Spirituality Incorporated: Including Convergent Spiritual Values in Business

As with most categorizations, there will be overlaps between categories, such as conceptualization and best practices, as well as redundancies, where an article can fit into multiple categories.

That said, stakeholder benefits, as a reason for spirituality inclusion, may still serve as a “bonus”—that is, it is generally accepted that an organization should benefit its stakeholders, provided that it properly aligns with optimizing organizational performance. While shareholder primacy advocates dismiss fiduciary duties to act on the behalf of stakeholders, they would still prefer to treat stakeholders well, provided neutral or positive benefits to organizational performance.

There is another available justification for spirituality inclusion: namely, an approach that hitches spirituality to a normative ethical theory—such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, or virtue theory—and shows how spirituality comports with the theory. I am not listing this as an available justification, above, however, as the very few articles that do provide this justification do not present this as a primary argument (Cavanagh and Bandsuch 2002; Gotsis and Kortezi 2008). Similar to the stakeholder model justification, the normative ethical theory justification largely preaches to the choir. Managers, stockholders, executives, and a company at large are unlikely to defer to these moral theories (even less so than the stakeholder model) as providing constraints to business practice or directives regarding operations. If business persons subscribe to any normative ethical theory, they appear to subscribe predominantly to entitlement theory (which, in part, undergirds shareholder primacy), and are unlikely to be moved to promote “the greatest good for the greatest number,” to always treat others always as an ends and never as a mere means, or to act in a way that is conductive to the achievement of eudaimonia.

For this reason, the project may prove most relevant, generally speaking, to mid-sized companies. Smaller, boutique companies are oftentimes compromised by few principals, where the values are integrated at the outset, and convergence may be already baked-in. Contrarily, conglomerates and larger companies, such as Walmart, may have so many constituents representing such diverse value arrays, that a significant degree of convergence may not be possible or practical.

In illustration of the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic reasons, briefly consider Immanuel Kant’s famous example of the shopkeeper. Kant explains that the shopkeeper who provides correct change only in order to maintain a good reputation which will help his business is acting amorally: only the shopkeeper who provides correct change in recognition of his duty to honesty and fair practice. Likewise, if a business includes moral/spiritual values for extrinsic reasons, it is acting amorally. SIA seeks to introduce intrinsic, moral reasons for this incorporation aside from what benefits it may provide to the business.

This critique of “ethics as a strategy” does not reject the sincerity of businesses that attest that values lie at their core. Nevertheless, the justification of a company’s core moral principles is often cashed out via largely instrumental reasoning.

SIA will work for stakeholder models of corporate governance, though the degree of convergence may differ, given the wider range of principals, which may include suppliers, customers, employees, and so forth. Presumably, a stockholder model enjoys more value overlap, since fewer principals would be considered that might introduce divergent values. The broader view of a stakeholder model may enjoy fewer shared values compared to a stockholder model, the convergence will nonetheless prove significant. The scope of convergence will also depend on such things as the demographic diversity of the business, among other factors.

To “keep faith with” one’s values simply means that the activity does not require a violation of deeply held values. In contrast, to “exercise” one’s deeply held values via an activity is where the activity demonstrates and manifests those values in action. This distinction is significant in that the “alienation” objection engaged later in the paper finds root in activity that fails to keep faith with one’s values, whereas one may engage in activity that simply does not exercise one’s values without becoming alienated (provided they are able to express those values in some other way, at some other time).

Milton Friedman suggests the additional criterion of “conforming to…ethical custom,” yet he does not sufficiently explicate what this denotes, nor does he argue for it elsewhere. “Ethical custom” might be best interpreted as similar to Carr’s view of the norms of a practice—the agreed-upon “rules of the game”—that while not “embodied in law,” define the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable actions within a practice. For example, the “ethical customs” playing poker, according to Carr (1968), exclude trying to “unnerve” an opponent with “loud talk,” even though this is not a formalized rule.

For a thorough libertarian critique of Friedman’s view, see Nunan (1988).

For the purposes of simplicity, I will assume stockholders as the loci of fiduciary duty, and will not take up the question of extended fiduciary duty to additional stakeholder groups. Obviously, if there is a fiduciary duty to additional stakeholder groups, their beliefs/values will need inclusion in the convergent consensus. This convergent consensus among reasonable persons should be a robust enough overlap (and certainly will overlap in some cases, if not all).

I call this minimal set of moral precepts “value-neutrality” in parallel with Michael Sandel’s critiques of political liberalism (1998, 2012), and, more recently, the current field of economic theory. With the liberal view of the state, the government is to restrain from promoting moral values beyond protecting a certain baseline of minimal liberal values: namely, individual rights, liberties, and freedom. Beyond this, the state is to remain neutral, rather than endorse or support any moral values or particular conceptions of the good.

One (humorous) survey of business leaders found that when faced with a serious business decision, 74 % “pray to God for help or inspiration,” whereas by contrast, only 65 % said they would “talk it over with [their] spouse” (see Siemon-Netto 2002).

Jackson (1999) studies the overlap of Sikhism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Baha’ism, Confucianism, and Jainism” and concludes, “When one takes a broad perspective of the world’s religions, together with various secular equivalents of those religions, it is possible to identify general spiritual principles and values….”.

Jesus for instance states, “What ye do unto the least of Mine, you do unto Me.” He is not implying “you mess with me, I take it personally”—rather he is preaching the concept of interconnection, expressing that he is within everyone (1989).

This is a imaginative exercise is commonly suggested by feminist commentators as a way to “humanize” women to men (and even to other women), who might have an unsympathetic view toward the objectification and/or exploitation of women as objects or victims of a patriarchy.

A multitude of companies provides real-world implementations of spiritual practices into their businesses, varying from types of dedicated periods for reflection during the work-day, to worship groups, to ecumenical invocations during meetings, among others.

For such methods and practices, see LaForge 2004 who connects three types of meditation to the expansion of different types of moral imagination; also see Corner (2009) who presents five practices, known as yamas, or “yogic self-control,” that “deepens an individual’s understanding of the effect of his or her actions on social relationships within any community. Niranjananada (2002) presents similar yogic methods for expanding consciousness.

This imagination is captured in the Great Law of the Iroquois, who would envision how their actions in the present might affect the children, seven generations into the future.

Steingard (2005) concurs with Moore (2013) in his claim that typical everyday human thinking obscures the wider spectrum of consciousness possible, unless transcended by exercising our capacities for spiritual contemplation.

See such psychological and sociological experiments as the Milgram Experiment (Milgram 1974) and the Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney et al. 1973).

This exercise of the spiritual imagination need not lead to the elimination of the sweatshop, if the sweatshops—as Ian Maitland might argue (1997)—improves the lives of the children who might otherwise be worse-off; nonetheless, it would at least result in the company demanding improved of working conditions.

This “end of history” deemed by Hansmann presumably refers to the matter being settled in terms of law and policy. That said, the matter may not be settled in academic circles.