Sustainability, Faith, and the Market

While "sustainability" has become a major concern in business today, there has been little progress toward a sustainable future. This is because the idea of sustainability in academic and policy debates is too small and too beholden to the assumptions that have created today's environmental and development crises. Current calls for reform have neither the vision nor the authority to sustain us in the relationships to self, society, and environment that define our human being. Reaching beyond our secular profession of business management to our Christian faith, we argue for a bigger idea of sustainability that puts these relationships into their true context based on our relationship to God. We identify sustainability with four principles of Christian theology - which we label anthropic, relational, ethical, and divine love - and we link economic development with eight principles of Catholic social doctrine - which the Church labels unity andmeaning, common good, universal destination, subsidiarity, participation, solidarity, social values, and love. We believe this bigger idea of sustainability transforms talk about the future from a gloomy contentiousness rooted in fear to a bright cooperation rooted in hope.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58610/1/1107-Hoffman.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58610/4/1107r-Hoffman.pd

Christmas Thoughts about Business Education

Ebenezer Scrooge lived to be redeemed. And so we might hope it will be for a business education today that conveys many useful values and practices, but no good. I argue that business education today leaves students unprepared for a life in business because it has no moral center and thus has no basis to judge the good of business values and practices. In a word, business education lacks an idea of the supreme good of man—a summum bonum. With the help of Charles Dickens, I consider the lessons of Christmas to suggest how business education can be redeemed in the good. In the end I find that these are the lessons of the social teachings of the Church.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56192/1/1098-Sandelands.pd

The Idea of Social Life

This paper reclaims the idea that human society is a form of life, an idea once vibrant in the work of Toennies, Durkheim, Simmel, Le Bon, Kroeber, Freud, Bion, and Follett but moribund today. Despite current disparagements, this idea remains the only and best answer to our primary experience of society as vital feeling. The main obstacle to conceiving society as a life is linguistic; the logical form of life is incommensurate with the logical form of language. However, it is possible to extend our conceptual reach by appealing to alternative symbolisms more congenial to living form such as, and especially, art.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68336/2/10.1177_004839319502500201.pd

Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination

This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction

The Problem of Experience in the Study of Organizations

This paper deals with the fact that we cannot experience large organizations directly, in the same way as we can experience individuals or small groups, and that this non-experientiability has certain implications for our scientific theories of organizations. Whereas a science is animated by a constructive interplay of theory concepts and experience concepts, the study of organizations has been confined to theory concepts alone. Implications of this analysis for developing a science of organizations are considered.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68303/2/10.1177_017084069301400102.pd

What is so Practical about Theory? Lewin Revisited

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74473/1/j.1468-5914.1990.tb00185.x.pd

Faith at Work: Toward a Theology of Business Administration

The book consists of seven related essays about what faith in God means for business today. Although each is written to deliver a soulful message of its own, each serves as a chapter of a rudimentary theology for business administration. Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing the dilemma of being human in the often inhuman circumstances of business today. Chapters 2 and 3 trace the corporate and personal dimensions of this problem and suggest a way to reclaim our lost humanity by recognizing our heart’s desire to rest in God. In view of the threat business poses to our human being, chapter 4 asks what holds business together and comes to a surprising answer about God’s design for our lives. Chapter 5 turns to the practice of management to reflect on the source and nature of its authority and comes to an again surprising answer about God’s design for our lives. Chapter 6 turns from business practice to business education to ask what the latter must do to better serve students destined to manage the businesses of tomorrow. And at last, chapter 7 brings the book to a hopeful conclusion by celebrating the potential of business to inspire and enrich our human lives by its love and beauty that calls to God. This last is not least the joyful note that faith keeps ever before us in our worldly journey.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58091/1/Faith at Work--Submission revised 03-20-08.dochttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58091/4/Faith at Work--Submission revised 08-28-08.do

Male and female in organizational behavior

The human division of male and female sexes has profound unacknowledged consequences for behavior in organizations. Sex is not simply an individual difference (like eye color), but is an essential part played in life with others. This essay finds sex to be the main organizing principle of human life. Bringing this fact to light, the essay shows how we can begin to understand many perplexing problems of reconciling men and women in organizations today. ( This article is based in large part on ideas developed in the author's book Male and Female in Social Life , Transaction Publishers , New Brunswick, Jersey, 2001, and appears here with the permission of the publisher.) Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35036/1/134_ftp.pd