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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

[email protected]

1 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

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DOI 10.1007/s10551-016-3186-7

Author’s personal copy

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

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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

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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

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