
‘‘effectiveness.’’ people know what love is through
experience rather than through an explanation of its
conceptual boundaries or nomological network
(Cameron and Spreitzer 2012, p. 2).
With these words we can ask whether, in their struggle
to define the positive, POS scholars have come upon that
dilemma familiar to students of business ethics generally,
namely that the human good is beyond science to say. This
is to see, as philosopher Hume (1777) admonished, that an
objectivizing science can be about only ‘‘what is’’ and not
about ‘‘what ought to be.’’ The idea that Cameron and
Spreitzer come to—that people know the good of positive
business in the same way that they know the good of
love—suggests that a science of POS can speak no more
authoritatively of the former than it can of the latter. Per-
haps it is POS’s adherence to the ways and means of sci-
ence—in hopes perhaps to claim its legitimacy and
authority—that has been its hidden liability. Perhaps, the
good of positive business is the sort of thing that must be
known in another way, the sort of thing that must be
known, with philosopher and polymath Pascal (1950), not
1 http://www.positiveorgs.bus.umic.edu/. 2 Among the latter are the Economy of Communion as part of the
worldwide Focolare movement (see Gallagher and Buckeye 2014)
and the Blueprint for Better Business, http://www.blueprintforbusi
ness.org/.
L. E. Sandelands
123
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by reason alone, but by reason informed by the heart and
by faith.
In this article, I address this philosophical dilemma by
asking why positive business scholars are attracted to an
ideal of positive business that they have not yet been able
to reckon with scientifically. By article’s end I hope to
establish that this is because they are attracted to the real
mystery of business which is its incomprehensible and
largely unspeakable divinity. Positive business, I find, is
the real presence of the divine that we know in our hearts
before we know it by the reason. This positive good is not
(as typically supposed) an exception to the rule of business,
but is the rule of business because God is always with us
(even if we are unaware of or deny His presence). Of
course the idea that God is with us is hardly new and hardly
my own. It is ages old (dating at least to Aristotle); it is the
subject of virtually every theology; and it is especially and
pointedly the lesson of Christianity which identifies us with
God intimately in the person of the God-Man Jesus Christ.
In and from Christ, we learn in detail ‘‘who’’ we are in the
eyes and heart of God. Christian humanism, I conclude, is
the real and abiding mystery of positive business.
I begin by asking why positive organizational scholar-
ship has yet to speak precisely of positive business. I find
that it lacks the right words because it comes to business as
a science attuned to its visible objects rather than as a
religion attuned to its invisible being. Science is faith in
ourselves.3 It consists of the things we ‘‘create’’ when we
render our experiences in abstract terms of ‘‘objects’’—
objects which, even after we have invented them, we may
presume to be real and to have been there all the while.
Religion is faith in God. It consists of the things we
‘‘discern’’ when we take their real being into our own and
by reason aided by faith ascertain what they are and mean.
Next, I say what I can about the real mystery of positive
business, bearing in mind that it is nothing less than the
mystery of human being which is nothing less than the
mystery of God. Finally, I examine in brief the Christian
insight that these mysteries are one in the real person of
Jesus Christ who reconciles man to God. This is to see that
business is ‘‘positive’’ when it invites us to be as Christ;
which is to be a person in joyful communion with the
Father; and which, as we noted at the outset, is to take part
in a joyful solidarity of persons in the common good. This,
I suggest, is how to speak plainly and in one voice of
positive business.
When Science Fails
Science speaks vaguely of positive business because it
lacks the vocabulary to speak of it clearly, or indeed to
speak of it at all. It has words for the objects of business
(individuals, groups, tasks, jobs, leaders, followers, owners,
employees, products, services, buyers, sellers, etc.) that it
relates as cause to effect, but it has no words for the spirit
or being of human persons in communion. This is a
problem especially when it comes to the distinctive qual-
ities of positive business—of joy, solidarity, and common
good—which are not objects or attributes of objects that it
can see and size-up, but are appearances of a human being
or spirit that can be known only by some other means. Let
us consider each.
Joy is a condition of the human spirit, of being ‘‘one’’
or ‘‘right’’ with being itself. It is not simply a physical or
sensory experience of pleasure but is more profoundly a
metaphysical and spiritual emotion. As noted by the
Christian theological historian Pinckaers (1995, p. 132),
both the Fathers of the Church and later St. Thomas
understood joy to be linked with faith and hope, to be a
direct effect of love or charity, and to be one of the signs
of virtuous human action. It is, in a word, the feeling of
‘‘the best of the human condition’’ and ‘‘the highest
aspirations of humankind.’’ Such a feeling cannot be the
focus for the science of man because it is subjective
rather than objective—subjective not only because it is a
personal feeling but also because it is about a ‘‘one-ness’’
or ‘‘right-ness’’ or ‘‘best-ness’’ or ‘‘aspiration’’ of being
that cannot be objectively defined. It is the kind of thing
Hume (1777) discounts as a mere sentiment, a soft
feeling about what ‘‘ought to be’’ rather than a hard
indication of what ‘‘is.’’
A solidarity of persons is a substantial form in which
each person is at once a member of an integral com-
munion or ‘‘body’’ of persons (he or she is one in being
with others) and his or her own personality (he or she is
one in his or her own being). This duality of being—of
communion and person—is likewise of the spirit that
science cannot observe. Science can speak of this duality
only in terms of one object or the other—as a commu-
nion or as a person—but not both at the same time
(Sandelands 1998). Where psychology sees the individual
psyche it does not see the communion, which it turns
into what it is not, an aggregate or collection of psyches.
On one account, communion is an entativity, a perception
of individuals in a group (Campbell 1958). On another
account, it is a cohesion, a number of individuals who
want to belong to a group (Janis 1972). For psychology,
3 I speak of science as a faith because it rests upon an extra-rational
premise in the same way that religion does. Both faiths rest on beliefs
born in rationally unjustified intuitions. Belief in natural cause and
effect, like belief in supernatural God, comes neither by the logic of
induction or by the logic of deduction (Hume, 1748), but by simple
and direct intuition (what philosopher Alfred Whitehead called
‘abduction’). It is thus a sophistry to argue, as the modern atheists do,
that one faith is more logical and reasonable than the other.
The Real Mystery of Positive Business: A Response from Christian Faith
123
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the solidarity in ‘‘solidarity of persons’’ is not real but is
a figure of speech for a number of individual psyches.
And where sociology sees the communion it does not see
the individual psyche, which it too turns into what it is
not, an instance or expression of the social whole (e.g., a
position, office, or role). On one account, the individual
psyche is an instance of like-mindedness (Toennies 1879/
1957). On another account, it is a residual of a division
of labor (Durkheim 1893/1944). For sociology the person
in ‘‘solidarity of persons’’ is not real but is a figure for
the social whole. Thus, the sciences of psychology and
sociology offer views of the solidarity of persons that are
false to its being. Each tells the lie of putting a half-truth
in place of the whole truth.
Finally, the common good locates the solidarity of
persons in the moral order of what is right and just. It is